Six Pivots to Step Up Your Content Marketing Game

When combing through surveys, studies, and articles, one gets the picture that people are struggling to make changes to how they use content marketing, but their struggles are paying off. When building support for content marketing becomes a business imperative, I suggest presenting these challenges with a positive spin. They are items that can limit a company’s potential or increase risk but instead represent a tremendous opportunity to embrace an important differentiator that influences customer experience, helps drive value and can achieve new levels of revenue growth.

Here are six hard problems organizations face, which can be pivoted to become six positive ways content marketing can help to step-up your game.

1. Slow to adapt and react to new competitive realities

Content marketing can be utilized not only for a company to engage clients, but can also be a way for a company to engage employees with market dynamics, customer needs, competing alternatives, and prevailing opinions that drive behavior. It is an interactive process that takes time to build and streamline, so just getting started is of critical importance.

In CMI’s 2018 study, only 12% of respondents felt successful at their current efforts to strategically manage content. While this can mean many things, it certainly is a relative measure of the company’s ability to respond to market realities being shaped by changing customer needs, competing alternatives, or both. Being proactive is key.

2. ROI and connection to revenue growth not understood

59% of content professionals surveyed by CMI say their organization experienced a positive ROI from deploying content management strategically. ROI is notoriously difficult to calculate because of the indirect nature of content marketing, but if companies don’t invest in technologies and processes necessary to increase the value of content over time, they increase the risk of being displaced by companies that do. There is an opportunity cost of not using content and digital marketing to achieve desired results.

Studies show the majority of businesses are achieving positive returns from their investments, so if generating meaningful content is a low priority, it can also mean that senior leadership is simply unaware of the benefits content marketing contribute, the risks that exist, or the massive change occurring in how people use online content to learn and make decisions.

3. Ad-hoc processes, undocumented strategy, and scalability

95% of the CMI survey respondents said that their content marketing is a lot of manual work, or they do things on an ad-hoc basis, which detracts from quality, consistency, and scalability. Solving this problem takes an investment in at least a Proof of Concept implementation of resources, processes and technology platforms that help streamline capabilities, drive the process, and get more return from the investment.

It may not be easy at first, but companies that want to begin climbing the experience curve can benefit immensely from taking a calculated plunge. This means funding testing, deployment, and scaling of content marketing with more automated capabilities, formal processes and committed process owners.

4. Inconsistent messaging and content flow

Segmentation helps you clearly define who your best target customers are, what you want them to do (such as sign up for a newsletter or subscribe to a service) and what benefits they will achieve. When core content publishing is not aligned to segmentation, messaging will not be as effective and much less likely to reach intended audiences. If customers, partners, and internal resources are generating content without a content strategy to influence publishing plans (e.g., timing, messaging and channels), then confusing and competing messages are more likely to occur.  

One study published in the Harvard Business Review showed that 40% of senior executives had not used market segmentation in the past two years. One of the best ways to align content generation and publishing strategy is through the use of buyer personas, which is a way to bring the needs of customer segments to life. Deploying a well-crafted content marketing strategy gives you the ability to clarify segmentation and buyer personas. This, in turn, helps you structure, organize and better control how content is used to achieve business goals.

5. Siloed content and technology

Studies show that content professionals often face problems quickly and easily accessing and managing content across the organization. More than half of the 2018 CMI survey respondents (51%) say their organization has not yet acquired the right technology to manage content across the organization. 44% say they can rarely/never repurpose content without major human intervention.

The more automated processes you can put in place, using technology that fits the company’s IT strategy, the more success you will have at breaking down silos of perspective. These silos often represent conflicting content strategies that exist because of organizational or regional boundaries. Integrating them will have the dual benefits of helping to optimize the ROI of content marketing and better aligning team perspectives.

6. Finding skilled resources

The biggest content management challenge in 2018 may come as a surprise. 61% of CMI survey respondents said their #1 problem was finding staff skilled in content strategy.

The good news is that there are many resources out there for finding and engaging freelance writers. The difficult news is that getting true value from content marketing resources requires strategy and commitment. This starts with senior executives and extends down into the organization. When understood and supported by management, consistent, aligned resources can be organized to publish the right content to the right segments at the right time.

Getting to the point that you can maintain a publishing calendar and continuously improve content marketing capabilities often means blazing a trail that uniquely works for your business. Supporting resources may need to be internally developed or can be effectively integrated from outsourced content marketing experts like Avenir Consulting Group.

About Avenir Consulting Group:

Driving an ongoing conversation with meaningful content is now a critical sales-driver, but companies often lack the process, expertise, and resources to effectively surface, coordinate and publish the stories, data, knowledge, and activities that can be sourced from across the organization.

Avenir Consulting Group offers a range of content marketing services that help you update your content strategy, create and organize targeted content, publish it, then promote it. Services enable you to establish and effectively maintain a flow of content that can be utilized across sales & marketing channels to drive awareness, engagement, and conversion.

Partner with Avenir to outsource aspects of content production that make sense for your organization. The outcome: a content funnel that attracts and engages targeted customers to deliver more value, increase your installed base, and boost overall revenue potential.