Biggest Problems With Content Marketing And How to Avoid Them
Getting into content marketing is a long uphill struggle. While you work your way towards things like organic traffic, reaching target audiences and actual profit, well, you are most likely to feel the burn of all the bad sides of content marketing. On the flip side, if you persevere the results can be tremendously positive for your business.
So, instead of going with endless material and info about your product, just bear in mind that people always want to be entertained while getting useful info — ya know, something they actually need. They will be on the lookout for quality content and reliable info — as opposed to blatant marketing schemes. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves, so let’s start with the bad stuff first.
Bad Sides of Content Marketing
The Market Is Already Over Crowded — Even-though quality still matters getting your post in front of your audience is becoming increasingly hard. The only thing that can separate you from the lot and help you stepping into the fray in an overcrowded market is the value you provide to your audience.
Do a thorough research of your audience needs and wants and tailored your content on those findings, otherwise chances are you won’t be reaching your targeted audience. Or they won’t engage with your content as much as you hope.
Overselling and Telling the Same Story — People are not stupid and they can usually tell when they’re being pitched a product. Over-emphasizing and overselling your brand or product is something readers or viewers easily recognize. Whether you’re overusing your brand in videos or spamming with irrelevant keywords in an article or blog post, it will frequently backfire.
Watch Who Do You Hire — Bad blogging is usually the product of hiring somebody idle or rather on hand, or dare I say, incompetent to handle blog posts for publications. Someone with little writing experience. Cutting your expenses on a count of quality of your content should never be an option.
Lousy Formatting and Not Thinking About Headlines — It is vital to have a decent blog format, that appeals to modern-day format standards. For instance, readers may be drawn in by headers and headlines, but the same readers often skim-read, which means the text itself has to hold their attention and should not be too long or too elaborate in terms of presenting the subject matter. Try exercising caution in this regard and sticking to formats that work.
Content Marketing is Never Easy — While you work to get your people interested in your product, you’ll go through hell and back again, just to scratch the surface in terms of profit and recognition. So, yes, this is a hard, time-consuming endeavor. It takes a great deal of patience, hard work and tremendous dedication in order to construct a proper digital marketing strategy and then make some sort of mark on the current market.
Content Marketing Isn’t Free — Making a powerful campaign denotes a substantial investment, both in terms of finance and workforce. Work requires seeking out the right content creators, marketers, influencers, social media/community managers and sales representatives. All of that costs money, but it will get you ahead.
Traditional Marketing Sucks, And It’s Hard to Stay Away — So, you’ve assembled a team of talented people and now you want to execute a carefully planned out marketing campaign. Company execs and managers often make the mistake by jumping the gun, spending their budget on classically annoying ads. Additionally, they might also spam various email addresses with updates about their product, etc.
Good Sides of Content Marketing
Good, Honest Efforts Lead to Content Virality — When you put effort into your work, and manage to produce quality content, people will remember, and pretty soon they will be hungry for more. If you are really good, you won’t have to bother with sharing, people often share themselves and chat about what you’ve done on their own. Nothing builds your reputation quicker and better than when it’s being talked about by others.
Being ‘Human’ and Personal Works — Creating top-notch content (videos, articles, podcasts and the like) will resonate better with an audience if you keep things personal. That means you make stuff that a niche audience can relate to. To evoke an emotional response requires brainstorming and producing meaningful content. The less it seems like a commercial or ad, the better. Expressing personal opinions on important matters leads to approvals, and that creates loyalty and followers. Such an approach is especially effective in social media marketing.
Delivering Reliable Information — As we’ve mentioned, people come back when you provide interesting and meaningful content that is both fun and informative. Powerful content equals loyalty and this gradually builds reputation and brand recognition.
Getting to the Relevant Client — As we’ve established, good content marketing is about quality and knowing what the target audience wants. To become an industry leader though takes a lot of time, and most of it relies heavily on finding the right audience and know what it really wants — as an age group, millennials are a good example.
Overcoming the Challenge With Solid Digital Marketing Strategy
There are a lot of challenges and downsides when you are in the business of content marketing. One of the biggest challenges is facing a fluctuating market where the rules change almost constantly, so it’s very hard to stay on top of things and still end up in ‘the green’ in terms of profit.
Still, if you overcome these challenges, and just stick with the formula, there’s no reason why your hard work won’t be crowned with success; even if that success is small — never mind, it’s a start.
Make sure you determine what kind of business you’re in exactly: B2B (Business-to-Business), B2C (Business-to-Consumer), small, or mid-sized business. For instance, B2B marketing might seem like a good starting point, but having an effective digital marketing strategy is a pricey endeavor. So, with medium and big-size businesses, it could be easier to achieve satisfying ROI (Return-on-Investment) seeing as the content might cost less to begin with.
Producing powerful content marketing is tough, but if you persistently go down that road and make all the right steps, then benefits are sure to arrive, sooner rather than later. Remember, allocating resources is key in order for content marketing to have any effect whatsoever. So, with people being overwhelmed with information left and right these days, it is up to you deliver that awesome content and make a connection with your audience.
Read on…the links :-)
I’d like to share few links here for your further reading that can help you understand the topic better:
Your Content Marketing Isn’t Working. Here’s Why.
The 5 Biggest Digital Marketing Mistakes (and How to Avoid Them)
Top 19 Social Media Marketing Mistakes You Should Avoid
3 tips for overcoming content production obstacles
Now, Over to you!
Alright! In all fairness this is an updated post from 2016. While new data have arisen the scene and the practice haven’t changed much.
Now really over to you … first of all, if you like what you have read here please CLAP IT and SHARE IT and FOLLOW me :-) Second, hit me with your thoughts on content marketing. Leave a comment in the comment section below! and THX for reading!
