Content marketing can be tricky. From creating great content to generating eyeballs for it – nothing comes easy. There is also no one solution that fits all, which means you have to constantly innovate and do new things to shine over a sea of content out there. So as an SMB marketer how do you succeed in your efforts?
We asked a number of marketing experts (especially SMB marketers) the following questions, to find out what are their content marketing challenges, and the successes they’ve had along the way.
Based on our interviews, we found the following to be the top content marketing pain points of SMB marketers:
- Creating high quality, relevant content consistently
- Promoting created content and generating eyeballs for it
- Building an effective content marketing strategy
- Zeroing on the right marketing channels
- Measuring the success of your content marketing efforts
Also, we have compiled for you 7 SMB stand-out content marketing success stories and tips:
- Create newsworthy content with data analysis and research. – Paul Ronto, RunRepeat
- Transcribed interviews of employees work amazingly with the audience – Drew Cohen, SmartBug Media
- Create infographics related to industry trends that people find great value in. – Reuben Yonatan, Get VOIP
- Video, video, video. Try experimenting with different formats. – Vanessa Perplies, Workiz
- Take advantage of timing. Your content should coincide with events and news that are directly related to your niche. – Saloni Doshi, EcoEnclose
- Giveaways and Contests because nobody is going to turn down the possibility of winning something for free. – Morgan Lathaen, Thumbprint
- Take an hour or so each day to add better, more up-to-date content to pre-existing pieces. – Anastasia Iliou, Medicare Plan Finder
Here’s what everyone had to say:
1. Paul Ronto, Chief Marketing Officer at RunRepeat
Could you please share your input on the top 2 content marketing pain points?
Ideation is always a pain point. Figuring out what to write about that will help you meet your goals can be hard, especially if you are not sure what your goal is. A lot of marketers create content without clear goals, and I think this can be a waste of time. The first step is to really lay out the goals of your marketing plan. Are you looking for authority in a vertical, backlinks, traffic, or rankings for a specific KW? Goals will help drive your decision making when it comes to coming up with new content ideas so be sure to etch out your goals first then come up with ideas that lead specifically to that goal. If your goal is backlinks, maybe you don’t need to do as much keyword research or SEO and instead, you need to focus more time on creating newsworthy content and doing outreach. If it’s traffic, maybe you need to spend more time understanding the competitive landscape and understanding which high-volume KWs you can rank for easily.
Promotion is the second thing that most marketers struggle with or ignore altogether. Content is only valuable if you can get people or google to see it. Publishing a new piece is just the halfway point of any content campaign. Promoting it is the other 50% of the equation. For content to be useful it either needs to drive traffic or drive your site’s authority. So either you need to rank well for competitive KWs to drive traffic from search, it needs to have some virality to drive traffic from social, or it needs to boost your whole site’s authority by driving backlinks from other authoritative sites. These are all somewhat tied together really, by getting authoritative links to a piece it will rank better and have a better chance at driving more traffic. Unfortunately, most marketing folks in the SMB world consider content to be done once it’s published on the site and a tweet announcing it’s live has gone out. That’s just not enough in 2019, as a marketer you really need to be promoting your content to get noticed and to make a difference in your business.
Share 1 success you have had with a content marketing strategy.
I think content is crucial to building a long term organic traffic strategy and I’d say that creating newsworthy content within your vertical has been a real success for us here at RunRepeat. We aim to create unique content based on data that shows changing trends within the products and topics we cover. Because of the content’s newsworthiness, we’ve had success ranking well for our pieces for competitive keywords and in garnering mentions and links from other authoritative sites. In the end, creating boilerplate content won’t set you apart, you need to create something new and innovative every time, and that’s what we strive to do here.
2. Shakun Bansal, Head of Marketing at Mercer | Mettl
Could you please share your input on the top 2 content marketing pain points?
Measuring the Success of Content Pieces: When we started leveraging content marketing collaterals to generate the balance between creative as well as business value, we were sure our thought leadership pieces were useful in creating interest, fulfilling market demands. But we could never put our heads around how to measure the success of our thought leadership pieces like industry report, insightful survey, and ebooks and it still remains a sticky point for us. We figured out that we were generating brand awareness and recognition but how could we say eventually that we did do it has been a pain point for us.
