Creating top-quality, exciting content is a crucial component of your company’s overall marketing success. While you may know the importance of this crucial branding element, you’re also likely to confront a few content marketing challenges that can delay your content marketing success.
If you ask business leaders, “What is your greatest content marketing challenge?” you’ll hear a wide range of responses. Fortunately, when you know more about your potential barriers, you’re in a better position to overcome them.
What are the biggest content marketing challenges for businesses today? Find out below!
1. Connecting with your audience
Do you know what type of content your audience wants?
If not, you may be experiencing one of the biggest content marketing challenges. Your audience plays a crucial role in the success of your branding efforts, so it’s vital to know more about them to maximize the impact of your marketing.
If you want to reach your audience successfully, you must know your target market.
What are the general characteristics of your customers? Do they represent a specific age range? Do your services or products sell better to users within a particular income range? How long does your audience generally remain a client?
Analyze your customers to develop a better understanding of your target market.
Use the audience data you’ve collected to produce content that meets their needs.
Even top-tier articles and blogs fail to succeed when they’re not shared with the right audience. The characteristics that define your clients and the content you produce should go together, ensuring the success of your digital marketing campaign.
2. Meeting deadlines
You can’t discuss content marketing challenges without talking about time and deadlines.
Perhaps, even more so than money, time is a crucial issue when it comes to the success or failure of a marketing campaign. Although some businesses have an expansive budget, every company must work within a limited amount of time.
To avoid running into content marketing projects delays, remember to outline your goals. Set aside enough time to accomplish what you want too. Getting your work done on time happens when you collaborate with your team and establish a reasonable set of expectations.
Take an organized approach and know what your business can expect to achieve within a specific time frame. Make use of company resources to ensure that all your content marketing objectives go according to plan.
3. Posting too little (or too much)
To keep up with your competition, you likely feel an overwhelming urge to publish new content as fast and as often as you possibly can. While creating a ton of content may seem like a smart decision, you also don’t want to annoy your readers with too much information, either.
How do you find your company’s groove when it comes to your posting frequency?
For many businesses, it helps to go through a trial and error phase to rule out what doesn’t work. Eventually, you’ll discover that posting a set number of social media posts or blog posts per week helps you obtain the highest level of engagement.
Once you find the ideal posting frequency, develop a plan to ensure you stick with it.
4. Keeping up with competitors
While the Internet is an excellent place to advertise your business, your competitors probably think the same thing. That means that companies in any industry can experience tough competition when launching a digital marketing strategy.
How do you ensure that your brand stands apart from the crowd?
The first piece of advice to take when looking to keep up with your competition is to be unique. When you produce content — like blogs and videos — don’t mimic what other businesses in your industry have already made. Create something that’s one of a kind.
Your target audience doesn’t want to read or watch the same article or video twice.
That’s why you need to make every piece of content that you produce 100 percent yours. Use your company voice and add a unique spin to your content to remain on top in an oversaturated market.
5. Setting unrealistic goals
While the idea of multiplying your sales overnight may seem appealing, it’s not reasonable to anticipate this level of growth in such a short period. Even when you produce top-tier content and hire the help of the nation’s best marketers, success doesn’t happen overnight.
That doesn’t stop your business from eagerly awaiting success, however.
Unfortunately, impatience can keep you from achieving your company’s content marketing goals.
When you release a new blog or article, you shouldn’t expect it to reel in thousands of new users overnight. Content marketing produces a gradual impact on your business, and the results occur over time, not overnight.
To overcome this issue, establish short- and long-term goals.
Remember to set goals that you can reasonably achieve, given the current status and investment of your business in content marketing. As you continue to accomplish your objectives, you’ll find that it’s easier to up the stakes every time you establish next year’s content marketing plan.
6. Being creative
While creating informational and instructional content is necessary for your marketing campaign, it’s also crucial to go beyond educational material. This, of course, means getting in touch with your creative side, which is something many professionals struggle to achieve.
Avoid feeling burnt out or hitting a roadblock in your creative thinking by collaborating with others to create new work. You’ll have an easier time discussing potential ideas without taking on the burden of this task solo.
Keep your information fresh and up-to-date by turning to other websites for a source of inspiration. Remember that while it’s okay to use third-party content to stimulate your creativity, make every piece that you write original and unique.
7. Budgeting and finding the proper resources
Nothing kills a content marketing campaign more quickly than cutting your marketing efforts short due to insufficient funding. Unlike powerhouse companies that seem to possess a limitless budget for marketing strategies, your business has a finite amount of resources available.
That doesn’t mean small businesses can’t use content marketing, however.
The great thing about content marketing is that you can develop a strategy that fits your budget. Even if you partner with a digital marketing agency, your dedicated account manager can develop a strategy that makes the most of your budget.
Begin an effective content marketing plan today
While you may face a few roadblocks in your content marketing plan, don’t let these challenges keep you from getting started. When you know what hurdles to look for, you’re in a better position to address and resolve these with success.
As a business professional, you always aim to deliver top-quality marketing content. You know that the key to success lies in the effectiveness of your branding strategies. This is a tremendous responsibility to take on alone — which is why businesses partner with WebFX.
With more than 200 digital marketing specialists, plus more than 20 years of experience, we have the tools and resources to create a custom, data-driven campaign for your business. That’s how we’ve generated more than $1.5 billion in revenue for our clients in the last five years.
Learn how our team can help your company by contacting us today!