12 Biggest Content Marketing Challenges (To Boost Growth)

Content marketing is the goldmine for quality leads in today’s digital business space! It involves several strategies, ranging from developing to sharing relevant content.

This attracts and drives profitable customer purchases. Yet brands have faced many challenges that affect their content marketing efforts.

The thing is, there is no single, “sure way content strategy” that works for all B2B marketers. Hence, brands are expected to handle many things at once! So, you have consistent content development, proliferation, and coordination to think about.

Also, you must ensure that prospects find relevant content at the right time.

Sadly, many businesses, particularly startups, are clueless about how and where to begin. Thus, it is necessary to highlight the biggest content marketing challenges.

By doing so, you can easily identify ways to manage them effectively to boost growth.

What’s an effective content marketing strategy for B2B?

For B2B marketers, content marketing is a way of driving sales. And, this is through disguised storytelling. Thus, you’ll be providing valuable insights through entertainment. Notably, attracting new clients connotes a successful outcome.

While content creation is in the spotlight, you’ll need more to reach the target audience.

No doubt, people’s attention span keeps getting shorter by the day. So, having effective content arsenals is crucial for elevating business brands.

Here are key reasons why you must invest in an effective content marketing strategy.

Improved brand awareness

When done effectively, content marketing can increase brand visibility. You can create awareness among the target audience with engaging, valuable content. Coupled with proper marketing campaigns, businesses can build and sustain a solid reputation.

Enhanced search engine visibility

Content marketing can trigger a sudden boost in a business’s search engine visibility. However, this requires an effective content marketing strategy! You need optimized content marketing to attract a brand’s target audience.

You can begin with a strong keyword research. Also, tracking performance data with tools like Google Analytics is necessary. Notably proper SEO content can invariably improve your business website rankings.

Establishing expert credibility

You can remain a credible expert or thought leader by crafting a compelling content marketing strategy. This is achieved through consistent delivery of ungated content via proper marketing channels.

Such a high position in your industry invariably builds trust and authority.

Better lead generation

An effective content marketing strategy can quickly generate leads for businesses. However, such content must address prospects’ concerns. Interestingly, this works on both a brand’s website and its social media channels. How does it work?

The content resonates and attracts your target audience. Then, you prompt them to provide their contact details to access more of such value.

Building strong client relationships

Again, an effective content marketing strategy helps build and maintain better customer relationships. The main reason is that your brand can offer valuable information that addresses clients’ pain points.

12 Biggest content marketing challenges (+ solutions)

Businesses today are expected to thrive in the digital landscape. You can do this by leveraging organic traffic and enhanced audience engagement. With proper content creation tools, you can educate prospects about your products and services.

If done properly, you can easily drive growth and profit. As simple as it may sound, it is not easy. So, here are some of the biggest marketing challenges and how to navigate them.

1. Understanding clients’ personas

Producing content that doesn’t match your client’s persona is “wasted resources.” Let’s say you have a vegan audience seeking high-quality meatless burgers.

You don’t, and shouldn’t, try to convince them to go for meat. Rather, you create solutions that resonate with their needs.

People out there often have their individual consumer behavior.

But your sole focus is on your target audience. So, rather than pushing a “content for everybody,” you want to identify your audience. Often, a “general content” piece gets drowned out by your competitors who’ve played their cards well.

This is not about settling for a tiny niche, especially if you serve multiple buyer personas. But take time to understand who you’re selling to, and incorporate user-generated content.

Begin by writing out the buyer persona(s) you serve. Be sure to list their unique characteristics, worldview, and quirks. Then, every piece of content you put on your website or social media channels must align with the worldview you highlighted.

Find ways to entice your customers! Show them how your products align with their lifestyles.

2. Consistent content output

Considering regular content as “too much work” will be your greatest undoing. You can only make notable progress when you have a library of valuable, relevant content. This places you as an authority in your industry.

Without an effective strategy and a consistent publishing schedule, there is a likelihood of becoming lax. And this causes brands to start posting only when they feel like it and to scrape around for things to post about.