The Alignment of Content with the Product and Sales Team Expectations: The content marketing team does its best in bringing out the best features of our products but doesn’t find consonance with the sales and product teams’ understanding of their client’s needs and product characteristics respectively. This lacuna can have a negative effect on the success of the content strategy and customer acquisition process.
Share 1 success you have had with a content marketing strategy.
Our media outreach has been successful with HARO onboard and we have found a space for our brand in reputed publications like Thrive Global, SHRM, Forbes, Medium, Entrepreneur, Business, and other such highly acclaimed magazines. It has bolstered our brand’s footing in HR, assessments, and future-ready technological advancements in the talent management space.
3. Daniela Andreevska, Marketing Director at Mashvisor
Could you please share your input on the top 2 content marketing pain points?
Our two main content marketing points have been:
- Finding talented content writers. In the past few years, we have developed very specific requirements for our blogs in terms of focus keywords, the general use of keywords, length, internal and external linking, CTAs, visuals, and others. We have tested these criteria and proven that they work. However, one of our biggest challenges in terms of content marketing has been finding talented content writers who can produce content of the expected quality, following the guidelines set up by us.
- Providing unique content with high value to our users. As you can imagine, there are thousands of websites which create content related to real estate investing, which makes it really difficult to write new, fresh, unique content which has not been written about before.
Share 1 success you have had with a content marketing strategy.
We have developed our own content marketing strategy, based on our experience as well as thorough research and best practices. We have a diverse content marketing team comprised of a few full-time content writers and 10-15 freelance writers with different educational backgrounds, experiences, and expertise to cover the various aspects of real estate investing. We have been able to add real value for real estate investors in our blogs by incorporating our own real estate data and analysis, which is our major competitive advantage. Our success is proven by the fact that more than 75% of the traffic to our website comes organically.
4. Drew Cohen, Senior Marketing Strategist at SmartBug Media
Could you please share your input on the top 2 content marketing pain points?
The top 2 marketing pain points I run into with small and medium business leaders are issues with low organic traffic and an inability to create content (due to lack of resources or lack of direction). Typically, these two pain points have a very deep connection, and addressing one certainly can help address the other. Quite frequently, I hear We don’t have anyone to produce content, and the fact of the matter is that most organizations need to take a step back and look at their strategy. A Content Marketer is not the only individual who can produce excellent website content, blog content, and premium pieces such as ebooks and infographics. Whether you have talent in sales, marketing or operations, key content starts with knowing your business, and just as importantly, knowing your personas. Maybe you’re struggling with ideas for blog content? Begin with interviewing a member of your in-house team about the most common customer pain points.
Share 1 success you have had with a content marketing strategy.
Transcribed interviews are a great way to produce content that your audience may find interesting. You can also look to previous pieces of content and repurpose them. For example, if you’ve created one-pager sales sheets in the past or have brochures, consider packaging together with your Top 5 [Insert Industry Here] Products For 2019 and listing out the products, its application, and how the market finds value in it. The key here is being creative, and it doesn’t take a journalism background to create relevant content. Over time, this consistent production of content will likely lead to an increase in organic traffic.
5. Reuben Yonatan, Founder, and CEO of GetVOIP
Could you please share your input on the top 2 content marketing pain points?
We’re in a very niche environment, so it’s not always easy to generate sexy content that others want to share. Another challenge for us finding writers who are able to speak to our customers’ needs, since it’s a service that not everyone is familiar with.
Share 1 success you have had with a content marketing strategy.
Lucky, we’ve had a lot of success generating infographics related to industry trends that others find great value in. This has increased our backlink portfolio and organic traffic tremendously. We hit upon a literal gold mine of a solution one day: we created an easy to fill out a form for our viewers. To date, we’ve logged over 20,000 unique customer reviews – that has been and continues to be a huge keyword-rich boost to our SERP rankings and organic traffic!
6. Kenneth Burke, Director of Marketing at Text Request
Could you please share your input on the top 2 content marketing pain points?
Top Pain Point: Proving results We create content specifically for organic search / SEO, and that’s a long-term play any way you spin it. Leadership always wants to see that what you’re spending time on is producing results, but it takes 6-9 months to see results from organic content, and what you do get are often indirect. The solution is to track as much as you can. E.g. You’ve been creating X blog posts per month for Y months. Show how much organic search has increased over that time, how many organic leads and sales you’ve gotten over that time, and any actions taken specifically from your content (a lot of the progress will show in organic traffic to your homepage).
