Every industry involves unique challenges. Content marketing is no exception to this rule. If anything, the challenges in content marketing are even more unique, because they are often changing year to year. Conquering those challenges are the path to success. Start 2016 right by conquering the following four challenges today.
1. Finding Compelling Images is Difficult
Images, whether they are photographs, charts, or illustrations, are an increasingly critical component to content marketing. Properly using images in your content marketing is one of the most effective ways to engage your audience. The challenge is finding high quality images.
The best images are protected by copyright. Fair use exceptions may exist, but rarely for content marketing because it is used to earn money. The simplest solution to this challenge is to create your own images when possible. Tools like memegenerator are ideal for making snappy, engaging images that you own the rights to.
2. Everyone is Using Different Social Media These Days
While maintaining a presence on every type of social media may seem like it will have a net benefit to your bottom line, that actually isn’t true. You will spend more resources on maintaining your social media presence than you will earn from the media saturation.
Instead of using every type of social media, you benefit more by focusing only on the types of social media that best support your business and are most used by your customers.
If you are lucky, your customers primarily use the same type of social media that best benefits your business. If not, the best solution is to use the primary social media of your customers to direct those customers to your primary type of social media.
What is your primary social media? That depends on your business, but usually the answer is based on how often you want to interact with your consumer base.
If you want to interact multiple times a day, use Twitter. Approximately once a day, use Facebook. Approximately once a week, use YouTube.
By maintaining a presence on only a few types of social media, you make social media a valuable part of your content marketing plan.
3. Everything Has Been Said Before
If your product or service doesn’t change significantly over the years, your content marketing is likely becoming stale. There are only so many ways you can discuss the same service or product before your customer base gets tired of hearing the message.
Tackling this challenge requires innovation. If you have a new service or product on the horizon, focus on that with previews. If your don’t, focus your content marketing on something other than your product.
Other valuable things to focus on are your customers, your business, or maybe just something that is only lightly related to your product or service. For example, a month or so of marketing that focuses on amazing U.S. locations to visit may help your car dealership get sales even if you don’t ever make a pitch during that time.
4. Short Term Campaigns Are Often Hit Or Miss
Short term campaigns have the potential to be truly memorable and create a major uptick in your page hits and sales. Unfortunately, they also have the potential to fail miserably. Creating a truly excellent content marketing campaign usually requires solid planning and perfect timing.
The key to conquering this challenge is to schedule your marketing campaigns, preferably about a year out (and at least six months out). This gives you plenty of time to create truly memorable content, ensures that last minute problems don’t derail your campaign, and lets you create linked campaigns that build off each other.
A well designed marketing campaign that incorporates lots of short term campaigns, including perfectly timed holiday campaigns, is practically assured to be memorable.
