Top 7 challenges in content marketing faced by marketers

To help you navigate the do’s and the don'ts, we’ve compiled the top 7 content marketing challenges and how to overcome them:

1. Failing to create relevant and engaging content

One of the main purposes of content marketing is to attract and engage your target audience. Creating relevant content is imperative for a successful content marketing strategy. Without it, prospective customers won’t be able to find your products and services when they’re searching online. Plus, if your content’s not related to their search, they’re not going to stick around. They also won’t be inclined to read your content if it’s not related to what they’re searching for. 

So, if your content isn’t relevant or engaging, customers won’t be intrigued or appealed by what you offer. This leads to poor business growth and a lower chance of building customer loyalty.

However, although it’s not easy, you can produce high-quality content if you put your mind to it. It’s more likely that your audience will engage with content that stands out from the crowd on the search results page, so it’s beneficial to consider what would stand out to you if you were a customer. Just remember to write content that is relevant to the services and products you offer and which helps searchers to answer whatever it was they were searching for! Curating a team of creative experts or hiring an external agency to produce original content is another option. 

Additionally, ensuring your content is up-to-date and provides useful information that your customers would read is a simple but essential aspect of a successful content marketing campaign.

2. Not knowing what your target audience wants

It’s one thing to produce compelling content, but it’s another to ensure your content targets the right audience. If you don’t know what your target audience wants, you can’t create content that truly interests them. This means that you’ll struggle to rank highly in the search engine results. We know you’re not a mind reader, so how do you actually discover what your audience is looking for?

A good starting point is looking at what your competitors are doing. What are they doing well? Where is their content falling short? By examining their strengths and weaknesses or their strategy, you can determine what customers are engaging with within your marketplace. This will help you determine the direction your content strategy should take to push your business towards relevant engagement.

Additionally, your content should aim to target customers at every stage of their buyer journey. You should focus your content on engaging with new customers,, customers at the buying phase, as well as appealing to returning customers. Content should aim to appeal to customers at all stages of the marketing funnel.

3. Not producing enough content

If you don’t produce enough content, your business and its image lose the consistency that customers value. Producing content consistently is difficult to maintain because it can be time-consuming, especially when you don’t harness the appropriate resources or expertise. 

A valuable way to overcome this challenge is by creating a clear content plan. Not only will this maintain an element of organisation, but it will reveal where there are gaps in your content and where there’s room for improvement. It’ll be easier for you to track the content that performs well. And by setting content marketing goals, you can work towards them with confidence rather than creating content for the sake of it and with no direction.

As mentioned previously, if you can’t create your own content marketing team, appointing an external agency or freelancers is a good solution. This would allow you to focus on other aspects of your business while knowing your content marketing is in safe hands.

4. Not knowing which medium to produce content for

With such a plethora of social media sites and online platforms, it’s difficult to know which medium to produce content for. Ultimately, if you want to engage with your audience and generate brand awareness, you must be flexible and diverse with where you place your content.

Our top tip would be to focus on the platforms or channels that your customers use most. Once you’ve discovered your target audiences’ wants and habits, you’ll be curating content for them. So, if the general trend shows that most engagement occurs through blog posts, then prioritise blog content!

Remember: the key aspect of great content marketing is ensuring you’re creating high-quality content, no matter where your content is placed.

5. Not knowing how well your content is working

If you don’t have the correct tools to track engagement and purchases, then it’s difficult to understand which content is making an impact and which isn’t. Blindly creating content, whether it’s high-quality or not, is a dangerous use of time and resources! If you don’t know how well a piece of content has performed, then you can’t adapt and tailor your future content to ensure success.

It’s therefore important to have some way of measuring your success, for example, by recognising your KPIs (Key Performance Indicators). Measuring data and analytics will help to push your business in the direction it needs to ensure growth and relevant engagement.

By setting defined goals that can be measured, your content team will be able to work towards achieving those goals and amend aspects where necessary. For content marketing campaigns, the more knowledge and involvement you have, the better.

Useful tools to help you out include: Google Analytics, Youtube Analytics, Hootsuite, SEMRrush and, Databox.

6. Content not being seen by your target audience

Nine out of ten published blog pages never receive any search traffic, hence why it’s so important to ensure your content is optimised to generate relevant traffic.

Search Engine Optimisation, otherwise known as SEO, is a key aspect of successful content marketing. Here are the main things to consider:

• Keyword research: Engaging with keyword research will reveal what phrases prospective customers are searching for and which phrases generate the most search traffic. By utilising these keywords and producing content that targets gaps in the market, your content will be able to rank higher in the search engines.
• Backlinks: Other sites backlinking to yours means Google will trust your site. This will ultimately increase your search ranking, making your business more visible to customers and individuals searching for what you offer!

7. Not seeing immediate results 

After putting so much effort into producing content, of coursecours,e you want to be able to see positive results. This can sometimes take weeks or even months to show. But it’s more important that you have good-quality, engaging content online rather than rushed, irrelevant content that won’t ever make a difference. 

It’s easy to become disheartened, but trust in the slow content marketing process and you WILL start to see results if you do it correctly!

There are no shortcuts that can be taken in creating a successful content marketing strategy. High-quality, engaging content that uses keyword research and considers its audience is the content that will receive the best results. The suggestions above work in tandem with one another because content marketing is made up of a web of elements that rely on each other; it’s rare one will work without another.

At Logica Digital, we provide free audits for businesses like yours! Our team are experts at content creation and our content marketing skills are unmatched. For a free audit please contact our team on hello@logica-digital.co.uk.