How hard can it be to create quality content week in week out, while still finding time to run your business? As it turns out, consistently churning out content that people will want to read is one of the biggest marketing challenges companies face daily.
Creating a successful content marketing channel means being aware of the challenges and knowing how to develop strategies to overcome them. Often, if you are facing a content production challenge, someone somewhere has managed to solve it. Here are the most likely hurdles you will meet, and ideas on how to get through them.
Limited Time
It doesn’t take a lot of resources to create content, but it does take time to produce quality material your visitors will want to read, and time is one resource most business owners wish they had more of.
When time is a factor, the obvious option is to outsource the content production, but then there is the matter of financing the effort and finding the balance between high-quality yet affordable writing.
The solution is to either work longer hours to produce the content yourself or spend time finding a writer who understands your business enough to create value-added content your visitors will appreciate.
Writing your own content will save you a lot of money, depending on how much you want to publish, but then you must find somehow a balance between running the business while keeping your online presence populated with quality material.
It’s a balancing act where you may have to be willing to either work more hours or set aside some of your marketing budget to pay for a quality writer. Unfortunately, content marketing gets a reputation as a cheap or even free form of marketing, but by now you will be starting to realise that it’s not a free lunch.
English is Your Second Language
With the global market becoming an increasing reality, many bloggers need to make a choice – either stick to creating content in their native language and miss out on marketing to a large English-speaking population or struggle to produce content in a language with which they are unfamiliar.
The problem is even worse if English is the second language, but they now live and run a business in an English-speaking nation.
One solution is to write the articles in the language which you are most comfortable with and then hire a competent translator who can maintain the flow of the material.
Another option is to outsource your content production completely to a skilled English-speaking writer.
Writing What Your Audience Wants to Read
You could be spending hours producing the most amazing content, but if your audience isn’t interested in the subject matter, then it won’t attract much traffic.
Adding value to your customers’ lives through your content means you need to explore your demographic to discover their innermost desires. The next step is to then go about producing the kinds of articles which fulfil those needs and provide relevant answers.
Developing your research skills is the key to finding out your market’s most urgent needs. Your competitors’ social media feeds are one way to reveal the type of content your audience craves. Check out their posts and see which ones are attracting the most interaction with likes, shares, and comments.
Your goal is not to produce the same content, but more to offer a new perspective or create an article that tackles the problem from a different angle or goes into more depth to add greater value.
Getting Views
It can be frustrating to produce page after page of quality content worthy of a Pulitzer, while the visitor count remains firmly anchored in the single digits for every piece you publish.
With more and more businesses getting online the competition for eyeballs is only set to increase dramatically. Social and organic reach will still have its place, but paid promotion of your content is becoming an increasingly viable solution for getting more exposure to your content almost instantly.
Google, Facebook, Pinterest, and Twitter all have a system for paid promotion, and all provide sophisticated tools to help you get your material in front of the right prospects. Naturally, this exposure comes at a cost, but it might be better and more profitable in the long run than waiting for organic traffic to build up to decent levels.
Measuring ROI
In the past, content marketing was notoriously difficult to measure ROI, which is why many businesses chose to disregard it as a viable marketing effort.
Technology has moved on, and while things are better, measuring the return on your content marketing is still a challenge for most businesses.
The key is to set out the goals for your content marketing. Attracting more traffic to your website, building up a more substantial social media following, or increasing the number of leads in your sales funnels are all key performance indicators you can use to gauge the success or failure of your efforts.
A well-developed strategy outlining what you want to achieve with your content marketing is much better than blindly producing random blog posts and hoping for the best. Use tools designed for the purpose such as Twitter Analytics and BuzzSumo.
Try not to focus on metrics that don’t relate to true value such as Time on Page or view counts. Big numbers are always nice, but unless they are translating into more phone calls or a growing email list, then they are more for vanities sake than anything.
In Conclusion
From the above discussion, you may be thinking that content marketing may be more trouble than it is worth, but this is not the intent of the article. We have aimed to open your eyes to the challenges you face when pursuing content marketing.
There’s no doubt that content marketing is a lot more difficult than it used to be due to an increasingly crowded market and an attention-starved audience. However, when your material gains traction, content marketing can be well worth the investment, with one good article able to bring in loads of free traffic for months if not years.