The three biggest challenges facing content marketers

What do you find most challenging about content marketing? Recently our Head of Content Strategy Sarah Mitchell was interviewed on the August blog to give her take on the state of affairs in the content marketing space. In the interview Sarah mentioned three major challenges most content marketers face.

1) Content marketing is hard

If you’re a content marketer, give yourself a pat on the back. Executing a content marketing strategy can be really difficult. You need a lot of different parts working at the same time. This means you’ll either be firing on all cylinders as a one-man-band, or attempting to manage and coordinate a team working on different tasks at once.

Due to the multiple roles involved in content marketing, there are also many skills required. To be successful you have to be a jack-of-all-trades and a master of most. Your typical content marketer will have knowledge about marketing strategy, good writing and editing skills, an ability to tell good stories, an understanding of distribution and amplification techniques, social media expertise, as well as digital knowledge like email direct marketing and search engine optimisation (SEO).

It’s a demanding discipline, which is one reason why many brands put content marketing in the ‘too hard basket’.

2) You have to stay ahead of the game in a rapidly changing environment

As a content marketer, you have to stay abreast of rapidly changing technology across many different mediums. Working in the digital landscape puts you at the mercy of other systems. You have to constantly re-educate yourself when algorithms, interfaces and capabilities change.

It’s your responsibility to make sure your content is hitting the mark for whatever medium you’re chasing - Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+ - whatever is in your marketing mix. If you’re managing a content marketing team, it’s also your responsibility to make sure they’re educated in the specifics of these technologies too.

3) It takes serious perseverance

Content marketing is a slow-burn process. One of the biggest challenges facing content marketers is the ability to persevere in the face of minimal initial results. Unless you’re in a space like software or engineering where projects can take an extended period of time, this kind of slow-burn process can go against your organisation’s expectation of success. It can be hard to convince your executive team to trust you in this approach.

It takes a lot of drive and perseverance for marketing managers to stick with their long-term strategy, especially if management is looking for short-term gains. Many content marketers feel immense pressure to get it right the first time.

No pain, no gain

With all these obstacles, why do people attempt content marketing at all? Although it can be seriously challenging, content marketing produces excellent results when done well. Recent studies have shown 70% of marketers believe content marketing to be the most effective SEO tactic. Content marketing generates 3 times as many leads as traditional outbound marketing, but costs on average 62% less.

If you’re struggling with the challenges of content marketing, why not let us help you? We have experience writing and implementing content marketing strategies for companies of all shapes and sizes.

By Carla Young