Today’s guest post is from content marketer extraordinaire Lisa Fugere from Radius. Editor’s note: I truly appreciate her honest take here. I hope you do too!
We all screw up our jobs from time to time, but when you’re a content marketer, your screw ups tend to be more public than most. Good content has a way of finding itself in front of thousands of eyes, and when you screw it up, you have to answer to a larger audience than your boss or your colleagues.
As a content marketer, I learned early on that modesty is meaningless in my chosen profession, so with absolutely no compunction for my pride, I present my three worst content marketing mistakes:
1. Leaving an egregious typo on the cover of a SlideShare presentation that received 30,000 views.
SlideShare is a great presentation tool, but it has a lethal flaw: you can’t re-upload a presentation without losing all the original views. SlideShare has also developed a unique algorithm to determine which presentations will be featured on the homepage each day–one that considers the volume of page visits a presentation receives in relation to the amount of time it’s been posted on the site. So when you upload a presentation at precisely 10 AM and throw the full power of your marketing team behind its promotion to secure a spot for said presentation on the SlideShare homepage, you really don’t want to find any typos.
I let out a heavy sigh of relief the morning that our presentation was scheduled to appear as a feature on the SlideShare home page and go out in an email to the entire SlideShare user base and I had yet to receive any of the dreaded “found a typo” messages.
So when I went back to SlideShare to review the presentation, my heart dropped out of my stomach.
I’m not really sure how the entire marketing team–myself, our Product Marketer, our Social Media Marketer, our VP of marketing, three people on the design team, and even our Marketing Intern–missed the extra “S” attached to the word “About” on the cover slide of our presentation. But we did, and there was nothing we could do about it.
With every mistake comes a lesson, and the obvious one here is to double-check everything. More eyes does not better proofreading make. Some people have an eye for the nuances of grammar, and some do not. It’s not always the best writer or the most detail-oriented person who catches typos. Many organizations make the mistake of relying on the aforementioned parties to catch typos when they should outsource a proofreader to peruse all major content before publishing. Typos are an unavoidable nuisance for all writers, and when you create a lot of content, you have to invest in proofreading.
2. Scheduling a holiday campaign without accounting for the holiday lull.
Last Christmas, I managed a holiday campaign that involved a giant piece of content outfitted in holiday graphics and design, an email campaign, and a sizable social media push. And on December 23rd, the graphic designer, the social marketing manager, and myself were scrambling to put the campaign together so we could attend to our families’ holiday plans. When we devised the plan for the campaign at the beginning of the quarter, we allotted the amount of time it usually took to complete a content campaign. However, during the holidays, the entire business world seems to go on part time. Our graphic designer took a week off before Christmas, and because I hadn’t gotten her the content before she left, she had to spend her plane ride home adding Christmas trees to an e-book. The company holiday party got in the way of our plans too–we had to leave the office before we could finish building the landing page for the social campaign. Without the landing page, we couldn’t schedule any social updates. We eventually launched the campaign to acceptable success, but it wasn’t a smashing enough success to warrant the last-minute stress and sweat that went into it–during a time that’s typically stressful anyways.
In marketing, timing is everything, and while the busiest times often offer the best opportunities for marketing, you have to make extra room for the delays that inevitably come with them.
3. Publishing more blog posts than we had the capacity to promote.
When I started at Radius, I was coming off a job for which I published 5-10 posts each week for a blog that saw tons of traffic and successfully drove leads into the inbound funnel. Ramping up the blog was one of my first goals at Radius. This will be an easy way for us to quickly grow our audience, I thought.
I drew a giant calendar on the white board next to my desk and filled in the days with blog posts. I had a bunch of contributor pieces lined up, and I had scheduled some internal interviews so I could write on behalf of some of my teammates.
I began publishing three to four posts a week with plans to scale to five in two months.
Most of these posts saw very little traffic. Without one person managing our social media, we didn’t have any dedicated promotion beyond our halfhearted and spontaneous Tweets and the customary LinkedIn and Facebook updates. We were a marketing team of three people. We had no promotion strategy, and we were too busy developing our lead scoring process and creating our first ebook to schedule out Tweets.
However, content marketing doesn’t work if you don’t promote it. We published great blog articles that sat unseen on our blog.
Publishing three to four posts a week was not worth the effort that I was putting into it, so we made the decision to scale back. We hired a social media manager, and experimented with blog post frequency. When we published one post a week and pushed the full power of our social marketing behind it, we saw very high traffic. When we published four posts a week and spread our social marketing power across all of them, each post received mediocre traffic.
Every blog is different, and what works for the industry leaders doesn’t work for everyone. But one rule holds true: you have to build out the content and ramp up the social channels simultaneously; one cannot succeed without the other.
I can guarantee that my career holds many more mistakes, and I hope that none of them are too great to recover from, and that I have many more lessons in my future.
Lisa Fugere manages content strategy at Radius, where she runs the corporate blog, and drives the creation of all marketing content.