When a new marketing trend comes to the forefront, some companies will just dive into it simply because popular brands or their competitors are in it. Let us consider content marketing here. Marketers may not have a well-processed content marketing strategy if they don’t know its purpose and process. This can be a major weak point, and more often than not marketing through content cannot be constructed without proper research and defining the target audience.
Well known platforms like HubSpot mentioned that, you as a business should have a content marketing strategy.
However, there are full-fledged B2C and B2B marketers who know what content marketing is thoroughly. They realize that it is required of them to understand the pain points associated with content marketing before they start off the marketing vehicle. These content marketers have an idea about what may work and what may not.
HERE ARE THE EIGHT MOST COMMON HURDLES FOR CONTENT MARKETING:
1. Generating original content
When you are writing any sort of content which in itself is a form of creativity, you are sometimes made to experience what is known as the dearth of creativity. You struggle to come up with innovative ideas and may even feel completely saturated.
In such a scenario, make a template or a process of how the content should be generated and how effective would it be to make a difference in conversions. Look around and within- be inspired. You need to bring more sales leads and improve the brand on the various online mediums. So, ponder, what would work out for you?
When such thought process is put to place, the content marketers will realize that they not only can create original content but can keep their audience engaged as well.
2. Creating and maintaining an effective publishing schedule
For a non-content marketer creating an effective content marketing calendar seems like a very simple activity. Just put the events in an excel sheet and put the due dates next to it.
It is simple, right?
Not Quite.
An efficient content marketer knows that the topics have to be created first and then comes assigning the due dates. Further, actual content creation proceeds. A delay in any of the underlying process will delay the publishing of the entire piece of content. This can be quite frustrating for a content marketer.
An effective content marketing calendar can be created with content marketing management tools. They can help organize priority tasks effectively that will eventually let you function to your peak potential.
3. Creating a content marketing strategy that ties everything together
Companies sometimes feel like they should adopt every marketing trend that comes to the forefront.
This is nothing but a fad to stay in the news, and the same is the case with content marketing.Content Marketing for as good as it is, just rushing into it without any prior planning will not produce any feasible results for the company.
When you don’t have a detailed content marketing strategy on how content marketing will progress over time, it becomes difficult for your potential audience to find the piece of content.
This is a great example to strengthen the point made earlier. If your content marketing strategy doesn’t work in conjecture with other strategies then it won’t be discovered by others and thus will have produce less value out of the content marketing campaign than expected.
4. Keeping content engaging
With low-quality content at the helm, you can only go so far these days and get the attention of the users. These days, even if content is immaculately written there is no guarantee that it will have a higher SERP. The average attention span of a user is on an average of 8 seconds; the content marketing team needs to keep this in mind.
If you want to make your content marketing more engaging you can utilize these tips:
i. Put in the right keywords
ii. Establish a proper tonality throughout your content
iii. Hook the user’s interest with impactful stories
iv. Use a combination of images, videos, and infographics efficiently
v. Provide useful external links along with internal links to your niche
website
Companies fail to create great content for one of two reasons:
i. Improper time management
ii. They lack right resources
Read on to know some recent statistics for content marketing.
5. Not understanding your audience
When you start off with content marketing, the first thing you need to do is to create a buyer persona of your end users. This can be done by using analytics, A/B testing and market research. In digital marketing, a business must know it’s audiences tastes and preferences for closing better deals.
Like for example, if your target industry is healthcare, you wouldn’t weave in content based on chocolates.
But, creating buyer persona isn’t the end of the story. The audiences are humans first and then your customers. So, their interests may change over time. Things that once enamored them may not appeal them later on. Therefore, you should see what information they’re looking for and their ever-changing interests and requirements.
You’ll get a better grip on your audience and makes it easier for you to target users through marketing campaigns. Segmentation of potential customers based on their interests helps marketers to stay in tune with the end-goal.
6. Failing to present proper content to the right audience
The next issue faced by content marketers globally is failure to showcase their content to the right end users.
It is a waste of your time and effort when create great content, and fails to reach the right audience.
In order to execute effective content marketing, you must use a combination of ads, influencer marketing and paid promotions as part of your overall strategy. Utilize social media platforms like LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter to post your articles, infographics and so on. You don’t always need to post on your website only. Based on the outcome of different marketing collaterals used, you can decide which options would be the best for you.
7. Having gaps in your content marketing strategy
As a marketer, you should understand the buyer’s journey before you undertake any content marketing campaign.
What marketers fail to comprehend is that, content marketing needs to be dynamic at all stages of the buyer’s journey. You cannot have awesome landing page content and leave the rest of the content to be unkempt. If potential buyers are exposed to such content, they will move out of the buyer’s cycle completely. It prevents them from trusting the products/services of the company in the future.
Think of the offering from an end users perspective. Check if you were in audience’s place, would you be convinced enough to buy the product or look for something else. If the answer is the latter, then you have to reframe the entire content according to buyers’ journey.
8. Gaining traction with valuable content
The suggestions made in your content should be practical and simple enough to be implemented by the end user. You can gain their loyalty by adding value to their lives or their businesses.
An element of traction is what keeps the user interested in your products/services.
It is highly unlikely that the audiences will get glued to your first piece of content. Therefore, you must see that your content is customer-centric. As you progress with a well-analyzed content marketing strategy, continue to integrate user-friendly attributes to click with your potential or existing customers.
Conclusion:
Content Marketing is an effective way for lead generation, creating brand value and closing sales. So, a business should invest in relevant resources to maintain a good flow of content. We have decoded the pain points of content marketers and their effective solutions to alleviate them. This infographic is a helpful read if you are digital marketing executive or a business wanting to start content marketing.
A detailed work on how content marketing compares to other forms of marketing with stats, infographics, and information is in the works.
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