Web Marketing Wednesdays: Content Marketing Mistakes and Disasters

Welcome back to Web Marketing Wednesdays (WMW), Southwark Consulting’s weekly roundup of news and notes from the digital marketing world! This week we focus on the somewhat gloomy – but always entertaining – subject of content marketing mistakes and disasters. We also take a look at the talent gap when it comes to using marketing data and shed some light on a couple of interesting dashboard tools. As our regular readers know, the aim of this column is to provide a concise rundown of key news items and tech tips for higher ed admissions and marketing staff. Read on for all the latest news…

We begin our WMW journey with a wonderful article from Pauline Magnusson on the Social Solutions Collective site. Her piece, titled Do You Make These 13 Content Marketing Mistakes? is a solid primer on content marketing and social media participation in general. As is often the case in life, we can learn quite a bit by understanding the most common failures (I feel like I have seen an admissions essay or two on this subject!). Among the key takeaways for those of you pursuing content marketing campaigns in various social media outlets: avoiding impersonal content, steering clear of overt marketing pushes in the content you create and failing to be consistent about posting frequency. Magusson also cites ‘ignoring the power of images/photos and well choreographed design in posts’ as a common mistake.

Next, we move from mistakes to all out disaster in the digital marketing world, where Marketing Land’s Daniel Cristo runs through the importance of setting up a disaster plan with your team. And no, this isn’t about keeping fresh water on hand or establishing a meeting point – it’s about how your team will react to a media crisis, an inappropriate tweet, a discussion forum rumor that spins out of control, a YouTube video of a horrific admissions information session, and more.

Closing our theme of mistakes, disasters, doom and gloom, we’d like to draw your attention to an article about the lack of talent where marketing analytics are concerned. Tom Webster over at the Convince & Convert blog cites data from a recent Duke/Fuqua survey of CMOs that points to “a shortage of analytics talent available to marketers” despite being “in an era where the amount of data to which they [Marketers] have access has multiplied exponentially”. Is this a disaster waiting to happen, or will more and more workers develop these skills to meet the demand?

While disaster, doom, and gloom themes are fun, we’d never want to leave you on a sour note, so we’ll close this week’s WMW with links to a couple of interesting social media tools that you may wish to explore. First up is SumAll, a very slick dashboard (still in beta) that allows you to keep an eye on all of your social media channels in one place – and is 100% free. Second, check out ‘Commun.it‘ – a collaborative tool that allows users to manage their presence on Twitter and seems well suited to a university setting where several folks may need to be in on a Twitter feed’s posts.

That’s the web marketing news for this week. Thanks for sharing WMW with the higher ed community!