Top 4 Greatest Challenges With Content Marketing (And How to Overcome Them) | Tech Blog

BY Young Entrepreneur Council – 10 Jul 2018

PHOTO CREDIT: Getty Images

By Syed Balkhi, co-founder of OptinMonster.

Are you struggling to get tangible results using content marketing? You’re not alone. Content marketing is challenging and it takes a lot of effort and resources to create great content that generates engagement, shares and sales. Long gone are the days that any content can get noticed. In this competitive market, you have to not only produce good content but make it stand out by being helpful and authentic.

Let’s take a look at a few content marketing challenges and how to overcome them.

Creating Fresh Content

For most businesses, the biggest challenge is creating great content consistently and sustaining the process over time. A sustainable content production process helps you to grow your business by establishing yourself as an authority around your niche circles. Before you dive into developing one, identify how it could benefit your customers.

• Increases brand awareness
• Addresses customer concerns in different stages of sales funnel
• Improves customer acquisition and onboarding efforts

Creating an editorial calendar for your blog and marketing channels is the best way to start a sustainable content creation process. Brainstorm headline ideas and schedule them on your calendar a month in advance. Consider trends in your industry and upcoming holidays as you’re coming up with topic ideas. For example, on our blog, we’ll write about holiday email campaign strategies our readers can implement. You’ll also need to conduct a regular content audit to ensure your content is up to date. You can then repurpose it for different marketing channels.

Brainstorming Content Ideas

It is hard to come up with new content ideas every day. To streamline your workflow, below are a few strategies you can use to collect content ideas for your blogs.

• Ask the audience: Asking your audience is the best way to understand what problem they have. If you find that many of your prospective customers have the same problem, that’s a good topic idea for your blog. If you run an email list, you can encourage them to let you know their concerns through your newsletter. Not only will it help you collect content ideas easily, but it also encourages users to engage with your emails, making your email marketing more effective and your subscribers more loyal to your brand.
• Use Twitter: Use Twitter search with relevant hashtags to find what problems others have within your industry. Based on your findings, you can create a post and tweet the user linking to your blog post.

Updating Content Regularly

Staying up to date is another big challenge content marketers often have to face. To stay relevant and provide value, you’ll have to audit your content on a regular basis. Aside from staying up to date, content auditing can have many benefits, like finding content gap opportunities, escaping a Google penalty, measuring how well it performs and much more.

Always keep an eye on the trends in your industry. Be vigilant if your users complain about outdated content. You can use your editorial calendar to schedule a content audit session and update your content based on the audits.

Creating Content for Multiple Channels

Creating content is time-consuming. This can be especially true if you’re creating content for different marketing channels. To reach a new audience, you don’t have to publish new content regularly. Instead, you can repurpose your existing content with a fresh spin for different channels.

For example, we’ve grown our YouTube subscribers to two million by repurposing our blog content into presentation videos. Similarly, Oracle regularly shares slides on SlideShare that are repurposed from their existing corporate presentations to increase visibility.

If you want to get tangible results by repurposing your existing content, be sure to have a measurable goal and a solid strategy to achieve it. Find the best platform to reach to a new audience segment and demonstrate your expertise. YouTube has worked well for us so we repurposed our blog posts into video format.

Content marketing can elevate the growth of your business and helps you establish your authority. By adopting the above tips, you can easily tackle content marketing challenges you’ll face down the road.

Syed is the co-founder of OptinMonster, a conversion rate optimization software that helps you recover abandoning website visitors and turn them into subscribers and customers.

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