Top 11 Content Marketing challenges
TOP 11 CONTENT MARKETING CHALLENGES AND HOW TO OVERCOME THEM
The importance of content marketing to the growth of your company cannot be overstated. It enables you to attract, engage, convert, and retain customers that you ordinarily wouldn’t have been able to. And it’s never been more popular – odds are if you’re not using content to promote your business, your competitors are.
‘Content is King,’ said Bill Gates, the founder of Microsoft, in 1996. Many people didn’t seem to take him seriously, I guess.
However, he goes on to stress that “Content is where I believe much of the real money on the internet will be made, just as it was in TV.”
You may reach clients at the exact moment they’re looking for something using content marketing.
You’re not bothering them; instead, you’re drawing them to your brand by delivering helpful and relevant information that answers their questions or solves their problems.
The good news is that you can use anything from a blog post to emails, photos, infographics, videos, or whitepapers to provide knowledge and thought leadership and persuade your target audience to interact with your business and eventually buy from you,
While content marketing is an essential and effective component of any digital marketing strategy, there are a few content marketing challenges to be aware of and conquer to develop a successful strategy.
DEFINITION OF CONTENT MARKETING
Content marketing is the practice of developing and disseminating content to attract and retain customers to boost revenue and, eventually, expand your business.
It’s a strategic marketing strategy in which businesses employ relevant content to satisfy their customers’ information needs. Also, it’s a strategy for generating, contacting, and converting clients.
Different channels are used to deliver content to consumers. They include News, infographics, and instructional videos, as well as blogs, social media posts, eBooks, and white papers.
All of this is done in a bid to teach the buyer something rather than to sell him something directly. This impartial approach is crucial because once the information is laced with excessive advertisements, it loses its allure for potential buyers to continue reading.
Our content marketing strategies at Tradmill Digital Marketing in Sheffield, South Yorkshire, are straightforward and effective: We write in-depth blog posts and share them on social media to assist our new and existing customers, particularly those in Sheffield, in solving business difficulties and increasing website traffic.
Alright! You now have a good understanding of what content marketing is and how it can help your business grow.
It’s high time we crossed over to the various content marketing challenges to see how our team at Tradmill can help produce quality and engaging content for your brand.
HERE ARE TOP CONTENT MARKETING CHALLENGES AND HOW TO AVOID THEM
1. PRODUCING POOR QUALITY CONTENT
It’s not enough to have a well-written post. Worse still, if your content fails to solve a problem, answer a question, or meet a need, then its aim is defeated because the reader will not gain or learn anything from it.
Guess what will happen! Your website visitor will rush to the exit button and he’s gone to your competitors’ website where he can get high-quality and valuable content, even for free.
This person, who could have joined your tribe or become a client, will go hunting for the information you didn’t give him, because, while the content you wrote may not be useless, it is meaningless to your potential clients.
To be among the best at content marketing, you must first assume the mindset of your readers, get to know them, and learn what interests and informs their decisions. From there, you can begin to post content that truly addresses their problems.
In a nutshell, every piece of content you create must be unique and superior to anything else available. Your content should deliver value to your customers; otherwise, they’ll visit the search engine to look for information that will provide them with what they desire.
It can be tough to know what high-quality content looks like and what it can give to your clients if you aren’t a content creator.
As a solution, you can simply contact content creation specialists to assist you in creating great content that your audience would enjoy.
The difference is that you’ll have to outperform your competitors’ pieces of content in terms of quality and offer something unique to your customers.
2. IT TAKES TOO LONG TO SEE RESULTS
Yes, content marketing takes longer to see results than more direct methods like paid advertising. That’s if getting instant results is your main motivation.
However, just because something takes longer than others does not imply that it is ineffective. Driving up a mountain, for example, is faster than digging a tunnel. However, once you’ve completed the tunnel, you’ll be able to drive through it in a fraction of the time.
