A guest blog post written by Paul Hunter, Marketing Manager of Liberty Marketing

Every successful business creates a great content marketing campaign that churns out good content, surprising statistics and great research. There is no disputing the fact that content marketing gives a business the chance to create brand awareness, as well as improving customer engagement and lead generation.

While it is encouraging to hear that 72% of marketers have a content marketing strategy in place, it also means that the marketing world is a lot more competitive, and it is a lot harder to get your content seen.

There is more to content marketing than writing a couple of blogs for the company site. If you want a successful content marketing strategy that will lead to great coverage and results, then it is important to know exactly what you’re producing, your targets and why you’re producing it.

Here are some of the ways that you can overcome the most common content marketing struggles.

Staying Ahead of the Competition

As previously mentioned, the content marketing industry is becoming more competitive. Larger companies produce reams of great content each day, and it may seem ridiculously daunting trying to compete with companies such as Apple and Coca-Cola. Just because your competitors may be bigger and have a larger budget, do not back down – everyone has to start somewhere!

Your audience will come naturally with brand awareness and word of mouth, so focus on creating a devoted audience rather than trying to get a larger audience. It is quality over quantity, after all. Utilising longtail keywords is a great starting place!

Entertaining a Tough Crowd

Some companies have it easier when it comes to content marketing; bigger budgets, larger teams and better connections. However, with a bit of hard word, content marketing can work whatever the industry. Sometimes, it isn’t always possible to make a dull topic stimulating, but you can definitely make educational and helpful content that people will appreciate.

Most of the time, if a piece of content helps someone and answers their question, especially when no other website can, then that piece of content will be far from boring and they will be grateful to you for helping out with their problem.

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Overlooking the Importance of Digital PR

Writing great content is one thing, but it is important to share it too. It is just as important to shout about the new content, as it is to write about it in the first place.

Outreach and digital PR are some of the biggest content marketing problems that businesses face. The phrase from Field of Dreams, “if you build it, they will come” is sadly something that those in marketing cannot go by.

You can’t write content and hope the right person will come across it, it is important to push this story out and shout about the amazing work that you’ve been doing. Journalists appreciate PRs for sharing the news, especially on a quiet news day.

Look into techniques like influencer marketing, social media sharing and email newsletters, which are all great ways to share content. Businesses need to be aware of the way that PR is changing and the different pathways to take to get your content out there.

If you’ve created something that you’re really proud of and you really think that the outcome is amazing, it may be worth keeping a bit of budget behind for paid promotion.

Monitoring Metrics and Results

With any sort of marketing, measuring success is extremely important. It is great to analyse the data and find out what strategies worked, and what didn’t work well. This is where a lot of marketers struggle.

In order to measure success; take a look back at your original goals. Do you want your content to gain five pieces of national coverage? Do you want to widen your social media following? These are good things to look at prior to the campaign.

The next step to take is to decide how you’re going to measure the return of investment of your content. If you want to generate more leads from your blog, for example, then setting up conversion paths and tracking in Google Analytics would be a good start.

Tracking the success of your marketing has become a lot easier over the years. Here are 3 great ways that you can measure the success of your content marketing efforts:

1. Setting up conversion tracking on social media – Measure the ROI of the content that you promote on Facebook by looking at what a user does after seeing it. Do they engage with it? Do they ignore it? These are good things to know.
2. Setting up conversion tracking on Google Analytics – You can track the number of conversions by setting up a tracking code on your site. You can also set up your personal goals such as how many people download your brochure, sign up to your emails and/or how many people click through your call to action.
3. Filtering sales transaction data –B2C marketers should be applying filters in order to track the total % of revenue that comes from different areas of the website. A good example of this is tracking how many purchases came from a direct result of your new blog post.

If you’re really struggling with your content marketing strategy, then the best thing to do would be to call a professional. While you know your business more than anyone, sometimes it can be daunting trying to start and they will be able to advise in the best way possible.

About the Author

Paul Hunter is the Marketing Manager of Liberty Marketing, a specialist digital marketing agency in Cardiff. As well as being responsible for the overall marketing strategy for the agency, he works with key clients such as Universal Music, Admiral and Happy Beds.

Follow Paul – @pm_hunter