Creating content for content's sake
"Content marketing" is a newer term for an age-old challenge related to creating visibility online. The recent changes to the Google algorithm, combined with increased consumption of socially distributed content, have created headaches (and opportunities) for marketers.
Unfortunately, creating compelling content (think Red Bull) can be expensive and daunting for many organizations. As such, these companies tend to rely on cheap solutions including outsourcing blog and article creation to unsophisticated writers who are paid by the word or article and not based on quality or user value. These companies might also outsource social media management, which often results in a flurry of meaningless and often automated status updates.
Even more sophisticated marketers are falling short with advanced content strategies around audio, video, and images by creating useless or boring podcasts, presentations, and infographics. If you can't create compelling, unique, or remarkable content that provides value to your target end user, you might be hurting your brand more than helping it.
Untargeted retargeting
Retargeting (aka, remarketing) is an advanced technique that effectively targets visitors to your website via advertising on third-party websites. Unfortunately, too many marketers have failed to customize the ad creative based on segment or goal. Consumers can be easily annoyed by brands that overtly follow them around the web with seemingly irrelevant offers or, more importantly, with very targeted messaging, but long after they've purchased.
To avoid this costly oversight, consider segmenting audiences, create personalized ads, and use frequency capping. Additionally, trying to maximize reach by using multiple retargeting vendors can also make efforts ineffective as each retargeting vendor will be bidding against each other for impressions, thus driving up cost and further annoying your target audience.
