The challenges of content marketing

Content creation practices are under constant pressure to perform and deliver to meet sales targets, says Nick Durrant, digital managing director at Bluegrass Digital. Here, he provides his insights.

Although the biggest factor to achieve a return on investment (ROI) is content personalisation, the challenge for marketers is to create content that turns heads.

Eighty-nine percent of the most successful B2B organisations are very committed to content marketing, and it is no surprise that 62% of those successful B2B companies have a documented content marketing strategy.

After all, there is little reason to create brand assets – whitepapers, articles, blogs, infographics, videos, etc. – if audiences are not defined, goals are not mapped and topics are not based on demand.

Why is content marketing so popular with businesses?

The decoupling of marketing from other parts of organisations has caused silos in business goals. While IT typically has the goal of managing and maintaining a stable online platform, marketing has the goal of creating a sales pipeline or generating brand interest.

This content is continually pushed to be cutting-edge, relevant and timely. Marketers are fighting for their jobs, and their job is to create relevancy for their brand by creating demand.

The problem here is that content groups often don’t have the time or structure to slow down and make sure their content strategy aligns with the rest of the organisation. The question is whether content creation will slow down or keep increasing. This process will continue to get faster and more frantic.

The expectations of communication channels like social media and efficient content creation platforms are that marketing teams can publish as fast as possible. Paired with these expectations, marketers will continue to feel the burden of working at the speed of urgency.

The speed at which marketing organisations work is unsustainable

Marketers traditionally think and work in a vacuum because businesses do not have the infrastructure or place the importance on broad network thinking. This devalues the success of the content they create as it lacks the overall strategy component that is essential to organisational success.

More importantly, they are not given the tools to communicate and share insights properly to influence their content practice. Marketers often have their own disconnected set of tools they work with to create content.

If technology is not integrated with the rest of the technology stack, issues can easily arise. Typically with acquisitions, organisations will use various marketing automation platforms and CRMs between many marketing teams under one umbrella. This normally leads to many horror stories of dead-end landing pages, failed outreach campaigns and unmanaged email lists.

This is largely due to the tools not been synced across the organisation and a lack of commitment to fix the problem. The result? Many pointless emails to users and without much success, and a steady stream of complaints about the strategy – externally and internally.

The ownership of websites and digital content in the hands of IT

Marketers are tasked with creating stand-alone messaging through their own channels, and this separation creates confusion and misalignment.

However, there are specific elements that marketers can consider to determine whether their content creation practice is effective. They can help their practice by investing and connecting to their different departments through technology to align marketing goals with content publishing tactics.

They can also institute proper data practices and feedback loops to make sure that learnings and insights from different teams can be shared and applied to messaging practices.

Can marketers prove the ROI of their content practice?

A successful content strategy should focus on producing relevant content, not aiming for critical mass. By synthesising cross-team communication with effective attributable data practices, teams can do less work and produce more successful results.

ROI is more time for marketing teams to think critically and make decisions that resonate rather than reacting to deadlines. Additionally, by investing in technology that syncs with the organisation, marketers can eliminate redundant disconnected technologies that might only exist because of legacy decisions.

While re-platforming and integrations can cost money, this investment needs to be weighed against the value of continued business development and end goals. How much is technology costing organisations to be inefficient and ineffective?

Content creation needs to be driven by smart data practices

Marketing teams and content creators are tasked with telling great stories, but often these stories don’t ask the right question – what does the audience want to hear?

Data analytics and customer data platforms provide the tools to give a single source of customer journey, from offline business steps all the way through in-store purchase. The content team should be directly linked to these platforms to find key attributable data points to help drive future innovations.

Technology organisations will continue to develop machine-learning based platforms that can analyse customer journey trends and even go as far to suggest relevant content to publishers during the creation process based on business goals.

Technology will no longer be the deterrent to these business practices

Marketing teams will come to the table with IT departments to make investment decisions in platforms that can drive both teams’ interests.

This will mean the expectations of marketing and content publishers will rise – ease of connection to tools like personalisation and access to data platforms will be an expectation rather than on the wish list.

Content expectations will not go away; organisations will continue to work at the speed of information and expect their messaging to fall in line.

And as teams get better at using data to drive these decisions, innovation and responsiveness will move upward since the tools will empower teams to work faster and smarter.