Content marketers typically aim to create content that will foster brand awareness, loyalty, and engagement. However, we are all faced with marketing difficulties that make it more challenging to reach our target consumers.
If you use the right strategies and tools, you can surpass any obstacles in your content’s performance. Here are some tips on how to anticipate common digital marketing challenges and connect with consumers:
What is the biggest marketing challenge?
In the United States, companies spent $297.5 billion on advertising in 2021. An estimated 40% of this spending is wasted. The most difficult task for marketers is to ensure that the people they are targeting receive the intended message.
Many companies also have difficulty creating content that is interesting and engaging. You want customers to interact with your marketing in a way that is meaningful to them, not just train their eyes to avoid your banner ad. Your message should encourage customers to take action that will result in new business or customer retention.
What problems do content creators face?
When planning your marketing efforts, you will have many issues to consider for your content strategy. The goal of content marketing is to get customers to take a desired action, whether that’s making a purchase, signing up for a newsletter, or downloading an eBook.
As a content creator, you can fall into several traps. Here are a few of the worst:
Lack of clear objectives
What is your goal for your marketing strategy? What are the most important performance indicators for your company, and how are you measuring them? A metaphor is a way of describing something by relating it to something else that is more familiar to you.
- If the goal is to increase organic traffic to your brand’s website, think of this as your destination.
- The vehicle to get there is content marketing.
- The engine that powers content marketing is your content strategy.
- The ROI for your engine-powered vehicle is measured by the increase in average monthly visitors to the website over an established time in your content strategy.
Misunderstanding the target audience
Who is your customer base? What do they want or need? How can you help? Many content creators have difficulty creating a product-market fit. This is especially true for those who are developing a B2C or B2B marketing strategy. To be successful in content marketing, you need to understand the different buyer personas within the complex system of people who like to consume content in different ways.
You can only understand your audience’s different preferences when you put in the effort. Don’t just focus on their age, gender, goals or interests. Try to understand them on a deeper level. Having multiple buyer personas helps you to truly connect with individual buyer types. You should create different types of content that reflect the diversity of your audience.
Bad content
The content creation process takes time and effort. This means that if you want to attract good talent, you will have to pay more money, especially to external agencies. Content creators can be their own worst enemy when they choose to publish sub-par articles instead of taking the time to produce high-quality content. Producing quality content on a tight schedule is one of the most difficult marketing tasks businesses have to deal with. It shouldn’t just be search-engine optimized (SEO) but also clear, concise and compelling.
Everyone involved benefits from engaging content that is thought out and well researched. When you are sharing your ideas, you are showing your expertise in your field, area, or topic. Although keyword research is important, it is more important to understand the context of these keywords within a content landscape. Creating content that appeals to your target audience is essential for success. Knowing who you are trying to reach and what they want to see is the first step in creating effective content. If you want to produce better content, you need to understand the context surrounding your target customers’ searches. What do people need to see in order to believe in you or your brand as a trusted expert?
Not promoting their content through the proper channels
An example of this would be a Google Ads campaign. This might give you good results for a while, but it’s not a good way to keep getting top results. The rules for social media are always changing, so unless you pay for promotion, you will eventually lose your target customers. Since most businesses have limited resources, it is important to be choosy about how you approach the content distribution process. Don’t spend more; spend more wisely.
Neglecting their current customer base in favor of new leads
An engaged customer is one who not only makes a purchase but also refers others to the same helpful website, thereby generating more traffic organically. Generating new content ideas that don’t resonate with your core audience can damage your brand. The best way to bring in new leads is by focusing on trends that are appealing to your current customer base. If you can identify what your current customers are interested in, you can tap into that market and bring in new business.
Here’s how to accomplish that, based on the best practices I’ve learned running content campaigns for Online Marketing Gurus:
How to Build Cohesiveness Into Your Content Marketing Process
When building a content marketing campaign or strategy, it is important to plan from the beginning and continue throughout the creation and promotion process. This includes reporting and analyzing the campaign or strategy.
Keep in mind that although content strategy means different things to various groups, it all needs to come together to form one complete brand identity.
Its visuals include your logo, color scheme and typeface, while its voice is its tone, name, tagline, slogan and vocabulary. They are together representing how the company wants to be viewed by their customers. Take Pepsi, for example. The brand’s identity would be youthful, trendy, and enjoyable. The logo, which has three colors (red, white, and blue), and the message that encourages people to enjoy their youth are both part of the brand’s identity.
Start with Planning
A plan is a helpful tool to use when working towards a goal because it provides a clear path to follow. Start by defining your goals, what type of content you want to create, and how you want to measure success. This will help you create a content marketing plan that works for your business.
This means creating a budget for content marketing and using those resources wisely. You also need to be honest about what you have to work with. It is important to create a set of guidelines or standards that your team can use across departments and channels.
