As a business owner and leader, you always want to put yourself in a position to succeed. In today’s digital landscape, that means having a comprehensive digital marketing strategy to connect with more people online. The problem is, every business today does some form of content marketing, making the online space even more competitive. This makes it harder to stand out and build brand awareness.
Success is not impossible, though. Businesses of every size face different content challenges and are still able to be successful online. Sometimes, it takes a little bit of help, creative thinking, and strategic planning to overcome these obstacles.
To help make things even easier for you, here are six issues you might be facing and tips for overcoming content challenges.
6 Tips For Overcoming Content Challenges
1. Create High-Quality Content
It doesn’t matter if your customers are regular people or other businesses, you’re going to need a content marketing strategy. Creating high-quality content is one of the most effective ways to grow a company as it attracts leads and brings in sales.
To be successful at this, you need to create content that stands out. That means avoiding the same overly general pieces of content your competitors are likely making. If you want to get ahead online, you need to make sure the content you create offers greater value than the information readily available online.
To overcome this challenge, study your competitors. Look at the content they’ve already created and then find ways to make it better. This can be done by including more visuals, adding video, or simplifying complex topics and making them easier to understand.
A lot of variables go into Google’s algorithm to measure engagement and rank pages. If you can do something to make your content more engaging and more helpful than your competitors, Google will recognize this, and pretty soon, you’ll start to rank high on the search engine results pages.
2. Produce New Content Consistently
New content is getting created every single day. If not by you, then by different competitors around the world. It can be difficult to produce content consistently. It can take time to create genuinely engaging content.
Plus, if you have a small team (or you are the writing team), you likely have other business areas to focus on. It’s easy for that blog post or social media video to get passed off until a later date.
To overcome this challenge, there are few different things you can try. First and foremost, develop a marketing strategy and content marketing calendar. If you can build a schedule and map out what content you’ll need, you make better use of your time and have time to produce that content.
Another strategy you can use is repurposing content. You don’t have to create new stuff all the time. Find different ways to repurpose existing content. If you host a webinar, for instance, cut up some of the recordings into short clips you can share on social media after. If you have some comprehensive eBooks on your site, these could be turned into blog posts and direct traffic to a landing page where the entire eBook can be downloaded. There are plenty of ways to reuse existing content to drive traffic to your website.
When it comes to actually creating the content, you have two options. If you’re going to do it in-house, you’ll need to dedicate staff and time to actually working on it. If that might be difficult, consider outsourcing. A growing number of businesses are hiring agencies that offer content marketing managed services to help take things off their plate.
3. Develop New Topics and Ideas
One of the biggest content creation struggles businesses have is developing new ideas. Sometimes it can feel like there are only so many topics you can create content around. There are a couple of different ways to overcome this, though.
One is to do some customer research and talk to your audience. This is something a lot of businesses rarely do. Surveying your existing customers and having your sales team ask different questions during a call can lead to fresh ideas. If you can start to identify different pain points your customers have experienced, you can create content that discusses these things and shows how your product or service solves that problem.
Your next option is to write about your customers. If you’re out of new ideas to promote your product, start promoting the success others have had since becoming your customer. People love social proof. While this shouldn’t be your entire content marketing strategy, case studies and customer interviews are both effective pieces of content to build.
Lastly, sometimes it pays to have a fresh perspective. If you work with a content marketing agency, they’ll be able to approach the topic from a different perspective. Chances are they’ll have questions about your product or service, and this might lead to new topics to build content around.
Many content marketing agencies also use special tools to find gaps online. They’ll likely be able to develop a comprehensive list of topics based on keyword and competitor research to identify your biggest opportunities online.
4. Get Organic Results
We’re living in a world where pay-to-play seems like the only way to get attention online. As more and more content gets created online, businesses are investing more and more money into online ads and sponsored posts—all to get some more website traffic.
That doesn’t have to be the case, though. There are still plenty of ways to drive results organically. It all comes down to your marketing strategy and research.
When someone uses a search engine like Google, they’re looking for help. Google wants to offer results that will help the user answer their question or point them in the direction they want to go. If you’re going to get more organic traffic, you need to invest time and effort into creating great content. This all goes back to the very first point on the list. With so much noise online, your content needs to stand out and offer some real value to the person engaging with it.
Your marketing team needs to make sure that the content answers questions, offers advice, and does something to actually help the person reading or watching it. If you can do this and you optimize the post with the right keywords, you can still achieve great results online.
5. Create the Right Type of Content For Your Audience
Buyer personas are very important. If your content marketing efforts aren’t aligned with your buyer personas, you’re just wasting time. Every audience is different, and you’ll need to build your content specifically for them if you want to get results.
Some businesses might find success with longer-form blogs or guides that go in-depth on a certain topic. Others might see more success from a few hundred words of keyword-specific content paired with a video and images.
You also need to think about the different stages your buyers might be in. A good content strategy should have content available for every stage of the sales funnel. That means you should have generally informative and educational posts that attract initial interest.
As someone enters the funnel and begins their buyer’s journey, you’ll want to mix in content to help nurture them. This is when you might want to share the case studies and social proof mentioned earlier.
The tip for overcoming this content challenge is simple, understand your audience and match your content to the different stages of your sales funnel. If you can do that effectively, you’ll be able to better nurture your leads and create more customers.
6. Keep Content Engaging
This might be the most important tip on this list. If you want more brand awareness and to really stand out online, you need to create above-average content that keeps the viewer engaged.
It all comes back to understanding your audience and why they’re engaging with your content in the first place. To help keep them engaged, make sure your brand has a distinct and authentic voice.
Use storytelling to keep your content compelling and memorable. Most importantly, include facts, stats, and credible sources to help drive your point home and resonate with the viewer.
Don’t be afraid to diversify your content either. Including videos, images, and infographics in your blog posts can make it easier for the viewer to digest all the information you’re sharing with them.
Overcome Your Content Roadblocks
As you can see, there’s a strategic way to get past any content challenge you encounter. Sometimes the easiest way is to find a partner who can handle your content marketing efforts for you. Not only does this help you save time, it lets you focus on other parts of your business that need attention while still being able to reach more people online.
Our okgrow services or managed content marketing services are two great options to consider. With each, you’ll work with a team of content marketing experts to produce content that will help drive better results organically.
If you want to learn more or are interested in having a strategy call, contact our team today and transform your content marketing efforts.