Secondary Pain Point: Creating high-quality content consistently.
Anyone can create a blog post, but the content’s only going to work for you if you create pieces that are far superior to what anyone else is creating. That’s how you stand out and right high organically. The trouble is most SMBs have a very small marketing team (1-5 people), and it’s hard to find 10+ hours to invest in a single piece of content – even though that time can produce exponentially valuable results.
Share 1 success you have had with a content marketing strategy.
Our organic search traffic keeps doubling year over year, which has a substantial impact on our leads, sales, and creating other opportunities.
7. Vanessa Perplies, Content Lead at Workiz
Could you please share your input on the top 2 content marketing pain points?
As someone who has almost 10 years experience working as a Marketing Writer for SaaS companies with Enterprise/Corporate customers like Sisense, SysAid and more, it was challenging for me to write for SMB clients.
Why? The tried and true content formats in traditional B2B marketing like case studies, white papers, ebooks, and newsletters just didn’t work for us in SMB marketing. While our open rates would be good, our CTRs would be low. The engagement was suffering and our small business customers (primarily home service businesses like HVAC, plumbing, locksmith, carpet cleaning, etc. businesses) weren’t responding.
Share 1 success you have had with a content marketing strategy.
Video, video, video. Try experimenting with different formats. The second biggest search engine is Youtube and we found out through A/B testing that our customers EAT UP videos. It’s literally turned into our marketing secret weapon. No joke, the CTR for our video newsletter (a 1-minute 30-second newsletter) had a CTR that was x8 than our traditional written newsletter.
We were shocked. Gobsmacked even.
So we were onto something. Since this first test, we’ve tested this theory quite a few times. The fact of the matter is, many of our customers do not have the time or patience to read. Since then, we’ve created in-product walk-throughs and tours using video, monthly customer newsletters, focused more heavy-handedly on webinars, video testimonials. Overall our video formats outpace our written tests by x6.
Sometimes, it’s about the format – not the message.
8. Saloni Doshi, Owner, and CEO of EcoEnclose
Could you please share your input on the top 2 content marketing pain points?
Our business serves a very specific niche. We need to be hyper-focused with our content marketing and sometimes that can be challenging. We’ve had to be very creative in order to reach wider audiences.
A fair amount of our content is product related. We have to toe a line between being self-promotional while helping to elucidate how our products serve our larger mission – which is what our customers care most about.
Share 1 success you have had with a content marketing strategy.
We learned to take advantage of timing our content to coincide with events and news that are directly related to our niche. For example, we wrote up a piece that touches on a UN report that came out last week and that gave us a lot of promotional angles.
9. Jordan Brannon, President of Coalition Technologies
Could you please share your input on the top 2 content marketing pain points?
Based on my experiences, the two main content marketing pain points are having gaps in content and not getting content in front of the right audience.
Share 1 success you have had with a content marketing strategy.
One successful content strategy that comes to mind is one I worked on for Trumpet & Horn. We worked on content creation to fill in gaps on their site and got their content to the right audience using keyword optimization and link building initiatives designed to promote brand awareness.
10. Hamna Amjad, Content Marketing Executive at Gigworker
Could you please share your input on the top 2 content marketing pain points?
The two biggest pain points of content marketing are:
1: Not understanding your audience well
If you don’t know your audience well, there are very slim chances that your content will resonate with them. Your content marketing strategy is a big failure if your content is disliked by your readers – doesn’t matter if it’s quality content or how much effort you put in. Your first step should be to get to know your audience better.
2: Not figuring out the right marketing channels
Choosing the wrong channels means your content won’t get in front of your audience. Find out the channels which your target audience prefers! Your content marketing strategy efforts and budget should be spent 20% on content creation and 80% on content distribution and promotion.
Share 1 success you have had with a content marketing strategy.
The content marketing strategy that has worked for us:
-Create intelligent content that is relevant to our audience and robust. We make sure that our content is structurally rich so that it can easily be repurposed for different channels. So, instead of producing content for different channels from scratch, we are able to adapt the same content across various devices and in various contexts.