The solution to this problem is having a documented schedule and content calendar. This way, you know the direction you’re heading. And, you can easily develop marketing strategies to help you prioritise content creation.

Notably, you can create a schedule for posting once, twice, or more a week. But then, you must ensure you strike a balance between quantity and quality. As you do this, be sure to consider your team’s capabilities.

With more content production, you must also consider how to manage it effectively. Sadly, functional silos may emerge from poor content management. This, in turn, affects the consistency and overall quality of your content.

3. Audience Research for relevance

No doubt, SEO is important, especially for Google rankings. Yet, it is also important to push relevant, useful content that aligns with your desired audience.

Sadly, some brands don’t look beyond optimisation. You can’t effectively grab a prospect’s attention if you shove content that doesn’t resonate to them.

The solution? Whether written or visual content, it is important to research your audience. In addition, thorough topic and keyword research helps eliminate guesswork. Thus, it aids in producing valuable, relevant content. Be sure to explore the latest industry trends.

Then, use the data gathered about your buyers to influence their purchasing decisions.

Another issue is originality! It is not wise to push out content that your competitors have already rolled out. Now, this doesn’t mean you should go looking for what hasn’t been “done before.” It calls for deeper reflection on what your competitors must have missed.

You can also approach similar topics from a different angle. Remember, clients often align with strong views, and having a bold opinion is helpful.

4. Paid promotion

For marketers in the digital space, there is often a struggle between free vs paid ads and promotions. Across various online platforms, paid advertising often reaches the top of search engines faster.

So, while you are not necessarily losing by ditching paid digital advertising, it is a big challenge to match competitors who ply this route.

Organic blog, website, or podcast content promotion still holds a solid spot. But a bulk of content marketers are investing substantial sums in social media ads. These folks aim for significant support on their keyword rankings. So, what do you do?

You can experiment with paid promotions, but do so wisely. Work with a realistic budget, push the correct content type, and focus on your target audience.

During this time, learn and understand the changes recorded. You can either double down or hit the break, depending on the outcome. If your focus is on generating more website traffic, you should also have systems in place to measure it.

Don’t forget the need for an effective content schedule. Stay consistent as you track metrics and determine whether this investment is worthwhile.

5. Determine content marketing ROI

Many business owners and marketers have struggled to show the ROI of their content. Often, they can’t tell how many conversions a specific piece of content drives.

This problem becomes more persistent for brands with non-trackable digital conversion paths. When content performance is not measured or analyzed, it becomes challenging to convince key stakeholders to invest in campaigns.

First, you must understand that content can be linked with conversion. This possibility helps with assessing the resulting impact of content marketing.

Well, no cut-out model can be termed perfect. But you can tell that prospects are taking actions when they click on CTAs.

So, you can begin by setting key performance indicators (KPIs), goals, and objectives. Know the exact metrics you want tracked and measured. These could include traffic flow, internal links, backlinks, domain authority, CTA performance, and similar metrics for blog articles.

You can also leverage platforms like HubSpot to easily track performance. Then, set out clear plans to secure stakeholder buy-in.

6. Proving leadership and authority

In the content marketing world, setting a credible voice and emerging as a renowned authority in your industry is crucial.

Differentiating each content piece or aiming for a viral video is necessary. Yet, you must focus on making a significant impact on your customers. Recently, many people are posing as “experts” and offering insights and advice to customers.

Thus, it can be quite difficult for businesses and their content to stand out.

As a result, content marketers are seeking effective strategies to improve their visibility and marketing ROI.

While at this, they keep seeking ways to enhance their thought leadership. Impressively, there is a way to emerge as a brand that customers and prospects can trust. The first thing is to focus more on your audience’s needs rather than self-promotion.

Be available to offer insights and solutions that genuinely help your customers.

7. Content management

A successful content marketing strategy is deeply rooted in effective content management. Pushing out videos, articles, and social media posts without a cohesive content management system is wrong.

In fact, statistics show that many content marketers have admitted to having more content than they can manage.

