06.10.2022

Is Your Business Killing Content Marketing Strategy

Marketing Consultant, Internet Marketing Consultant

Having a content marketing strategy in place is essential if a business wishes to reach new audiences and grow.

However, defining the strategy is arguably the easy part.

For a step by step guide on creating a content strategy for a SaaS product/service see this blog post https://alkane.marketing/blog/b2b-saas-content-strategy/

The difficulty often arises with the actual implementation and execution. This is generally because of various internal constraints and obstacles within the business.

Whether it is a lack of resources for content, organisational processes or a simple lack of belief from the leadership team in the benefits of content marketing, the main challenges often lie within the business itself.

Here are 5 ways in which businesses can inadvertently kill their own content marketing strategy.

Competing Internal Demands. This is a common problem that affects businesses with small content teams. Limited resources mean the content team is stretched whenever there are competing ‘urgent’ demands for content from different departments. This hinders the execution of the original planned strategy.
Limited Access to Customer Insights. In depth customer insights are essential for producing content that resonates with the intended audience. It can be difficult asking customers to give up their time so you can interview them to get information about their pain points - information that is valuable in deciding what content to produce.
Lack of Content Process. A lack of an organised and documented process for creating and publishing content can cause delays and negatively impacts the overall strategy.
Unclear Content Briefs. Clear briefs give the content creator specific guidelines on what is needed, who the content is aimed at, keywords for SEO, how a blog post should be structured etc . Content briefs ensure that the original content strategy is adhered to.
Expecting Content ROI too Quickly. This can be a common problem characteristic of leadership teams in B2B businesses. The benefits of content marketing are realised in the long term, after regularly and consistently publishing. Leads and sales don’t come after publishing a few blog posts. Content marketing is a long term play, designed to build trust in a business. This trust translates into sales further down the road.

In my days of misspent youth, I was once bemoaning the misfortune that seemed to plague my life to my uncle, who then told me that if I wanted to understand the cause of my problems, I should go look in the mirror.

That floored me, and I was pretty resentful towards my uncle for having the audacity to say such a thing!

But what I didn’t realise at the time, but do now, is that because I was the cause of all my problems, I could also be the solution.

So if your business has some of the content marketing challenges outlined in this post, all is not lost. The problem (and solution) all lies within the business.

To find out more on how businesses can solve these common content marketing problems, see this blog post https://alkane.marketing/blog/b2b-content-marketing-challenges/.