– We always stay proactive to keep up with the ever-changing trends. We monitor trends using trend monitoring tools and by finding out the popular hashtags. After figuring out what our customers are talking about and what their current interests are, we produce content on those topics.
– We use multiple channels for content promotion. This has helped in increasing our brand’s reach. Creating and using intelligent content makes it easy for us to handle multiple channels at once as we reuse the same content in different ways.
Results?
- Links/mentions for GigWorker from the likes of HR.com, MerlineOne, and Business2Community. We have yet to see a sharp increase in our organic traffic but within only 2 months or so, we have earned over unique backlinks from over 150 referring domains apart from a continuous improvement in our DR and UR.
- We have used the same strategy for our partner site Ridester.com to get its traffic from 0 to 1.5 Million unique monthly visitors (within 12 months).
11. Jason Lavis, Partner & Webmaster at Drillers
Could you please share your input on the top 2 content marketing pain points?
In almost every niche that I’ve seen, high volume keywords get dominated by long-term authority websites, that are extremely hard to compete against. The decision on whether to target these ‘glory keywords’ depends on your available budget, and whether your company is genuinely disruptive or newsworthy. In most cases, the best keywords should be avoided.
The other pain point that comes up, again and again, is the fact that ‘money keywords’ attract black hats and spammers. Any keywords that have ‘best’, ‘cheap’, ‘review’ and similar words, will have professional internet marketers who will use short cuts and tactics to game the search engine ranking algorithms. It’s common to see the first page full of pages that have PBN links, automated spam and paid links. Google fights this, but new sites seem to pop up at the same speed as others get de-indexed or penalized. Legitimate small to medium sized business owners often struggle with this.
Share 1 success you have had with a content marketing strategy.
Drillers.com was established in 1996, and has stayed online ever since. Until 2017, it never had a blog. We started a blog, and traffic has grown from around 2000 monthly page views to 30,000. We only post a few times a month, and some months not at all due to other business operations taking priority. Interestingly, we often rank with few or no links to the specific ranking pages. The lesson here, is for any business owners that have an established website, with plenty of homepage links – create a blog, traffic might increase easier than you expect.
12. Kristen Scheve, Founder of The Table Agency and the CMO at AngelHack
Could you please share your input on the top 2 content marketing pain points?
The biggest pain point that Small and Medium Businesses have to overcome is being able to stand out in a sea of digital content. Typically, SMBs have fewer resources to build and execute their campaigns and struggle to be seen by large audiences.
Another pain point SMBs face is deciding on which channels and tools to use. By having a smaller budget and bandwidth, SMBs have to be strategic in which marketing channels they adopt; however, there’s not always a clear answer of what will show the strongest results while also being the most cost effective.
Share 1 success you have had with a content marketing strategy.
Luckily for Small and Medium Businesses, we’re in an era of targeted marketing. Instead of casting a wide net and trying to be on every platform, it’s easier than ever to stand out in a crowd by focusing on audience-specific strategies. I worked with a small firm that found great success in focusing on their email marketing list over social media platforms. By segmenting their list, and offering unique deals dependant on the consumer’s habits, they saw both higher conversions and leads.
Another success I’ve experienced is around guest blogging. Instead of focusing all of their money and energy into purchasing keywords against competitors who had more resources, a startup I consulted focused on finding the right partnerships. By offering to write guest content on someone else’s blog you can build a new content relationship, gain backlink authority, and reach a new audience.
13. Chris Stasiuk, Founder and Creative Director at Signature Video Group
Could you please share your input on the top 2 content marketing pain points?
One pain point that content marketers often find themselves tackling is their audience’s rate of consumption. So often, consumers are so overwhelmed with information overload online, so unless your content stands out visually in some way, they will likely just skim over it. A second pain point is the lack of metrics on how your content is being consumed. We can see if someone clicked on a link or even get insight on how much time they spent on the page, but it’s difficult to understand how the content is being engaged with on a deeper level.
Share 1 success you have had with a content marketing strategy.
To make your content stand out, don’t just stop at changing font sizes, eye-catching colours, or appealing words — consider tailoring your content to tell a story through video instead. Video content is much more engaging and has higher retention rates than text copy. Video is also much more measurable than static content. Marketers can get a deep insight into exactly how each visitor watched a video. For instance, they can see is viewers paused, rewinded, rewatched, and more.
