Common Content Marketing Mistakes (and How to Avoid Them)
Five content marketing mistakes that got more costly in 2020, as brands rushed online and content output spiked but strategy often didn't keep up.
2020 pushed a huge wave of businesses to invest in content for the first time, many because their physical locations, events or sales floors were suddenly closed. That rush produced a lot of content, but rushed content and good strategy rarely arrive together. Here are the mistakes that showed up most often that year, and what fixed them.
Publishing without a specific reader in mind
The mistake: a lot of 2020 content answered “what should we say right now” instead of “what is our customer trying to figure out.” The result was generic advice pieces that could have come from any company in the category.
Why it happens: under pressure, it’s faster to write something safe and broad than to research one specific question a real customer is asking.
The fix: before writing anything, name the one person reading it and the one question they came with. If a piece doesn’t answer a specific question for a specific reader, it doesn’t get published yet.
Treating a crisis update as a whole content strategy
The mistake: many brands published a single “how we’re responding” post in March or April 2020 and then went quiet, or kept republishing variations of the same reassurance message for months.
Why it happens: a crisis post is easy to greenlight quickly, it doesn’t require ongoing planning, just one round of approvals.
The fix: use the crisis moment as one entry point into a real content calendar, not the whole calendar. A single post should lead somewhere, not stand alone.
Publishing with no distribution plan
The mistake: teams spent their time and budget on writing and almost none on getting the piece in front of the right people, then were surprised when it got no traffic.
Why it happens: writing feels like the finished product. Distribution feels like a separate, optional step that gets skipped when time runs short.
The fix: budget real time for promotion, email, relevant communities, outreach to people who’d want to share it, before you consider a piece done. If nobody’s going to see it, the writing time was wasted regardless of quality.
Chasing every new platform at once
The mistake: 2020 saw a scramble onto every channel at once, a company blog, a newsletter, LinkedIn, sometimes TikTok, often without the resources to do any of them well.
Why it happens: fear of missing out on wherever competitors or customers might be spending their newly increased screen time.
The fix: pick the one or two channels where your actual audience already spends time and commit there first. A single channel done consistently beats five done sporadically.
Measuring the wrong things
The mistake: teams tracked pageviews and social shares as proof content was working, without connecting any of it to leads, signups or sales.
Why it happens: vanity metrics are easy to pull and easy to report upward. Revenue-linked metrics take more setup and more patience.
The fix: tie at least one metric per piece to an actual business outcome, even if it’s an assisted conversion rather than a direct one. A traffic spike that never turns into a lead isn’t a result, it’s a distraction.
Stopping when the crisis felt over
The mistake: some teams that built real content momentum in the spring of 2020 let it lapse once the initial urgency passed, treating it as a temporary project rather than an ongoing capability.
Why it happens: content built under pressure often isn’t backed by a lasting process, so it fades once the pressure does.
The fix: turn what worked into a repeatable cadence, not a one-time push. The businesses that kept publishing consistently through the rest of 2020 were the ones still compounding that early audience a year later.
For more, see our other Content Marketing guides, the full 2020 archive or the Digital Business Marketing Awards.
