Content marketing is a truly effective way to engage your potential customers. Rather than feeling like the hard sell, a well-written blog, interesting podcast or impactful video actually helps the user grow an affinity with a brand. However, it isn’t a simple process to create effective content. There are many content marketing challenges for small businesses.
Lack of time is usually cited as the main problem when it comes to instigating a content marketing strategy. This is understandable when a business is growing and everyone is working at full capacity on their main tasks.
But when you consider that a recent study by the Content Marketing Institute shows that 72% of respondents said that they had seen an increase in engagement and the same percentage reported an increase in leads following a content marketing push, you can see why it is important to implement for your business.
Here are some of the biggest challenges for content marketing at a small business, as well as a host of potential solutions that can fit into your busy schedule.
Lack of budget
SOLUTIONS – blogging is free and you can do it yourself using free image editing sites such as Canva where you can make professional looking social media images. You can shoot video on your phone and edit it using a free app such as iMovie.
Understanding SEO
SOLUTIONS – Check out Moz’s Whiteboard Friday videos, which give a great insight into different aspects of SEO. Use the Yoast SEO plugin for WordPress, which rates the SEO score of each blog on a traffic light system and gives you simple advice on how to improve.
Only being able to create one type of content
SOLUTIONS – Ask around your staff to see if anyone has any experience in video, audio, social media etc., hire a freelancer from a site like People Per Hour.
65% find it a challenge to produce engaging content
SOLUTIONS – Hubspot Blog Ideas Generator helps you get past the dreaded blank sheet of paper. Competitor analysis (find examples of great content in your niche to inspire), market research of social media fans and followers to find out what they are interested in.
60% can’t produce content consistently
SOLUTIONS – Guest blogs from people related to your niche (suppliers, customers, etc.), virtual PA to ghostwrite blog, spend a day building up a store of blogs and use one when you don’t have time to write something fresh.
62% don’t know how to measure the ROI of content marketing campaigns
SOLUTIONS – Compare like for like time periods on Google Analytics, checking referrals from socials and numbers who entered the site through blogs. Use the social networks’ native analytics, survey customers to find out where they heard about your business.
THE BIGGEST CONTENT MARKETING CHALLENGES | INFOGRAPHIC
