One of the most important aspects of your marketing strategy is your content marketing strategy. The content you’re creating for your brand does more for your brand than you may realize. After all, “content is king.” Engagement, reach, impressions, followers, likes: it all goes back to the content you’re creating.

The more your content resonates with your followers, the more value you’re getting out of each channel. Most importantly, stay in touch with what your demographic wants. When your content resonates with your followers, your brand will be a resource to them and serve as a place to find the content they actually want to read.

Since today is Halloween, I decided to cover the content marketing mistakes that are truly terrifying to make. Don’t let your content marketing scare you, just stay wary of these potential mistakes:

1. Not including images

While not every single post must include an image, it’s been proven that social media posts with images do increasingly better than those without. It comes down to the fact that with such an oversaturated newsfeed on all platforms, a visual will catch a viewer’s eye time and time again. Today with there being so many great and free resources out there to create graphics, there’s really no excuse not to. Canva is very user-friendly and can take even the simplest text update from your brand and transform it into a visually pleasing, eye-catching post that will likely perform better than plain text.

2. Ignoring trends

Social media users love to see their favorite accounts play into the current trending topics, memes and of course national holidays. When applicable to your brand, it’s always interesting to see how a fun post that plays off a popular trending meme will perform. It’s important that you know it’s a topic your target audience will be familiar with and not too niche. Some now even call it “Meme Marketing.” You’ve also probably seen the increase in posts on the various “National ________ Days.” Though this can sometimes be overused, it’s important to be aware of them and plan in advance in case there is one that aligns well with your brand. These free downloadable calendars from Planoly are great for planning your content around those days.

3. Posting text-heavy

Playing off of the image aspect, it’s important to quickly catch the attention of your followers and nail your content’s headline or caption. Get to the point with your text, in most cases the shorter the text the better it will perform. When it comes to media, whether it be length of video or amount of images, this is also something you should try to shorten in an effort to tease your audience. Whether it be a long post, caption or video it’s important to keep things brief as attention spans are said to be getting shorter.

4. Forgetting to tag or mention

A very simple action, yet so often forgotten about. When you tag a person on Instagram this photo will now show on their profile under tagged photos and even increase your odds of making it onto their followers’ discovery page on the app. Also with Facebook and Twitter, you’re giving the other person or brand the option to share or retweet this onto their own account, which gives you the ability to receive engagement from both your audience and theirs. Also including your location, with a photo on Instagram especially, will help with reach when people who are not following you view the location and see your post.

5. Disregarding analytics

At the end of the day, your analytics are your secret weapon. Almost every social media channel has an option for business accounts to view the analytics of their content. This way you can simply see what is working and what is not, from the types of content to the the best times to post. After analyzing this data, you have the ability to shift your content marketing strategy to what you think will work best. A tool in your toolbox that would truly be scary to ignore.