HubSpot’s recent report on the state of marketing found that 70% of marketers
are actively investing in content marketing, focusing on enriching the customer buying journey – but most of them are unfortunately failing.
Regardless of the increasing popularity of content marketing, only about 69% of the B2B
marketers are highly successful in their content marketing strategy. If businesses don’t have a documented strategy, they could be dooming their content program to failure.
Brand Strategy Is the Main Priority for CMOs, amid Budget Cuts
The top considerations where content marketing can stumble
There are few common pitfalls that tend to plague brands as they develop content marketing plans.
Crafting a clear Strategy
Problems start when business miss out on clear goal identification, and clearly defined
expected outcomes. That leads to the vision and strategy not getting clearly documented,
mostly because there is a noteworthy lack of executive buy-in. Strategy pitfalls also crop up with uncertainty about competitive positioning and audience needs, which disturb the brand’s marketing.
Quality
Even if a marketer manages to ace other categories, the content program will fail if there is less attention paid to quality. Unoriginal, low-value content with a lack of consistency in quality or tone can lead to unmet goals. Likewise, failing to align critical topics with business objectives will lead to failure in convincing the authorities about the profound impacts on the quality.
Research shows that just 7% of marketing experts actually think that their company’s content is exceptional.
Operations
The challenges escalate with the absence of clear leadership for the content program, or if they function in silos. Undisciplined and overly complex workflows result in constraints of money, time, and resources, which further leads to a failure to distribute and publish content.
Data
The content might be king, but data remains the marketer’s deity. Working with inadequate data infrastructure and tools creates uncertainty on how to monitor progress or measure ROI-resulting in a failure to extract actionable insights from data. Enterprises are highly vulnerable to this pitfall. Hence, it is critical to access good-quality data— for which effective interrogation, analysis, and inferred actions from that data play a heroic role in enriching the experience of the content.
Definition of a Successful Digital Experience Management Strategy
To avoid these pitfalls, it is crucial to analyze the content marketing program effectively, so as to identify the gaps. The key is to set the right foundations for content marketing success based on the top five competencies:
Planning: Establishing and maintaining a unified, collaborated, audience-centric strategy
Operations: Creating quality content at scale
Distribution: Publishing and exploring content effectively across different channels
Results measurement: Accurately measuring the results and mapping them with data
Optimization: Applying data insights to enhance effectiveness and improve results
When setting the KPIs and considering the goals, the content strategy should be rated
adequately. Real success for the content marketing plan will only come once the C-suite’s priorities are for the business as a whole, and focus lies on leveraging content to impact brand image.
Also, businesses need to consider what successful operations actually look like, mainly because inefficient operations can be a pitfall for content marketing. It is crucial to create a frictionless workflow that’s built around collaboration and communication but has a single content leader who gets the final sign-off.
