5 Key Content Marketing Challenges (and How to Solve Them) Phone : ,

5 Key Content Marketing Challenges

(and How to Solve Them)

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Introduction

Content marketing isn’t easy, and you really shouldn’t trust anyone who tells you they can make it easy. We try to make it easy-er, but you are still going to need to put in a lot of hard work along the way if you are to be successful. And maybe that is a good thing; maybe that is part of the reason content marketing is resonating with marketers, not just their audiences.

THE CHALLENGES

The 5 Challenges

In this eBook we look at five key challenges faced by content marketers and offer solutions.

Getting everyone working together, understanding your strategy and how they contribute to it, is a multi-faceted problem. (Page 4)

Getting on the Same Page

Building a Strategic Framework

Your overall strategy can quickly veer off the rails if you’re reacting to what’s next instead of acting according to a plan. (Page 2)

Defining Priorities

What content is going to be the most effective and where do you need to allocate your scarce resources? (Page 3)

Integrating the Pieces

Managing your team across different systems and software can be a full time job that you don’t have time for. (Page 5)

Once you have successfully planned a content marketing strategy

WARNING! CONTENT MARKETING IS NOT EASY

CHALLENGE #1

Without a plan, your overall strategy can quickly begin to veer off the rails as you’re overwhelmed by requests for content and pressing deadlines. Having a content marketing framework in place will help you reliably plan what content to develop based on strategic objects such as themes and buyer personas.

BUILDING A FRAMEWORK THAT GUIDES ACTION

How to Build a Strategic Framework

for Content Marketing Success

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Start with Themes and Personas. Pull these strategic objects from your existing strategies, refine them if needed, and add new ones. This not only affects how you write in terms of Tone and Voice, but how you target your content to match what these Personas are looking for.to match what those

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Map your Themes and Personas to your Buyer Cycle. For support, use a tool that conforms to your processes, rather than having your processes conform to the tool. In Marketing.AI, our Customer Journey and Theme-Cycle GridTM _{are completely customizable to}

your specifications, providing a framework to guide your content planning.

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Create a vision for how your future Content Marketing Architecture will look. How will your audience progress through your Buyer Cycle, in the right order, via your content assets?

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Plan the resources you need to develop the content you’ve planned and build a realistic timeline for roll out.

A strong strategy is central to successful content marketing. At Marketing.AI we recognize your marketing expertise and have spent a lot of time creating our content marketing software framework to be completely customizable to how you want to work while gently guiding you to get the most out of the system’s features. After all, our software was developed by content marketers for content marketers.

THEMES

focus your content on logical groupings that you can cover off with meaningful level of intensity, instead of dissipating your efforts

in several unrelated directions.

PERSONAS

focus your content on whom this content should be

targeted to. What are their specific goals and objectives

versus another group of people?

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CHALLENGE #2

With so much to say, where do you start? Building out your strategy using a content marketing framework leads to identifying and defining your priorities for content creation. Mapping out your conversion architecture and performing a content audit helps you to take stock of the content you already have, and then identify the gaps that exist in your content. This serves as a springboard for you to begin prioritizing the content that needs to get created first.

DEFINING PRIORITIES FOR CREATING CONTENT

How to Prioritize The Creation of

Marketing Content

Start by identifying any content gaps you have via tools like the Theme-Cycle GridTM_.

Create ideas to fill your content gaps.

Identify your best ideas and schedule them into your Editorial Calendar for your team to start drafting.

Use measurement and optimization tools to identify current bottlenecks in your conversion architecture and quick win opportunities. Create new ideas to solve these problems and push the best ones to the Editorial Calendar as well.

At Marketing.AI we spend a lot of time thinking about how best to move from Strategy to Ideation to Execution and how to make that process as seamless as possible. This is why we put an Editorial Calendar with drag-and- drop capabilities at the center of the workflow. The Editorial Calendar tracks where you’ve been and where you’re going and allows you to add or edit strategy, ideas and drafts with just a couple of clicks. Like our Theme-Cycle GridTM_{, the calendar helps visually guide you to fill content gaps by date, theme and content type. In addition to}

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Keep a close eye on your vision and your trajectory for achieving it by creating reports and monitoring your analytics.

CHALLENGE #3

With your strategic framework in place and your content prioritized for development, how will you execute it? Getting your team together and working from the same strategy and to-do’s can be a time-consuming task for a content marketing manager. Your writers may use different operating systems, with varying word processing and drafting tools, resulting in inconsistent formatting. On top of their writing tools, your writers may be using different calendar applications to organize their workload (if they’re using calendars at all). Adding to the complexity, your writers may have never even met each other, let alone collaborated on brainstorming, ideation and content planning. Corralling all of these disparate elements and having them aligned around a singular vision (your strategy) can seem like an insurmountable task.

