5 Content Marketing Disasters To Avoid

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Creating successful marketing content isn’t easy. When it comes to content marketing strategy failures, there are a few disasters that you really don’t want to fall victim to. Below are 5 of the worst content marketing disasters that can occur and how to prevent them.

Copyright claims

Using images without permission or plagiarising written text could result in a copyright infringement claim. A simple solution to this is to remove the copyrighted content, but you should watch out that you also don’t get hit by a lawsuit if you’ve already profited off the content. The best way to avoid copyright infringement claims is to make sure that images and text are always original or used with the permission of the creator. Unfortunately, accidental copyright infringement cases do still occur as a result of using AI or by coincidentally writing the same content as someone else. In these cases, you may want to hire the help of a law firm like Beyond Law Group to defend your right to use this content.

Social media backlash

There are many cases of brands getting ‘cancelled’ on social media for sharing certain content. This is usually because content is deemed either offensive or factually inaccurate. While a swift apology can often defuse the situation, it’s not always enough to prevent backlash - especially if your brand has been involved in controversies in the past. Therefore, you need to be very careful about the nature of your content. Avoid using any negative stereotypes or expressing any controversial political opinions. Similarly, make sure that all facts you provide are carefully researched and double-checked.

Search engine penalties

Search engines can reduce your rankings or even blacklist you if your content is guilty of certain SEO crimes. Certain things that may get you penalised by Google or Bing include keyword stuffing (using too many obvious keywords unnaturally in a post), having duplicate content on your site, sharing misinformation, or providing links to dodgy websites. There’s no quick way to undo the damage caused by being penalised, so you should try to avoid these bad SEO practises as much as you can. By researching positive SEO practices or hiring an SEO company, you can avoid any penalties.

Emails marked as spam

You need to be careful about the content of your marketing emails. Using too many images, writing in all caps or overusing words like ‘free’ and ‘click’ could result in your emails going straight into recipients' spam folders where they are less likely to be read. Once your emails start regularly getting marked as spam, you could find that your email address automatically flags up spam filters, which could make it difficult for any future email campaign to succeed. This is why you need to make sure that your emails are right from the beginning. This guide at Knowledge Base offers a few tips on how to stop your emails getting filtered as spam.

Loading errors

A final disaster to be wary of is uploading content that fails to load properly. This could include blog posts taking ages to load, or videos failing to view because the file is corrupted. This is a disaster because it could stop your content from actually being viewed. When it comes to making sure website pages load properly, avoid using too many high quality images or videos per page. When it comes to uploading videos, make sure that your connection is stable and that you’re using the recommended video settings of the video sharing platform you’re uploading to.