Top 9 Content Marketing Challenges Facing You Today

The eye-opening statistics I reported from the Fusionmex Content Marketing Conference in Antwerp suggest that budget allocation for content marketing is encouragingly on the up.

But don’t worry if you count yourself among the marketers who are still not confident that what you’re doing is actually effective. You’re not alone. This is why we’re using this blog post to reveal a few more stats from the Content Marketing Institute and Direct Marketing Association UK that give some colour to that theory. Here we detail the biggest challenges facing a contingent of content marketers and, more importantly, we look at how to address these content marketing challenges.

It’s a marathon, not a sprint. If you want to be effective at content marketing it needs to be a sustained effort. But just a little attention every day can yield good results, and clearly defining your customer personas saves time across the board because you already know who you’re talking to and what to say.

If you fear you’ve run out of content, why not repurpose your old stuff? If it’s evergreen content (in other words, not topical) then there will always be a contingent of people that will want to read or see it, and won’t have seen it when you first posted it. Meanwhile, great content presented in a new and original way sets you apart from your competitors. It doesn’t have to be brand new, just brand innovative.

Content marketing can sometimes be very trial and error, so try new approaches and methods to see what engages people first before you assume no one’s interested. For instance, are they more likely to read a blog accompanied by a short video? Remember to keep looking at your personas and double-checking that you address them first and foremost – these are the people most likely to engage – but it may take a few goes to hit the mark. Don’t be afraid to experiment – you’ll learn as much from your mistakes as you do from your successes.

Your competitors are allocating more and more budget to content marketing, so it’s worth looking at areas of traditional marketing that you’re already using that do not produce measurable results. It’s time to reassess where you allocate your marketing budgets, and redistribute your spend towards valuable content.

Again, start with your strategy, customer personas and marketing goals. Variety comes from addressing different groups of people for different ends. You may be selling a product to a public customer and also selling a service to another company. You want to market to both but the content and tone of voice for each will be very different. Variety also comes from using different channels to post engaging content. For example, your Facebook content might target a different audience to your Google+ feed.

This one’s easy to deal with. There are numerous ways to measure content effectiveness and ROI from content marketing. The great thing about the digital world is that everything is recorded and trackable. What you decide to track depends on your marketing goals and what you want your campaign to achieve, but always look to conversion rates, such as the number of blog readers converted to blog subscribers.

The good thing about a nascent industry like digital marketing is that many companies are in the same boat – they don’t feel like they have the resources to get the most out of it, either. Why not ask someone who does know?

This will naturally follow from reshuffling budgets. Commitment is needed in the long game of content marketing. It’s not advertising and you won’t see a sales spike overnight. Your vision is your long-term marketing goals and how your content marketing strategy can support this. It can have a variety of outcomes: you might want to establish yourself as a trusted authority and voice in your area of industry, in which case a sustained campaign of informative blogs, informed opinion and great how-to video content might be in order.

That’s where we come in. Get in touch and see how Southerly can skyrocket your marketing efforts…

Stats sourced from the Content Marketing Institute and Direct Marketing Association UK.

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