Top 6 Content Marketing Challenges That B2B Companies Face

Content marketing has never been more important. Yet, there are several challenges that make it difficult to measure its success in today’s Internet-savvy environment. As much as 60% B2B marketers say that producing engaging content is the biggest challenge for them. In this blog post, we’ll discuss the top six content marketing challenges and how you can overcome them.

Challenge #1: Lack of resources

Many people have the notion that producing content is easy. Though, they may be right, producing high-quality, relevant content is a lot harder. Consistently producing quality content requires a lot of time and skill. While many small companies use in-house writers to produce content, it often gets in their way of running the business. Lack of time and budget is one of the major barriers to content marketing. A large number of organizations tend to overcome this challenge by outsourcing content to agencies. However, good content, when outsourced, requires either enough time or money, or both.

Solution: You need to be fully prepared to deal with the content marketing costs. They involve tangible costs, no matter if you do it in-house or outsource it to an agency. Writing content in-house can save you money, but it will cost a lot of man hours and efforts. On the other hand, outsourcing may cost you a lot, but it will ensure that you’re getting quality content consistently. It’s a “no pain, no gain” situation. So, the choice is yours. Look at your resources and capabilities, and decide.Challenge #2: Growing competition

With a growing number of companies using content to market their brand and generate leads, it becomes very difficult to create new, innovative content, every time. Chances are whatever you’re blogging about has already been written by someone else, and that too, for a very long time. As a result, it becomes increasingly difficult to grab your audience’s attention. Rising competition requires you to frequently produce the best content. Moreover, growing competition for high-quality content with increased availability of the same increases the audience’s expectations, which puts you under even more pressure to deliver exceptional content. It is the survival of the fittest; only the strong will survive.

Solution: There is only one way to stand out in the increasing competition – maintain high quality. It may be virtually impossible to maintain high standards every time, but you always need to strive for excellence. If your content is bad, you are doomed to fail.Challenge #3: Maintaining high quality

Keeping quality consistently high is very difficult. As a content writer, I need to read dozens of articles every day. Trust me, at least half of them are horrible. While I won’t take names of these companies, I can tell you that websites with a large audience and team of copy editors and writers often publish terrible articles infested with mistakes, incorrect facts, and typos. However, I don’t really blame them. The pressure to maintain high quality and produce content in bulk at the same time can be a killer.

Solution: Maintaining high quality cannot happen overnight. You need to take your time to develop your writing skills and post the best-of-your-ability content. You need to produce content on constant intervals, even if it feels like no one is reading your content. Whatever the scenario is, never compare your content with that in other publications, even though it is good to know what the editorial standards and content trends are. Your focus should be solely on making your latest post better than the previous one.Challenge #4: Unrealistic expectations

Usually, businesses face this challenge when making a business case for content marketing to the management. Several misconceptions prevail about content marketing despite the fact that it has been in the picture for past many years. Therefore, the people at the managerial level tend to get impatient to see the results from the investment in content marketing. This directly has to do with their expectations. Executives and managers start expecting an immediate return on investment (ROI) like they get from more traditional marketing strategies.

Solution: You need to remind yourself and your stakeholders that content marketing takes time. Only a handful of blogs have had runaway success overnight. Besides, you need to manage the expectations of your readers. Set realistic traffic and engagement targets with manageable goals.Challenge #5: Measuring ROI

52% of B2B content marketers say that measuring ROI is one among the top challenges faced by them, indicating failure of over half of all B2B marketers to properly compute ROI. We’ve already talked about the time it takes to prove the ROI from content marketing in the previous point. To top it, quantifying content marketing ROI is even more difficult. the availability of several comprehensive analytics technologies to calculate results, it comes out as a huge challenge even for well-established companies and agencies to measure ROI.

Solution: Establish what your content marketing is trying to accomplish. Is it lead generation or brand awareness, or both? Without clearly defined goals, it is very difficult to measure the ROI. You also need to decide how you’ll measure the ROI of your content. If your blog’s goal is to produce leads, then make sure you have the right conversion paths and tracking set up.Challenge #6: Publishing schedules

Having an ambitious publishing schedule is one of the toughest challenges for content marketers. You may even be evaluated on it. With companies producing so much content, there is tremendous pressure to publish as much content as possible. There are numerous how-to guides, blogs, and whitepapers that indicate how important it is to publish at least once per day to make your content marketing strategy a huge success. However, maintaining this publishing schedule can be a nightmare even for the most seasoned content writer.

Solution: Good content marketing is not easily scalable. If you publish more content frequently, you need more resources. Failing to get that in place, you may end up producing a lot of mediocre content. With companies vying for attention, it is better to produce one high-quality blog post per week, rather than five mediocre content pieces. Maintain a publishing schedule while keeping in mind how quality matters over quantity.Final word

Regardless of how hard the challenge may seem, learn to accept and overcome it. Again, you’ll find various content pieces online, but you need to craft solutions that are specific to your business. Yes, content marketing has probably become quite harder than what it used to be, but it still continues to be one of the most effective methods to expand your business and promise yourself an increased ROI.

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