This issue ultimately leads to organizational silos. The resulting internal inefficiencies can thwart marketing efforts. Such unpreparedness and ineffective management have been recorded amongst many marketing leaders.

This may be due to lack of skilled talent, clarity, and content management technologies.

Thus, brands must invest in workflows and systems that support proper organization, collaboration, and repurposing. The human resources (writers, designers, strategists, etc.) must stay coordinated.

Also, having a content calendar will be the best addition to the marketing plan. You’ll definitely spot positive changes with key performance indicators.

8. Standing out amongst competitors

Setting your brand’s content different from competitors’ can be challenging. It is not entirely your fault, as topic saturation is a major phenomenon across various industries. Also, many brands are forced to rely on the same trends.

They mostly use the same data sources to meet their target audience’s needs. Invariably, this move causes their content to sound identical.

But here’s what you can do differently: tell a compelling story and give out knowledge and assets. Creating and posting content with real, memorable stories will resonate with customers. Doing this will help you push original content.

Hence, you can keep your brand at the top of customers’ minds for a long time. Also, don’t lock up knowledge, as customers yearn for valuable insights.

And no, providing them with enough assets doesn’t mean that your customers will no longer need you. Rather, it proves that you’re an expert and that you’ll definitely be providing services worth their money.

9. Pushing to multiple platforms

For content marketers or businesses, maximizing engagement and reach is very important. This is particularly true, as no two channels are created equal.

There are specific customer behaviors you can identify across different platforms. Each platform comes with its own engagement patterns.

A post that could drive website traffic may fall flat on some social channels. A notable example is posting a well-detailed article on LinkedIn. This may not work well, as it is better suited to a blog.

Similarly, while shorter videos work best on Instagram and TikTok, you’ll need to post longer ones on YouTube.

Thus, it is imperative to customize your story. Ensure it is structured for each audience touchpoint on each platform. Find out where most of your target audience spends time online. Then, adjust your content to fit seamlessly into those spaces.

10. Attact social media followers

More people are spending a lot of time on various social media platforms. Yet, there is an oversaturation of social media posts than ever before. This poses a challenge for brands to gain and retain followers across social media channels.

Why?

Well, time is a precious resource. Social media users aren’t going to spend time on content that doesn’t provide value. Given the selective nature of your target audience, you must ensure your brand delivers consistent value.

Otherwise, you risk losing them, as they may unfollow to free up their feed. So, you must take critical actions, including engaging with your followers/audience and optimizing your brand’s profile. Also, ensure you develop and post regular, relevant content.

It is recommendable to use compelling headlines and attractive visual content. Don’t forget to analyze your social media metrics to re-strategize.

11. Keep things balanced

Another challenge for content marketers as they focus on improving business value is time! No doubt creating high-quality content takes time. But to churn out valuable pieces consistently, you must remain on top of your game.

Sufficient time is required for learning and mastering new tools. This is crucial in creating written content, videos, and other forms of content.

So, how do you manage your time effectively?

There is actually no silver bullet here. But the main thing is to avoid reinventing the wheel when seated in front of a blank screen. Rather, use templates to speed up content creation and ensure it looks well put together.

With a functional template, new marketing experts on your team can easily understand and adapt to your exact writing style.

12. Aligning content with buyer intent

We cannot overemphasize the need for brands to put customers first. Yet many businesses struggle with this. You must know that a customer’s journey describes the stages a prospect goes through before making a purchase.

These stages include awareness, deliberation, reflection, and decision. It is all about the relationship that potential clients have with your brand.

While some people are just discovering your business through online searches, others are deliberating which products to purchase. Then, there are existing customers who are ready to patronize again but need a slight nudge.

So, be ready to create content that aligns with your audience’s preferences and answers their pressing questions. Kindly note that customers these days conduct independent research and compare search results.

Hence, yours must appear as what they are looking for.

Conclusion

The earlier businesses realize that content marketing is more about standing out, the better. The digital space hosts several competitors, offering prospects a range of options to choose from. Thus, it is important to develop an effective overall content strategy.

Your marketing content should identify your target audience, consistently post relevant content, and leverage SEO.