Content Marketing - Challenges

Developing the perfect content marketing strategy for your business is not easy. You have to accurately identify your target customers and understand their problems. You have to define your media channels and build editorial style guides. You have to make sure that your story will resonate with your audience without misleading them.

However, even after you’ve managed to bring all the pieces of your strategy together, three crucial challenges still remain −

• Creating engaging content
• Creating enough content
• Finding the budget to create the content

Let’s look at some of the ways in which you can solve these problems:

Research, Research, and Research

The first rule of creating engaging content that’s right for your audience is by way of research.

• Don’t assume that you know exactly what kind of content your customers will like or need.
• Do some market research to find out what your competitors are doing.
• Gather feedback from your customers.
• Look at data and analytics of your website’s traffic.
• Test your webpages and email campaigns.

The bottom line is to not regard yourself as an expert but a learner of the art of content marketing.

Resist Content Overkill

As in life, where you will not always make the correct decisions; not every content piece you create will do well either. Your webpages might see fantastic traffic but your blog might not be getting as many subscribers as you hoped it would.

• Don’t panic and start spamming your blog with one article after another.
• Instead, spend time on producing quality content that is a clear reflection of your brand message and story.

The trick is not to produce a ton of random content but well-researched content that will offer lasting value to your customers.

Define Your Content Budget

Once you understand what kinds of content you will create, find out how much of it is one-time content such as a webpage and how much of it is ongoing content such as blog articles.

This will give you a fair idea of how much you need to spend on creating content. Then you can decide whether you want to build an in-house content team or want to rope in freelancers. However, make sure you hire the right persons. For instance, someone with a journalistic background will be able to write you the best blogposts, while a copywriter will pen down the perfect call to action content for your webpages.