With the intention of obtaining customers and boosting website traffic, a lot of businesses start focusing more on content marketing.
However just because everyone is using content marketing as a means to enhance their online presence, doesn’t mean they are doing it right.
In this article, we are going to discuss some of the common struggles faced by business owners while doing content marketing. We will talk about each and every aspect of content marketing, and about what matters most to it.
After reading this complete article, you will get the knowledge of solutions or things to be done to overcome the content marketing problems faced by your business.
Let’s Start:-
Know What Kind of Content You Need to Create
One of the big issue people facing while implementing content marketing is that they don’t have knowledge of what kind of content to create that goes right with their business niche.
They face a lot of problem in generating engaging content that will help them engage their targeted audience.
As per the stats, 54% of B2B Content Marketers state that the big challenge they are struggling with is creating engaging content.
But as said, “Nothing is Impossible.” Some ways lead to everything. Just like this, production of engaging content is also not impossible.
If you wish to create engaging content, the first and most important thing to keep in mind is for what or whom you are creating the content.
Sit & think again- What your business is all about? What kind of people will interact with your company? What issues these people are facing on a day-to-day basis?
When you come to know about all these details, you can easily draft content that helps your target audience in solving the problems they are facing.
Your content will provide them an in-depth knowledge of how to deal with the struggles and eventually help them to trust your brand.
Always try to create content that is tailored to only a few audience personalities. If you create content thinking that this will catch the attention of the large audience, then it might be possible that your content will not appeal to anyone.
The reason for creating content for few audience is that creating high-value and comprehensive content is something hard to get.
According to this chart, you will see 47% B2C Content Marketers wish to generate content for only 2-3 persona audiences, as a result of the fact mentioned above.
Additionally, you might also think about the situation that leads people to get in touch with your business in first place.
For example, what are the consequences they have that makes them want to involve with your company.
When you know this, you can quickly create content that forces your prospective customers to become your frequent buyers. In addition to this, the same content also makes you as a solution provider for next stages.
To understand this, let’s take an example – Imagine you have a company that helps people carpet their homes or install wooden floorings.
There are two options for content marketing for you here.
1) You can create content that helps people know how to take care of the floorings of their home.
In your content, you can also include how to repair damaged wooden flooring or about maintaining the strength and physicals of your flooring.
2) Another option is to help people who are just one step behind, means they are going to install new carpets of floorings.
These are the people those who are building a new home or who are renovating their old house.
For those people, you can draft content that helps them handle all aspects of the renovation. After this, when they begin to look for flooring solution, you would place your offering as a solution for them.
After all, they already trust you because your content helped them in solving the problems they faced during the home renovation.
Hope from this example, it is evident that what kind content to be created for your business and targeted audience.
Other than this, let’s take a step forward to see how you can come up with great content ideas.
One of the tools you can use to do this task is “Buzzsumo”.
With this web tool, you can easily get the most popular content for your desired topic. This facilitates in getting the material, which works for the targeted audience.
So now, all you need to do is to create in-depth content and promote it effectively.
Go to Buzzsumo.Com and sign up. After signing in, enter the topic for which you are searching the content.
Let’s take the issue of carpet and wooden flooring that we have taken above.
When it comes to content marketing, actionable content tends to perform well. So, I just try and put phase “how to” carpet’.
The commas make sure you will get a lot of information or results on “how to”. Below are some of the results returned by Buzzsumo and it shows some interesting results.
As you see, there are some content ideas available here. The results are quite broad.
If you want to come up with more content ideas that are more comprehensive. Simply take any one post from the results list and put a related keyword into Buzzsumo.
For “Carpet”, I am taking “choosing carpet” because this might help people in getting content related to choosing the carpet for home.
After putting the phrase, I will get few results related to the topic of choosing carpets.
You will take help from those pieces and create a total content that is very informative and will attract your targeted audience.
This is the example of ‘carpet’. How can we forget “wooden flooring”? Let’s see how the process would work on the topic.
If you put “how to” wooden flooring’, the phrase is grammatically incorrect, but Buzzsumo returned some good results for this subject.
Point to be noted: When you search any topic with the quotation mark, Buzzsumo will sometimes help you get what you need or sometimes do the opposite thing.
Ignoring correct grammar concept will similarly apply to the structuring of your key phrases.
Here is what you get with the phrase “how to” wooden flooring’.
To create content, here are some good results to start with. When it comes to creating content, this is one angle.
Now, let’s see how to create content that will turn our visitors or prospective customers into repeated buyers.
Let’s take the same topic- carpeting and wooden flooring.
When you are generating content for visitors or prospective buyers, who don’t need carpeting this time but will need in future, then make sure to include benefits of it and how will help your home looks new ad beautiful.
This kind of content will generate interest of the individuals in carpeting and flooring.
Do the same procedure with Buzzsumo with the intention of getting some new content ideas.
I am taking the phrase/ topic “benefits of home renovation.”
