Ms. Buttons, owner of Better Buttons was talking with her friend Mr. Clips, owner of Better Clips, who was bragging about having 1,000 followers on his company’s Twitter feed.

Not to be outdone, Ms. Buttons announced to her company that Better Buttons would embark into ‘the Social Media’ (announcing this as if ‘the Social Media’ had sent a prestigious invitation letter to the company). They would soon start a Facebook page and a Twitter “something or other”.

Ms. Buttons appointed Jerod from Accounts Receivable to be the new head of this initiative because he was the only employee both under 30 and with an actual Twitter account. To help Jerod, Ms. Buttons told everyone to submit one post to Jerod by the end of the week.

Jerod got five right away and posted them on Facebook all at once. Most of the posts were simply a picture of someone at their desk describing what they do for Better Buttons.

After three weeks, fifteen more had trickled in. Jerod quickly posted these as they came in since he was still under a lot of pressure from his regular work. A few people like Ralph from HR refused to participate because he doesn’t want to leave a “data trail for the Feds”.

Four weeks in, Ms. Buttons submitted a three-page document highlighting the glorious history of Better Buttons and all the amazing values it stood for. Jerod copied and pasted it to their Facebook page. Ms. Buttons sent out an email to all employees to like and share her post, and also sent an email to her entire contact list to read and comment.

Two months later, the company has 31 likes on Facebook (28 are employees) and nothing new has been posted since Ms. Button’s epic article. Jerod does his best to avoid the topic in any staff meeting, but Ms. Buttons is still trying to figure out how to get to 1,000 likes.

This is not made up…

The good news is that this is the approach that a lot of your competitors will take to content marketing. The bad news is that you are dangerously close to making a lot of the same mistakes if you don’t know what you’re doing.

We are going to start a short series on the top five mistakes companies make when it comes to content marketing, and how you can avoid them. Currently, there is a huge gap between companies who are just ‘doing’ content marketing and companies who are actually good at it. Even eluding just two of the mistakes can make you seem like a leader in your field; but to really profit from content marketing, you’ll need to know how to avoid them all.

We’ll start next week with why most Content Marketing isn’t Strategic.