Creating content is a simple concept, but not always an easy reality. As a result, lots of businesses that venture into creating content give up soon after starting, and well before they see any substantial or sustaining benefits. The truth is, content takes time, and while it’s not always easy, there are steps you can take to help make your content succeed. Here we discuss four of the top challenges with content and how to fix them.
One of the biggest challenges with content is measuring its return on investment (ROI). Because content’s job is to inform, educate or entertain, it’s hard to track its effectiveness, even with a clear call to action (CTA) sprinkled throughout. The reason is, content is one piece of an overall marketing machine that includes lots of pieces, and because sales doesn’t usually follow a straight line from someone seeing content to making a purchase, many people think content doesn’t work.
The question becomes, then, how do you know? What evidence do you have that content played no role in acquiring any of your last 10 customers? Rather than measure how many people liked a social media post or downloaded a case study, measure how many people who downloaded the case study then clicked an offer for a free demo. Measuring a customer’s actions throughout the journey, not just at any one stage of the journey is a better, but still imperfect, way to measure your content’s ROI.
As already stated, your content’s job is to inform, educate or entertain your audience at every point of their buying journey. That means you need to create a variety of different content types for your audience as they make their way from the awareness phase all the way through the decision phase.
You do that by understanding who your audience is, how they consume their content, the challenges that keep them up at night, and what it means to overcome those challenges. You also need to understand how to move them through the buying process and how content can help them do that.
The awareness phase includes things like blog posts, infographics and social media posts. The consideration phase includes things like email newsletters, podcasts and how-to guides. The decision phase includes case studies, testimonials and comparison charts.
Know what you customer needs at each phase and create content to deliver it.
The age-old struggle between content or marketing teams and sales teams is real, but it doesn’t have to be. The two don’t have to exist in silos, but sometimes they do.
The remedy for this is nothing earth-shattering or revolutionary. It is communication. When the two teams talk to one another, beautiful things can happen. First, the marketing team learns what the sales people need in terms of collateral to send to prospects and customers. And the sales team learns what the marketing team is creating, why they’re creating it and most important, how to use it in their sales activities.
One of the biggest challenges with content is getting it done and feeling like it’s working for you. According to Content Marketing Institute, only 28% of B2B marketers say their content marketing efforts are very successful. But, one reason why they are successful is because they have a documented content plan that aligns with the company goals and objectives.
In other words, these companies not only created and implemented a content plan, the content they do create aligns to specific infinitives. That way, they are not creating content for the sake of it, but rather with intention and for a reason. Understanding and giving your content a central role in your marketing efforts will contribute to the overall success of that content.
If you need any help overcoming any of these content challenges, please reach out. We’d love to help.