Content marketing is similar in that it takes time to develop but eventually becomes a reliable source of sales and leads. Content marketing can deliver results faster than if you started from zero if you have an established user base.
2. INADEQUATE KNOWLEDGE OF THE SUBJECT
One of the most common content marketing problems is a lack of thorough understanding of the subject matter that such content is talking about.
People don’t consume content blindly. What this means is that for people to trust you and your content, you must know what you’re talking about. You must not only answer your readers’ questions but also focus on the issue to make it credible.
You want them to trust you, so if you can’t write the content yourself, you can always ask for assistance from expert content creators.
3. INABILITY TO CREATE CONTENT CONSISTENTLY
You’ll need to develop content regularly if you want your content to be productive and have an impact.
You want to be known as an industry thought leader or authority, and content helps you do that.
You will struggle to make an impact with your content if your blog page or website is just packed with a few pieces of content produced a few months apart.
To start seeing benefits from your content marketing efforts, you should publish at least once a week, or a couple of pieces of content per month – more is preferable though.
We recommend that you develop a content marketing strategy and calendar for the next six months at the very least.
A well-thought-out strategy should spell out the kind of stuff you’ll need to create, as well as when and who will do it. This will assist you in prioritizing your content marketing activities and demonstrating to your customers how critical they are to the company’s success.
This will save you time in the long run since it will provide you with a clear outline of what you need to accomplish and when you need to accomplish it
Above all, it’ll spare you from scrambling to come up with anything to write about once a month or once a week.
5. IT IS HARD TO MEASURE THE ROI
It’s difficult to calculate the exact ROI of content marketing. You’ll need to create a comprehensive attribution model to analyze the influence and impact of content across the funnel while isolating each variable.
Historically, calculating the return on your content marketing approach has been tricky. It might be difficult to link conversions and KPIs to specific pieces of content. It’s not impossible, though.
Your content marketing strategy’s return on investment is subjective and depends on your company’s goals or mission.
It’s critical to define what you want your content marketing to achieve before you begin to effectively monitor ROI. Do you want to increase the number of visitors to your website? Are you looking for ways to create leads? Do you aspire to be a thought leader in your field?
It’ll be impossible to tell whether your content was successful or not if you don’t know what you’re trying to accomplish with it.
Starting to create, publish, and share material without knowing why will make it harder to understand the influence it has in the long run. Setting specific goals and knowing how to measure them will aid in evaluating the success of your efforts as well as justifying the time and resources spent.
However, specific variables for each stage of the marketing funnel can be tracked and used to generate a partial ROI:
6. ALIGNING YOUR CONTENT WITH CUSTOMER’S JOURNEYS AND PERSONAS
A lot of content marketers have trouble with this. That’s due to their failure to appropriately match their content with the various stages of the customer journey and personas. And they keep on struggling and seeing it as a nightmare.
Each of your clients is unique. Although they have similar interests and ideals, they are still distinct individuals who like to absorb content in various ways. You should already know who your customer personas are if you have a content plan in place.
Use this to consider what kind of stuff they’d like to consume and how they’d like to consume it. To cater to these customers, you might reuse the same piece of information in numerous ways.
You should also make sure that your content meets your clients’ needs at every point of their journey. Furthermore, realize that sending the appropriate content to the right people at the right time might be challenging too.
To overcome this obstacle, sit down and examine your consumer personas as well as the path they follow before purchasing from you. Plan out the pieces of content that will assist them going through your sales funnel, and then create and share them in the appropriate areas.
7. AN EXCESSIVE FOCUS ON SELLING
Yes, the goal of creating great content is to make it easier for customers to navigate through the various stages of their journey.
One of the major challenges with content marketing is when you spend most of your time creating content to make sales rather than solve problems.
Your primary focus should be on teaching and solving readers’ problems, with sales coming in second.
