Foreword

At Curatti, we have always strived to bring our readers great articles from top bloggers and thought leaders, as well as excellent crowd-sourced, guest blog posts.

We’ve decided to formalize the re-published articles into an ongoing series called “Great Articles You may have missed”. Where better to start than with a great friend of Curatti as well as a respected leader…

The Biggest Content Marketing Challenges

Content marketing is popular because it is an effective tool to attract, retain, and engage customers—that is, if you’re doing it right. Research proves that many businesses don’t have a content strategy and, not surprisingly, aren’t seeing results. Getting the most from content initiatives involves a shift both in the way marketers operate and how they serve and support sales teams. And there are many challenges they face along the way. Let’s take a moment to break down the state of content marketing today and examine some of the biggest content challenges we see and hear from our clients.

The State of Content Marketing Today

Today, many B2B companies tend to jump on the content bandwagon without any substantial strategy—much like their approach to social—and wonder why they aren’t getting any ROI. Think that’s a reach? Think again. A recent survey by the Content Marketing Institute found that 88 percent of B2B marketers use content as part of their marketing strategy, yet only 32 percent have a strategy for those efforts.

Furthermore, only six percent of survey respondents said their content marketing initiatives were “very effective” (see Figure 1 below). That’s dismal at best, but it gets a little worse: So far, it’s supported by data that many marketers don’t have a content strategy and that what efforts they are making aren’t delivering results. Fifty-five percent of B2B marketers, though, said they don’t even know what a successful content marketing program would look like within their organization. If there is no goal, how can you strive to reach it?

Figure 1. Source: Content Marketing Institute’s 2016 Content Marketing Benchmarks, Budgets and Trends—North America

There’s clearly a disconnect between what marketers want from their content initiatives and what they’re getting. All hope is not lost, though—the first step in finding a solution to any problem is to fully understand the underlying challenge. Let’s take a look at what’s routinely plaguing our clients on their quests to content marketing success.

Top Content Challenges, Explained

Here are some content challenges that we see and hear from our clients most often:

1. Mapping

To get the most traction from a piece of content and provide the most value to your customer, it’s best to map your content to a particular stage of the buyer’s journey. What’s relevant to consumers when they’re in the awareness phase, for example, won’t be as helpful when it comes time for them to make a decision. Many businesses have trouble grasping this skill.

2. Tone

Knowing how to develop content in different iterations to support the aforementioned buying journey can also be a struggle. The marketers’ inclination (and the sales team’s as well) is often to sell, sell, sell. My thought on that is barf, barf, barf. And trust me, your customers feel the same way. The know when they’re being sold to, and they aren’t interested in being inundated with your BS marketing messages. They want information. They want resources. They want to learn everything they need to know before they have to sit through your demo or sales pitch. If every piece of content you produce is a thinly veiled marketing piece, you’re not going to get very far.

3. Measurement

Measuring success of content marketing is critical to establishing the business case for further investment down the line, but exactly how to do that isn’t always obvious. Many marketers need help when it comes to the tools and systems they’ll need to quantify the efficacy of their content initiatives.

4. Patience

Good content marketing takes time (just like networking, relationship building, etc.), but that’s hard for many marketers to swallow. There’s often a desire to establish authority with content, but you can’t go into that expecting it to happen overnight. Reputations don’t get built overnight, networks don’t get built overnight, thought leaders don’t magically appear. That is all stuff that you have to commit a budget and resources to, work on, and earn.

This disconnect between perception and reality of the process can lead to frustration. Marketers need to allow time to get buy-in from senior leaders, too, so they can start putting them out front with bylined content and a social presence—all steps that ultimately help to develop trust and credibility in niche markets.

5. Credibility

Yes, executives need to develop and maintain credibility in their industry by publishing smart, authoritative content under their bylines. This trustworthiness, however, isn’t reserved for the C-suite alone. That same credibility needs exist in general for blog content written by other members of the content team. As mentioned above, if you want to get credibility, you’ll need to earn it.

6. Budgeting

It probably goes without saying, but budgeting is a challenge for marketers—especially marketers looking to find some sort of ROI on content that may or may not be effective (or that they don’t know how to measure).

7. Personnel

Internal conflicts can arise when content initiatives aren’t well planned. Marketers need to remember that not everyone with a keyboard can write for the web, and unilaterally soliciting content is a quantity-over-quality approach that will fail. Also, executives shouldn’t be expected to contribute to the corporate blog at the expense of doing their jobs. For example, no one is ever going to put writing a blog post ahead of serving a customer or completing another billable project—this is where outsourcing your writing can deliver big value.

8. Approvals

All too often, blogging gets tied up in approval processes. When content has to go through too many channels and get past too many eyeballs, progress can slow. And when your legal team is driving the train, expect even more delays. Learn to trust your marketing team on this front, and your content teams. Chances are good that they’ll deliver.

9. Distribution

Writing great content is easy. Getting anyone to read it is the difficult part. And this is where many content marketing initiatives fail, as far too many marketers overlook this distribution step. This is where a legitimate presence in the social space, and ongoing social community building and engagement come into play. This is also where strong networks, great relationships, internal advocates, and influencer friends can make or break your content operations.

10. Commitment

Succeeding with content marketing takes a commitment to an entirely new, constantly evolving set of rules. Writing teams have a lot on their plates—understanding the nuances of SEO, writing effectively for the web, adapting tone to different personas, understanding what content works for each part of the customer journey and knowing how to create that are just a few examples. In short, ideating, developing, and effectively distributing the right content in the right channels, and knowing how to evaluate and measure the efficacy of that content takes a grand commitment from an organization.

The Takeaway

If you’re going to commit to content marketing, you’re committing to a shift in how you serve your customers, how you develop and utilize your resources, and how you measure your success. If you do well, the payoff can be huge—getting around some of those initial challenges, however, can be difficult. But it’s do-able. And when you do it right, content marketing delivers—for you and for your customers and prospects.

What solutions can you offer to the challenges listed above? Any problems you’ve had that I’ve left off this list? I’d love to hear your thoughts.

 

This piece was originally titled “The Biggest Content Marketing Challenges for Marketers” and posted on V3B. It is republished here with permission.

 

Shelly Kramer is the Co-CEO of V3 Broadsuite, a marketing agency specializing in the digital space. A 20+ year marketing veteran, she’s a brand strategist focused on delivering integrated marketing solutions and helping businesses leverage the web for growth and profitability. She’s an expert at content strategy and execution and tying social media to business initiatives.

Recognized by Forbes on a number of occasions, including as one of the Top 40 Social Selling Marketing Experts and Top 50 Social Media Influencers. She’s half marketer, half geek, with a propensity for numbers, producing results and a dash of quick repartee. Her blog has been recognized by Forbes as one of the Top 20 Best Marketing and Social Media Blogs and by PostRank as one of the Top 100 Most Engaging Social Media Blogs. Find her on LinkedIn, Google+ or Twitter

 

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