GETTING EVERYONE ON THE SAME PAGE

How to Get Everyone on the Same Page

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Document your strategic objects, such as Themes, Buyer Personas, _{and Buyer Cycle Stages in a central location.}

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Ensure your writers understand the objects and know how to use

them.

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For each piece of content you add to the Editorial Calendar, use the objects to define the context of each piece of content and the writing conventions that apply to it.

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Put an Editorial Calendar at the center of your content planning to make it easy for everyone to see what needs to be done.

This is why Marketing.AI allows you to create and store your strategic objects in the system for all team members to see and refer to when creating content. With these objects in place, Marketing.AI makes it easy to add your strategic context to each piece of content. To visualize your plan, we place the Editorial Calendar at the center of the workflow and provide color coded legends and dynamic filters to quickly and easily sort your content by those same objects.

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Create your workflows based on what’s planned in your Editorial Calendar and assign tasks to writers.

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As we noted in our last point, managing your team when they are using different systems and software can be quite difficult. From an internal standpoint there are also multiple systems you need to use, from your CMS to your different social media channels, to sales and support software. All of these different tools require content to engage and support your customers. Staying on top of creating content for each of these systems can cause some serious headaches. Once the content is ready, having to log in to each system and paste in your content to publish it is simply a waste of time. Having a central go-to point where you can plan out all of this content and publish directly to your channels will not only save you time, but will increase your ability to gain new business and grow existing engagements.

INTEGRATING THE DIFFERENT PIECES

How to Integrate Your Channels

Into a Repeatable Workflow

The marketing software landscape is a world where 1,000+ different vendors exist, and new social channels and startups are popping up every day. This means that no one solution will cover everything you may want or need. so it’s important to choose providers that are not just open to integrating and working with others, but actually devote significant time thinking about it. At Marketing.AI, we are always on the hunt for new integrations that we can add that will add value to the workflow for our customers and we listen especially closely to our customers’

CHALLENGE #4

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Determine your content mix and where that content will be housed. Before knowing all the tools you need to connect to, you first need to know what content types and channels you want to focus on. Determining your channels will dictate the kinds of content you need for each and how you want to connect content to them.

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Identify your marketing automation solution(s).

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Pick where you want the work to begin and end at different parts of your desired workflow. Which tasks are performed by which systems?

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Connect up all your systems so they work as if they were all one piece of software.

CHANNELS

are the publication channels through which you publish your content

such as: your blog, your social channels, your

community.

CONTENT TYPES

are the medium of your communications

such as: blog posts, social updates, emails, landing pages, images

and more.

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CHALLENGE #5

Once you have successfully planned a content marketing strategy and built up the team to execute on it, it can still be difficult to stay on top of it all. This applies equally to organizations taking the lead on their own content marketing and to agencies performing work for their clients. Where is the strategy we created? Is it accessible from within the workflow? How much work is getting done? How are the writers performing and how far along are they on the assigned work? Do they have additional capacity to take on more work, or are they struggling to keep up with current demands? Are we on track to meet our goals?

STAYING ON TRACK IN EXECUTING CONTENT

How to Stay on Track with Your Goals

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Make sure your strategic documents and guidelines are ever present. _{This might include Reference Documents such as Creative Briefs,}

Brand Standards, Writing Guidelines, Approved Claims and more.

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Track your progress in creating content that addresses your strategy. Look at your Theme-Cycle Grid to visualize this.

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Measure the efficiency of your production workflow in creating content that is aligned with strategy.

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Measure the effect your strategy is having on achieving your goals through analytics.

Marketing.AI’s cloud-based solution keeps your team on track, ensuring that all of your content creators are working in the same space, with access to the same information about the company. The entire Marketing.AI system is built to provide a content marketing framework that helps you build out an effective strategy, implement your strategy across content planning, assign content development to writers and other content creators, and monitor their progress along the way. To illustrate your success we provide analytics customized to your goals; this also helps you to continue to optimize your strategies and processes.

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Optimize your content and workflow processes to more efficiently achieve your strategic goals: try new ideas, switch up the order of your workflow, integrate new tools into your system, and more.

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Call us! 1-855-248-7377 Email us! [email protected] Tweet us! @marketingai

HOW TO GET IN TOUCH

It all sounds like a lot to keep on top of doesn’t it? Thankfully, Marketing.AI provides solutions to all of the above-mentioned problems.

To fi nd out more about how you can overcome these content marketing challenges:

CLICK HERE TO SIGN UP FOR A FREE TRIAL

TAKE THE NEXT STEP

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