14. Steve Kurniawan, Content marketing and growth strategist at Nine Peaks Media.
Could you please share your input on the top 2 content marketing pain points?
In my opinion, the top 2 pain points of content marketing are:
- Not understanding your audience – A significant portion of content marketing is figuring out your audience’s behavior, needs, and problems. This way, our content can provide a relevant solution for their specific issue, or provide solutions for their needs. The idea behind this is fairly obvious, but it is often easier said than done. First, figuring out your audience accurately can be difficult, even with all the available modern analytics tools. Second, the audience themselves are rapidly changing thanks to today’s fast-paced environment. Overcoming this pain point will require a thorough market research, proactive conversations with the audience, and the ability to analyze data.
- Promoting your content – Most people know how to develop a relevant content: find the relevant keywords with a manageable competition, research other content pieces covering the keyword, and develop a unique content that is better than the others. However, no matter how good your content is, it won’t bring value unless there are people (and a lot of them) consuming it. Too many times content marketers are focusing on the development process while the promotion is just as, if not even more important. Obviously, the best way to promote your content is through SEO to increase its visibility on the search engine. However, SEO itself relied on getting more backlinks, which require promoting your content on other channels from building relationships with influencers/media to social media to email marketing. So, we should promote our content with two main aims: getting organic traffic to the content and getting these valuable backlinks—which in turn will boost your SEO results and also produce more traffic. This will create a sustainable, long-term source of traffic for each piece of content.
Share 1 success you have had with a content marketing strategy.
We have successfully placed some of our content pieces on the first page of Google, producing a sustainable traffic source for our site. Our main idea is to treat each content piece as a landing page, where we develop a promotion strategy for each page and aim to get more quality backlinks through various means (guest posting, influencer/media outreach, etc.).
15. Morgan Lathaen, Marketing & Brand Coordinator at Thumbprint
Could you please share your input on the top 2 content marketing pain points?
The number one content marketing pain point is not understanding your audience. If you are creating high-quality work and it isn’t resonating with the audience it could be because you’ve miscalculated your audience. Maybe you don’t know your audience as well as you think you do. The best way to get to know your audience is to talk to them. Ask questions and figure out what it is that they are looking for as well as their content habits.
Measuring and adjusting is the second marketing pain point. Nothing is every perfect and you will always have to make adjustments. Look at the data and make some tweaks. Overall, don’t be afraid to experiment!
Share 1 success you have had with a content marketing strategy.
The biggest success we’ve had with content marketing strategy is giveaways/contests. Everybody wants free stuff! We receive the most engagement on days we post contests or giveaways because nobody is going to turn down the possibility of winning something for free!
16. Ryan Gerardi, Founder, and CEO of AutoConversion, LLC
Could you please share your input on the top 2 content marketing pain points?
Our two top content marketing pain points are:
- Scaling media production
- Organizing pursuing leads and opportunities
Both of these functions require skill, experience, and time. More specifically – excellent soft skills and niche industry experience. Because of this, personnel is expensive and requires sound training, development, and leadership.
Share 1 success you have had with a content marketing strategy.
One big success with our content marketing strategy is that it opens so many doors for us. We are constantly driving new relationships and adding continual value for existing ones.
I find that most B2B companies misunderstand the nature of content marketing today. They approach it in outdated ways, spending time, money, and resources on generating measuring metrics such as reach, impressions, CTA, etc. They miss the whole point, that business is fueled by quality relationships. An effective content marketing strategy should be measured by its ability to do just that.
17. Anastasia Iliou, Senior Content Manager at Medicare Plan Finder.
Could you please share your input on the top 2 content marketing pain points?
The biggest content marketing pain points are figuring out the most cost-effective way to produce enough content and fighting the battle between quality and quantity. For most organizations, it can actually be more cost-effective to hire an in-house writer than to assign various freelance projects. An in-house writer can not only write all of your marketing content but can also manage your SEO and digital marketing efforts. There’s more work involved in content marketing than most businesses think.
Additionally, your organization needs to find the balance between producing enough up-to-date content to become a reputable source and taking the time to produce high-quality content.
Share 1 success you have had with a content marketing strategy.
Sometimes the best way to do this is to start by spending a year or so publishing several pieces of relevant content and then going back and constantly updating and improving your content over time. That way, it’s out there and Google knows that you have a lot of great things to say, but you can constantly make it better. We’ve had a lot of SEO success with our content update strategy just by taking an hour or so each day to add better, more up-to-date content to pre-existing pieces.