That is, your primary objective will be to meet the needs of the people; otherwise, they will perceive you as unserious. If your content pieces, on the other hand, are not invasive, they’ll have a better chance of being shared and reaching more people.
Your call-to-action should be placed at the end of your post or content. That makes you seem more like a problem solver than a content creator looking for a quick buck.
8. LACK OF FUNDS
It is not easy to create high-quality material. It is a time-consuming and expert task. Many businesses struggle to produce content consistently due to a lack of time and resources. You may be a small or big company with insufficient capacity.
It makes no difference who you are; many businesses suffer from a lack of resources to develop content. It’s easy to push it to the bottom of the priority list as you focus on more important activities, such as running your business on a day-to-day basis.
When it comes to content marketing, a lack of funds is another major barrier that firms confront. You can create content in-house or hire someone to do it for you. It takes time and money to create something anyway.
If you don’t have content competent content creators, the right thing is to outsource the task to a company that can help you generate and distribute the right content for your organization.
9. NOT KNOWING THE RIGHT CHANNELS TO FIND YOUR AUDIENCE
Lack of knowledge of where to share your content is one of the content marketing challenges, especially with so many marketing channels and social media platforms available.
The aim is to focus on the channels that connect you with your target customers the most frequently.
It may take some trial and error to figure out which channels are the most effective for your organization, but it is critical to do so.
To your knowledge, if you post everywhere, you risk wasting your marketing dollars and never reaching the correct individuals with your material.
Take the time to learn about your clients and the platforms on which they interact. Your buyer personas should assist you with this, and if you’ve been in the company for a while, you should have a good sense of which channels are most effective for you.
If you’re a B2C business, for example, Pinterest is your best bet. LinkedIn, on the other hand, is ideal for B2B businesses.
10. INCREASING COMPETITION
There’s a lot of content out there because there are so many different types of businesses! Whatever your topic is, there’s a good chance that someone else has written about it already.
Making your content visible online, let alone getting people to engage with it is becoming tougher than ever. The reason is that there’re so many businesses vying for the same customers’ attention
Examine what your competitors are doing and ensure that your content provides something extra or unique that sets it apart. As your industry’s competition grows, so will your customers’ expectations, forcing you to improve your content even further.
Make sure everything you publish and share is of the highest quality possible, and maintain this over time to continue to grow and engage your audience.
11. OVER EXPECTATION
There’s a saying that, “good things come to those who wait.” Content marketing is no exception.
The main concern of content marketing is providing people with a valuable solution to their problems. It’s all about developing a long-term relationship based on trust. This isn’t something that happens overnight. Even if you follow the instructions to the letter, the first results will not be evident – or measured – until probably the sixth month.
It can take years for your content to start producing results, regardless of how big your content marketing team is or how much money you invest into it. It takes time to produce content for SEO and appear in the SERPs, or for your content marketing to begin generating leads.
Creating an audience and establishing credibility for your business needs a combination of a short-term approach like paid search and a long-term approach like Search Engine Optimization.
Although it takes time to see results and requires a significant number of resources, content marketing is one f the most powerful marketing methods available and will pay off for years to come.
While content marketing has some drawbacks, the benefits of a well-executed campaign can far exceed them.
You’ll achieve the best results from your content and overcome the above challenges if you create a strategy or get a knowledgeable team to help you create a strategy that you can stick to, understand your aims and audience, and create high-quality, consistent pieces of content.
Please, contact Tradmill Digital Marketing in Sheffield, South Yorkshire, to learn more about how we can assist you with your content marketing requirements.
There are plenty of great Digital Marketing Agencies in Sheffield, South Yorkshire to choose from and if your business needs a digital transformation or digital marketing specialists, you should go ahead and get in touch with Tradmill Digital Marketing who are based in the city. You will fall in love with the results that these specialists can offer you in the long run. Call them on 07818 406870 or email us at paul@tradmill.co.uk. Contact Tradmill Digital Marketing as they will be happy to help you with your online marketing.
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