7 Reasons Content Marketing is Overwhelming

When you are looking for ways to reduce company expenses, it’s tempting to cut business costs by doing your own marketing. The challenge is that as a business owner you likely already have way too much to balance. If you don’t have the time to market your company, you will find yourself feeling more overwhelmed by the extra tasks that you didn’t first anticipate. Great content marketing takes time and attention to detail as well as consistent execution.

Here are 7 Reasons Content Marketing is Overwhelming

It’s Hard to Know Where to Start

Content marketing includes all the written content you create as promotional and educational materials for your company as well as videos, graphics, slide decks, and infographics. With so many different options to create it’s hard to know where to get started.

Let’s say you have a new product you want to introduce to your customers. Do you create an email series introducing a new product or start with a blog article and then send an email? Maybe for this product launch, you should leverage video instead of written content for your target audience.

With limited time it’s important to maximize your efforts, so you may think the best choice is to focus on the area that you are most comfortable executing, but what if your target audience prefers to consume different content?

Content Marketing Advice Varies

It’s natural to head to Google to find the answers to your questions. The problem with content marketing information is that there are hundreds of successful experts, thousands more who claim the title expert and, depending on who you follow, you will receive very different advice.

In fact, if you collect enough content marketing advice, statements will begin to contradict. Consider these two marketing theories:

•        “The more you tell, the more you sell.”
•        “No one reads online. Focus on the visuals.”

Which execution is correct for your product or services? Active Campaign points out, and I agree, that neither philosophy is accurate when applied exclusively.

Effective Content Marketing Takes Time to Execute

Another reason content marketing is overwhelming is that it takes time to execute well. Besides writing the blog article or creating the images, there are many steps marketers take to make sure the content they develop has the best chance to rank in search queries.

Before you create the content you should:

• Evaluate your previous content to see what your customers and social media followers are interacting with the most.
• Do keyword research to see what long-tail phrases are best to use around a topic.
• Do a content analysis to see how competitive a topic is as this will inform how you should best structure your piece.

As you develop your content you should:

•  Incorporate SEO best practices such as headers, bulleted lists, and optimized images.
•  Proofread your content for clarity, spelling, and grammatical errors.
•  Consider ways to build on the original content. Will you turn a blog article into an infographic or a video?

After you publish each piece of content, you need to promote it on social channels and through email. Promotion requires more than posting a link to your content just once. You need to also build in time to engage with readers and interact on social media.

It Never Ends

You can’t publish one blog article and consider your content marketing complete. There is a direct correlation between how many times a company publishes and the amount of traffic they attract to their website. If you choose to take care of your content marketing, it’s going to be important to build time into your calendar, several times a week, to focus on this aspect of your business.

You Don’t Have a Strategic Plan

One of the biggest reasons that content marketing is overwhelming is that many people don’t take the time to develop a strategic plan. Creating content that will connect with your current and potential customers requires a lot of research.

You need to understand how your buyers search online to solve their problems. Once you know what questions are asked most frequently, you will know how to create helpful content that educates your current and potential customers.

Once you’ve completed your research, you can map out a plan to publish your content in the order that makes the most sense.

You Aren’t Measuring the Right Results

Part of creating a strategic plan is making sure you are targeting your efforts in the right categories. Does your target audience prefer video over written content? How do you know? It’s important not to focus on vanity metrics and instead measure the impact of your content as well as your rank in search.

It feels great when you post an article on social media that attracts a lot of attention, but if those likes and shares don’t translate to an increase in website traffic or inquires from potential customers what is the true value of that attention on social?

If you spend time focusing on vanity metrics your content marketing efforts aren’t as likely to increase your opportunities to attract customers.

You Need to Delegate

The main reason that content marketing is overwhelming is that you aren’t delegating the tasks you don’t have time to complete. We all understand the demands required of a business owner. There is always the potential for an emergency to come up that requires your immediate attention.

When customers and employees need your help, it’s important to prioritize them, but it also means that you need to rearrange your calendar.

It’s hard to publish quality content consistently when your calendar is always full. Writing late at night or early in the morning in order to stay on schedule will eventually lead to rushed production or skipping tasks altogether as exhaustion takes over.

At SMA Marketing, we partner with business owners who need to delegate digital marketing, including content marketing, so that you can focus on growing your business. We understand the value excellent content marketing adds to your company which is why we leverage unique, strategic content plans that are backed by analytics and SEO best practices for all our clients. Contact us to learn more.