Another time, you can see that there are some compelling content ideas here.
You don't need to utilize Buzzsumo with regards to content ideation.
You can likewise investigate what your rivals are doing, and then make an option that is superior to what they have.
A speedy approach to doing this is to search Google, utilizing keywords like those above, then see what results come up.
You could then take a portion of the primary types of content and survey how you can improve them.
This is like the Brian Dean approach is known as the ‘Skyscraper Method.'
In addition to this, you can keep following the social media profiles of your rivals to get up-to-the-date content posted by them.
How about we next take a look at what should be done once you have a decent feeling of what should be made.
Creating the Right Kind of Content
Once, you have selected the topic for your content; you must then think of generating your content in question form.
There are many forms of content creation available now.
Depends on what you think your skills best goes with, pick the one way. The primary intention of doing this is what you think is probably goes with your targeted audience persona.
Here, we will quickly observe all kinds of content that you can generate and see how to get the most out of every type of content creation type.
Blog posts are the most common type of online content creation. When it comes to content creation, a blog post can be a good start. As per the below graph, 60% of B2B Content Marketers like Blog post as their business tactic.
Writing is only done by the people who do not like to be in front of the camera or have superior written communication skills.
The blog post is also an excellent option for those people who have their fixed budget and cannot afford to pay for the substantial cost associated with other content creation forms.
If you don’t have excellent writing skills, you can still create a decent and informative blog post.
When it comes to writing a great blog post, there are two things you always need to keep in mind:-
1) Write in an easy-to-understand and definite language/manner.
2) Try to make the post visually appealing.
Overall, this means, make use of proper formatting and good quality images that will make your blog post look good.
Now, let’s look how to write the blog post in “easy-to-understand” language.
There are some tools available online these days that will help you write in an accessible language.
One such web tool is Hemingway Editor.
With this tool, you can see the ‘hard to read’ sentences right away.
Here is an analysis of some text from earlier in the post.
And here is, how easy to understand text looks like:-
After you see both the examples, you will observe that the second version of the text flows better, and it doesn’t have any unnecessary words stuffed in.
You just need to follow the guidelines provided by the app to create writing that is precise and easy to follow.
If you are troubled about your writing being indistinct, consider making use of this app.
Over and over again, the finest way to approach things is to write in a conversational manner.
You don’t want to write whatever that is going to make you look ‘cool.’
Just create content that is informational and will add value to the lives of your readers.
The first thing you must emphasize on is the proper usage of headers when it comes to making your writing visually tempting.
Headers are very essential because they break up the text. They let people rapidly scan a post and see if there is anything covered that they are attracted to.
Creating headers are very simple.
If you are making use of a blogging platform like WordPress, you just have to select ‘Heading 2,’ from the drop down menu within the toolbar.
Additionally, you also wish to concentrate on utilizing a substantial number of images inside your post.
Refrain from using images that do not contribute to the overall message of the post.
If you are taking screenshots of things you see online, you can use a tool like Skitch.
With this tool, you can quickly take a screenshot and afterward ‘mark it up’.
You might want to reconsider if you think that your blog post doesn't need images.
The blog post that contains relevant images will receive 94% more views rather than the blogs that don’t have images.
You can make use of websites that provide royalty free images if you want to get images for your blog post.
One such website that offers royalty free images is Shutterstock.
Another website that might provide you relevant images is iStock, here also you will get royalty free images.
However you may have to pay to use some of the pictures from these websites, you will come across that the price is worth it.
You will quickly be able to source high-quality pictures that are all set to work with.
This can often beat by making use of sites like Flickr because when using such websites, loads of time spent is on essentially finding an image.
Above all that, you will also possibly end up compromising, because an image is a royalty and cost free.
If you need more information, I have covered here and here what can be done with the intention of being a better writer.
After Blog Posts, let have a look at Webinars- another form of content creation.
As per the free research report, 62% of marketers are making use of webinars as an approach to delivering B2B content marketing. They learn how content marketing drive sale? Over and above this, marketers rate webinars as the third most effective tactic of content marketing.
So, how can you conduct a webinar of your own?
You can use a web tool like GoToMeeting for creating your webinar.
GoToMeeting is one of the most frequently utilized tools when the talk is about running webinars.
The platform can be a little bit expensive, however. If you are truly on a tight budget, you might want to read this guide, where I cover how you can create a webinar at an affordable rate.
Don’t ever complicate the process of creating a webinar. There are normally a few important phases in a webinar:-
- Describe for whom this webinar is created
- Define what the points are you are going to cover in the webinar
- Provide a three core pieces of content – around 15 mins each
- Provide a little bit of backstory regarding who you are, and why you are an authority
- Make an offer
- Open up for Q&A
These are some of the very basic outlines that you can start using right now.
As some of the webinars are purely educational, you can’t provide any offer in it.
When creating a webinar, always keep in mind that don’t put a lot of text on the slides/pages. This is because, if the pages have loads of text then people get engaged in reading the text appear on their screen and eventually would not focus on your voice.
