Content marketing has been compared with the Wild West many times, and we have to admit it’s a really spot-on description. The rules of the game are constantly changing and as a content marketer you need to control and optimise several factors to achieve your goals.
Content marketing is a complex system of strategies and methods. It takes constant time and effort to get it right and it can be easily compromised by simple, hard-to-detect mistakes. This being said, when it is done right, it’s the most cost-efficient type of digital marketing there is at the moment.
Let’s look at some of the main challenges of content marketing that business owners and marketers face.
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Challenges of Content Marketing
Challenge #1: Creating Content Tailored for Your Buyer’s Persona
One of the things many businesses are still ignoring is the fact that they should be creating content with their buyer’s persona in mind. Something that has been seen a lot in B2B companies is the lack of direct and open communication with the target audience.
A lot of times it’s easy to overlook this important stage of the marketing plan if you tend to focus on your company’s products and services and simply try to get them out there. But, remember, content marketing success is based on your ability to find out what your audience wants and needs, and to give them just that. Instead of creating content about how great your products are, think about the problems your audience is facing and how you can address them in your content. Prospects will appreciate informational content that adds value to their lives more than yet another promotional article.
Challenge #2: Staying Ahead of the Game When Things Are Constantly Changing
This is one of the main characteristics of digital marketing, and it’s one of the reasons it’s such a difficult niche to excel in. When creating content, you have to have the customer in mind, but also the search engine algorithms that can help your content rank in the SERPs.
As their technology advances, search engines update their algorithms. What you knew is working until then can no longer be effective. This is a main pain point of content marketing and it can impact marketing campaigns quite a lot.
Challenge #3: Being Persistent Even When Results Are Not Yet Showing
Content marketing won’t get you overnight results, it can’t be done “urgently” and this might be one of the biggest challenges for novice marketers or businesses trying to handle their own marketing. It takes perseverance to reach the goal you were aiming for, and this can mean spending more time improving your content marketing efforts before you start seeing the first results.
This kind of slow-burn can be frustrating and tiring for those exploring this realm, but the rewards it gets you when done right are worth the effort. Content marketing brings on average 3 times more leads per dollar when compared to traditional marketing.
This challenge explains the huge amount of pressure felt by marketers when businesses are hiring their services and the fact that a lot of small and medium businesses hesitate to invest more money in content marketing after not seeing quick results.
Challenge #4: Being Able to Measure the ROI of Your Content Marketing
Determining exactly how many conversions are brought by a certain piece of content or blog post is not so easy as it seems. While many content platforms, including social media, have integrated complex reporting tools for their users, measuring the exact impact of a marketing campaign and translating it into revenue can be a difficult task.
While seeing that a certain content piece did well is quite easy, understanding what exactly made it so successful might be challenging. This is why it’s important to be familiar with several types of metrics and constantly testing the content you put out. This way, you can find out what made your best pieces tick with the audience and replicate that for the future.
Challenge #5: Publishing Value-Driven Content Instead of Volume
Producing content by volume and being stuck in a rut of publishing new content aimlessly can be felt when the big picture starts to fade out of a marketer’s or business owner’s mind. The way content marketing is evolving right now puts more value on the originality of the content and not the sheer volume of the things you publish.
To put it more simply: today, it’s much more effective to spend more time researching for a skyscraper piece that is highly targeted for your audience and contains first-hand information that cannot be found somewhere else. Publishing 10 short content pieces on the same subjects is just not working anymore.
Content production should focus more on the big picture and what you can do differently from your competition.
Need Help with Your Content Marketing Strategy?
One of the main reasons businesses outsource their content marketing is the lack of time to do it properly. Building an efficient content marketing strategy takes constant effort and many of the tasks you need to do would take a lot of your precious time.
For medium and small businesses, a whole marketing department is just not sustainable. Hiring an advertising agency to keep this huge mechanism working is the best solution.
We at Australian Internet Advertising have the experience, expertise, and focus needed to create and fuel a performant marketing plan. We know what it takes to reach your end customer and deliver exactly what they need, and all these advantages translate into bigger revenue for our clients.
Contact us to get a free proposal and start growing your business with us at your side.