18. Rahul Alim, Founder of Custom Creatives
Could you please share your input on the top 2 content marketing pain points?
Two major pain points I had about creating content, and now hear from many other marketers are:
- I don’t know what to say
- I don’t know what formats to use
Everyone may want to be the next Gary Vee and pump out content at will, but he also started with nothing.
Share 1 success you have had with a content marketing strategy.
The best advice I can give is to learn to talk about the problems you solve for your target audience. Start with longer forms of video as if you’re talking to a friend. Then break down the long form video into other formats like an audio file for a podcast, a transcription for a blog, a pdf for a download, smaller nuggets of video for social video to create more volume and awareness of your brand.
The way to start is to write down topics by either knowing your audience well enough, asking your audience or looking in groups for questions and answering them yourself.
You can do a full month or more of content in a single day if you plan it out well enough.
19. Dene Menzel, Creative Director at Branthem Creative
Could you please share your input on the top 2 content marketing pain points?
Rebranding a business is a very big decision at any point in a business lifespan. The bigger the brand, the bigger the ship to change direction smoothly.
Two of the biggest content marketing pain points we have observed with brands that have rebranded are:
- Initial Confusion Of the Brand and
- Negative Engagement towards the New Brand.
After all, people like what they know and they know what they like – and social media freedom of opinion can be quite unforgiving to brands who don’t have a content marketing strategy in place prior to a rebrand.
Share 1 success you have had with a content marketing strategy.
For our brand, and we ourselves did experience a major rebrand last year, we found that the best marketing strategy for us our signature brand anthem which we had created in the early stages of our business. Our Brand Anthem accompanied everything from our online content to our offline content, and people recognized us as much from our sound, as our logo. This gave our content consistency across all our channels and platforms, so that even during a major rebrand, as our Brand Anthem did not need to be changed, our audiences could ‘hear’ that we are still the same business – just a new name and logo, eliminating any confusion to our audiences. With that we found, we were able to achieve 100% positive audience engagement over the entire rebranding process.
20. Bryan Pattman, SEO Analyst at 9Sail
Could you please share your input on the top 2 content marketing pain points?
There are two content marketing pain points that we run into. The first is deciding whether it is better to create content for other websites to gain publicity and backlinks or post on your own website. The second is figuring out what channels we are going to utilize to push the great content that we create. We want to be using our time and energy efficiently to get results, so these two areas are always going to be a tough decision to make.
Share 1 success you have had with a content marketing strategy.
We have seen multiple great successes in content marketing. We utilize content marketing for all of our clients and we have been able to see large growth in organic traffic for all of them. The saying content is king is still true today and will be for years to come. We created a case study around a hyper-local SEO strategy that we implemented for a personal injury attorney that you can see at our website.
21. Roxanne Williams, Marketing Director at Full Stack Talent
Could you please share your input on the top 2 content marketing pain points?
Being a small staffing agency in an oversaturated market has been a major pain point for our company. We’re mainly focused on tech staffing, so my content strategy has been twofold: focus both on tech content, and on career advice. Mixing those 2 together allowed me to write a very niche piece: the Top 10 Tech Companies to Work For in Tampa. This piece ranks #1 on Google for multiple keywords, and Top 10 for many more. In fact, a large chunk of our traffic has come from that post. It stays relevant since I update it for the year, and it has a ton of good information when it comes to benefits.
Our other pain point has been not having a budget for ads.
Share 1 success you have had with a content marketing strategy.
As such, all our traffic is organic. When you SEO your site content properly and write informative long-form content, that helps rankings drastically. If your site runs on WordPress, get an all-in-one SEO plugin, such as Yoast, to help you with content SEO and readability. I’d also recommend using a tool like Moz to do keyword research when you’re plotting out article ideas, so you don’t waste time writing content that won’t be searched for.
22. Ulysis Cababan, Content Strategist at RapidVisa
Could you please share your input on the top 2 content marketing pain points?
To share what I think the top 2 content marketing pain points are:
- Content does not get enough audience or not getting the right audience.
- Measuring and adjusting the tactics.
Share 1 success you have had with a content marketing strategy.