To get a better idea of ‘how to create an effective webinar?’ visit SlideShare. On this website, you will get some different presentations.
When you go through the presentations of SlideShare, you will get a clear picture of what points should be included in the presentation to make it look professional and effective.
SlideShare has approx. 70 million users, so it’s the best platform to distribute your content among ‘n’ number of people.
To keep people engaged in your webinar, you can also offer any bonus in it. The bonus can be something like a simple checklist o an info-graphic that have the content you are covering in the webinar.
Another form of content creation is Podcast.
According to statistics, 30% of Americans, aged 12 or older have listed to a podcast.
As of January 2015, 17% of Americans had listened to the podcast in past month.
As the podcast is becoming more popular day by day, the listeners will also go to rise beyond the numbers mentioned above.
For those, who are good at talking about their subject choice but don’t like writing or be in front of the camera, the podcast is the best medium to create content and share it with a lot of people.
Let me tell you here about ‘How to create a podcast’-
When you are creating your podcast, don’t worry about editing here.
If there are any mistakes, then surely you want to remove it. But, in most of the cases, you will start with the audio you have recorded in the first place.
Just do a little bit here. Add some introduction and closing music to make the podcast effectual.
Don’t worry about creating the music, just go to Fiverr. Here, you get someone who can help in creating the music for you.
When you search for someone on Fiverr, you will get a lot of sellers here.
The price offered by Fiverr sellers might be $5, but make sure to ask them what they are offering in $5. Most of the sellers offer basic music in the price. So, it’s better to discuss with them first.
If you want high-quality music, they may charge you more than $5.
For example, see the below image, here are the additional charges provided by a Fiverr seller to create an audio introduction for your podcast.
If you are worried about not getting high-quality audio after spending the money, then you can pick a seller, who have a high rating on Fiverr.
Here is the example of high rated seller:
However, you might face one problem here that the most popular of high rated sellers are already stuffed with a lot of work. So, it might be possible that they decline your work.
In this case, you can do one thing. Offer them more price for speed. These ‘upsells’ doesn’t cost you so much, but it will be worth the money spent.
Other than this, if you wish to invite guests onto your podcast, then always try to include those people who are already aware of the niche of your business. Guests may be those who have produced outcomes that can have resembled in your niche.
If we take the same example of ‘carpeting & wooden flooring’ for the podcast, then we have to invite people who are already dealing with cleaning or repairing wooden floorings.
Furthermore, we can also invite interior designers on the podcast.
If we invite or add this kind of guests, then they will help us by providing their insights on ‘how to pick the best type of flooring’ or ‘some of the best tips or advice to handle common problems of carpeting & flooring.'
With their insights, you can come up with a better topic or idea to create your podcast.
By inviting other people onto your podcast, you will be able to provide unbelievable amounts of worth, while also making sure that you are not forced to create the content all by yourself.
You will wish to ensure that you have a good set of questions before time, or you would not be able to excerpt the best material out of your guests.
Once you have one piece of content, you can always re-purpose it so that it is turned into another form.
For example, I mentioned above how you can create a SlideShare presentation with the help of the slides of your webinar.
You can also take the audio of that webinar and turn it into a Podcast. Or you can take the blog posts you have and turn them into podcasts.
Your potential to use your content in different forms is going to depend on how creative you can be.
This is how you repurpose your piece of content in different formats-
- Text – Blog Posts
- Graphics – Info-graphics/Tools
- Audio – Podcasts
- Video- Webinars/ YouTube Videos/ SlideShare Presentations
You don’t have to create the content every time by your own. In its place, hire a writer to generate high-quality content for you.
In present times, companies to a greater extent are looking to outsource for content creation. You can see this in the below chart-
If you compare 2014 and 2015 results, you will get to see that 2% more companies were making use of ‘agency partners’ to help them in creating content.
Also, you can see here that companies which use their staff to write content fell by 5% in 2015 as compared to 2014.
To find good writers for your business, take advantage of websites like ProBlogger Jobs Board or Up work.
Over and above this, if you come across any website that has an eye-catching and great piece of content, then don’t miss to message the writer of that website. Ask them if they can provide some quality content for your website as well.
This approach you can follow to Blog post, but if you are looking for someone, who can create webinars and podcasts for you, then there is no other better place than Up work.
Proficient writers will need perfect instructions on how they should structure their content, and what needs to be done to make sure that is going to be of high worth.
Typically, you will have to develop these instructions, even if the person you are working with is just a good writer/presenter in general or an expert on the topic of choice.
For example, if you can provide a clear summary of how a webinar should be generated and what significant points need to be included in the webinar, your content creator should be capable of getting the job done that goes perfectly with your requirements.
When you are selecting someone who is going to complete your tasks of content creation, make sure you choose someone who has enormous expertise on the topic of your choice.
That way, they will be capable of creating content with authority. They will also be able to take in hand any questions that customers of the content might have.
