6 Tips to Solve your Top Content Marketing Challenges

May 31, 2011

Finally, All of Your Content Marketing Challenges can be Resolved

The time has come! I have been writing about your top content marketing challenges for a few weeks now and I will finally wrap up this series with my last set of 6 tips.

For newcomers, I polled a group of content marketers on my blog to better understand the exact pain points of content marketers like you and I. Here were the results:

  1. Driving More Traffic – 33.33%
  2. Boosting Customer Engagement – 22.22%
  3. Getting Support from those Outside of the Marketing Department – 11.11%
  4. Achieving More with Less – 11.11%
  5. Lack of Time/Budget – 11.11%
  6. Lack of the Right Staff – 11.11%

Over the past few weeks I have shared several tips on solving the challenges of driving more traffic, boosting customer engagement, getting support from non-marketing folk, and achieving more with less. Today, I’ll wrap up with tips to address a lack of budget/time and lack of the right staff.

Lack of Time/Budget
Many companies (startup and expansion stage alike) struggle with balancing the meager marketing budget across lead generation, social media, event marketing, direct marketing, and PPC. Now enter content marketing. How the heck are we supposed to pay for that too? Here are 3 quick tips you can implement this week to avoid breaking the bank when executing against a content marketing strategy:

  1. Spread the responsibilities. One easy way to control costs is to keep everything in house. Consider building content marketing responsibilities into various positions currently within your organization. Tap into sales for great customer success stories. Utilize product management or product marketing to write killer blog posts that speak to your target audiences’ most burning pain points (how’s that for boosting customer engagement?). Encourage senior management to write thought leadership articles. Get account management on board to help with video testimonials for excited customers….okay you get the idea. If not, let me know in a comment and I will spend more time on this in the future! Last week I provided tips on getting people outside of marketing engaged and excited.
  2. Utilize freelancers. Gosh, I must sound like a broken record by now. Freelancers can be a great way to do more with less while controlling costs. Here are some tips on finding great freelancers.
  3. Find and use smart tools. Technology will always help solve some pain points around budget and time. There are a lot of great tools out there that are relatively cost efficient and can help you produce or distribute quality content. Think of using an iPhone to record short videos and find an intern to edit everything in iMovie. Use WordPress to support your blog content for free. Tap into social media tools that aggregate many accounts into one like CoTweet or ExactTarget’s Interactive Marketing Hub. Utilize Dlvr.it to easily share all of your content across multiple social accounts or RSS feeds.

Lack of the Right Staff
Human capital is an essential component to an exceptional content marketing strategy. If you have a great team in place, you are able to save money on outsourcing your entire strategy to a consultant or firm. Here are 3 tips to help address any team issues:

  1. Make the right hire. If you are in a position to hire a new person to mainly focus on content marketing, be sure to hire the right person. Today many firms are looking to former editors or writings from publishing houses. (We took the cue ourselves and recently welcomed Brendan Cournoyer, formerly of TechTarget, to our team)! Ann Handley recently contributed an article about this topic to OpenView Labs and offered insight on the 5 skills to look for in a content hire.
  2. Marry strengths. Even if your marketing department is just made up of one individual who is new to content marketing, it is not game over. It is true that you may not be in a position to hire a full time resource. You may not even be in a position to hire freelancers. If you are in one or both of these positions, take note. And if you aren’t in one of these positions, take note! It is important to always marry your employees’ strengths with your content marketing strategy. Think of tapping into the networks of your well-connected colleagues and a natural ability to sell. If you need more tips, check out this post from earlier this year.
  3. Move on. Unfortunately, despite following many tips I have written about, you may still face colleagues that couldn’t care less about blogging, social media, or content marketing. Instead of wasting your time trying to make some members of the team fit into the content marketing mold, just move on and continue to work with your coworkers who are excited to help out. Don’t get discouraged – just move on!

Are there any challenges that we missed during the initial poll? I look forward to continuing this conversation!

Content Marketing Director

<strong>Amanda Maksymiw</strong> worked at OpenView from 2008 until 2012, where she focused on developing marketing and PR strategies for both OpenView and its portfolio companies. Today she is the Content Marketing Director at <a href="https://www.fuze.com/">Fuze</a>.