The one success we had with content marketing in our business is that it is important to listen to the audience and know what they are searching for so as to create the right content that will lead to success in every content published.
23. Jeremy Ong, owner of HUSTLR
Could you please share your input on the top 2 content marketing pain points?
1) Producing Epic Content – I am a firm believer that content should not be just good, content should be epic. This is an expensive process so we typically only invest in content around evergreen topics.
2) Content Distribution – All content production efforts should be paired with at least the same amount (if not more) of distribution. While we also repurpose content into multiple other formats (podcast, YouTube, LinkedIn, Instagram), small businesses usually have weaker social media profiles so it’s not very impactful. On the other hand, manually cold email-ing for links and mentions is not a scalable strategy. Therefore, building a network as also extremely important for content distribution.
Share 1 success you have had with a content marketing strategy.
Lately, HUSTLR has been producing a ton of high value and high impact content. We then use Ahrefs to identify websites in our industry and then use Mailshake to conduct outreach campaigns at scale. We’ve had a lot of success from the mentions and backlinks. As a result, our SEO has improved leaps and bounds.
24. Daisy Campbell, from CANZ Marketing
Could you please share your input on the top 2 content marketing pain points?
The two main pain points to target when making a content marketing strategy are:
- Brainstorming the Idea
- Choosing the Type of Content to Create.
1. Brainstorming the idea – This phase includes you coming up with the topics to write about. this is the most crucial and important stage of them all. Thinking about your audience, what they would want to read about what direction should the content be headed towards. These are some questions that should be answered earlier on to avoid issues in the near future. Creating mind maps, personas anything that would help understand the audience better would work in this stage the deeper you go into the mind of your consumer the better.
2. Content Type – Once you have figured out what you would want to talk about, it is time to decide on what content type would be best to convey that information precisely and effectively.
There are a lot of content types each with their own Pros and Cons. You might want to write a blog for most parts because that is the easiest to produce but considering video and podcasts are also important they tend to bring in better results and a new perspective to your audience.
Other forms of content to decide from are:
- Blog Posts
- Ebooks
- Case Studies
- Templates
- Infographics
- Videos
- Podcasts
It solely depends on your business what content type would suit your business the best. experimenting with a new form of content would help one understand better what works and what doesn’t.
Share 1 success you have had with a content marketing strategy.
We have found success with these strategies in the past and we used video to create brand awareness for our firm that allowed for better results and a happy customer. Mainly we were targeting the stories of Instagram and Facebook which have produced great awareness campaigns.
25. Boni Satani, Digital Marketing Manager at Zestard Technologies
Could you please share your input on the top 2 content marketing pain points?
In today’s digital era, content marketing has become one of the key goals of B2B marketing. It is an excellent tactic for lead generation, building brand awareness, and increasing website traffic.
However, there are a few content marketing pain points:
– Content Without a Plan: For Content Marketing, the strategy is the foremost thing. Creating content without a plan, target less audience and non-relevancy would be directionless marketing. According to content marketing institute, 92% of marketers value content for business, while only 46% can manage according to the strategy. Creating content consistently is also essential.
– Type of Content: Usually, people emotionally more connect with the visual content than the plain texts. Along with the images in content, infographic and video content would also be useful for reaching out to the people. While adding images in the content, make sure you have well optimized your images for a google search by adding image caption with a relevant keyword.
Share 1 success you have had with a content marketing strategy.
High-value content: The more value you give while writing content, the more you get in return. There are a few points which I would like to mention that offer your content high value.
- Actionable Content: The audience knows well how to implement something that you covered in your article. This is why it is vital to break things down into step-by-step procedures making the audience engrossed with the content.
- New stuff: Sometimes, there is some value in repeating your message on specific topics as all readers do not understand it or implement it the first time. However, every bit of content should have at least one or two new tactics, facts, findings, etc. as most audiences put a high value on learning new things.
- Impressive Design and Readability: You must prefer to make all blog content highly readable, including images, picking large font sizes, formatting clearly, and minimizing distractions.
- Quality over the Quantity: Most of the people believe that the quantity of the contents helps in boosting traffic, ranking, generating lead and building the reach-out to the audience. However, instead of going for quantity, the quality of the content should be taken into consideration. Your content should be unique, original and understandable for your audience.
Cover image credit: Freepik