A brand style guide is essential to content cohesiveness. Try looking at Whatsapp, Absolut Vodka, the American Red Cross, and LinkedIn for some examples of how to do it correctly.
Develop Content Guidelines or Standards
Think of these as a content marketing-specific creative brief. If you establish standards or guidelines for your work, it will be easier to stay on track and produce a cohesive product, no matter what platform or medium you are using.
It is important that standards are not only created but also followed to ensure consistency.
Both Skype and MailChimp have established clear guidelines for the style and voice of their respective brands. There are a few things to keep in mind when creating a brand identity, such as which words to avoid using, where to place your logo and tagline, and what makes your brand different from others online, offline, and on social media. The guidelines mentioned here help customers to identify products of either company, no matter where they find them. Everything fits into the brand identity without fail. There’s no guesswork or confusion.
Use a Checklist
Making a list of what every piece of content should include makes it easier to produce consistent results. Make sure your checklist includes important keywords, attribution or links to external sources, an image that is on-brand, and a conversion-focused call to action.
We often resist using checklists because we believe them to be too simplistic. But that’s exactly the point. It simplifies everything by focusing on the most important aspects, which is what you should have been focusing on from the beginning.
You should develop your own checklists. You are the best person to understand your brand. Tweak and polish over time. If you’re new to content marketing, you can take some tips from the experts at the Content Marketing Institute or CoSchedule.
Stick to a Calendar
An effective way to stay organized and on track with your content marketing is to use a content calendar that includes key events, deadlines for deliverables, and topics that are relevant or seasonal. The calendar can help motivate you to write on days when you can’t seem to get the words out, or it can help your team make excuses less often by showing that even the best of us have writers block sometimes.
You can use a spreadsheet or Google calendar for planning, but a more modern tool like CoSchedule would be better for syncing, collaborating, and executing content marketing and blog management. Some other tools that can be used for content management are the WordPress Editorial Calendar plugin, Kapost, and Trello.
Don’t Neglect Content Curation
Sharing content created by other influencers or aligned brands is part of a solid social media strategy, but curation is often overlooked and undervalued, at least in regard to its role in content marketing. Curation can help you discover content, establish yourself as an authority, and build relationships.
Be mindful of how this activity works with your overall story and content marketing strategy. Use lists instead.
Both Buffer and Hootsuite allow you to gather, save, and plan different types of posts. When you link your social media accounts to your platform, you can keep track of everything from one convenient dashboard.
Organize Your Sources
A good start to having influencers share your content and interact with your messaging is to make a list of those who already align with your messaging. Then use it regularly by sharing relevant content.
Use BuzzSumo to find the influencers and content that are being shared the most for any keyword or topic. Lumanu also allows you to see trends, find influencers, and create relationships with people who share your interests.
This list can be a continuously updated document or ongoing process, as new writers and sources of content are always appearing, and current sources may change focus as the digital realm evolves.
Keep Everyone Involved
The content creators are not the only people responsible for maintaining cohesion; marketers, salespeople, and anyone else representing the brand also need to follow similar standards.
They should be included in the process right from the beginning.
Basecamp and Asana are great collaboration tools. Make sure that everyone is well-informed and cooperating. The brand guidelines you created earlier can be shared with everyone so that it can be accessed whenever it is needed.
Consider Your Content’s Context
This refers to all the places your content is present, linked to, or receiving attention. This also includes any responses to user engagement.
Your communications should all have the same general tone, even if they come from different departments within your company. You can save time by composing some standardized responses in advance.
Some examples of communication standards are an email signature, writing style guide, boilerplate, or the appropriate logo to use on various channels.
Perform Regular Reviews
Planning, checklists, and standards or guidelines cannot help you unless you are willing to be held accountable by yourself and your team.
Before posting or executing anything new, make sure it fits into the plan and that all the elements required are in place. Adhering to a pre-launch checklist can help with this.
What are the future challenges of content marketing?
There are too many options for consumers and it is difficult to get their attention. It takes a while to see results in your content ROI. You have to be patient and keep at it to see a significant return on your investment in content creation. The results of these content trends can be difficult to measure as they change rapidly.
To ensure that your blog or other published content receives the attention it merits, you can take a few different approaches. The question of how to make people aware of your content and get them involved in it will be one of the most important challenges for content marketers in the coming years.
You’re not the only one feeling overwhelmed with digital uncertainty and new challenges.
The content marketing field is constantly changing and evolving, so content marketers always need to be on the lookout for new ways to deliver the best possible message to their audience. The rellify platform and team of content marketing experts help customers experience marketing success by providing quality tools and expert services to ensure that content connects with a relevant audience, even in the fragmented digital age. We work with clients to help them identify their business goals and develop a content strategy that will improve their blogging or content marketing skills.
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