7 Common Pain Points in Content Marketing and How to Solve Them

Along with customer pain points, as a brand, you must also be mindful of common pain points that can arise with your content marketing.

They’re often easy to overlook, but it’s necessary to be aware of them. So, to help you avoid these hurdles, we’ve listed 7 common pain points in content marketing—and their solutions.

Why You Need Content Marketing in the First Place

Unless you’ve been hiding in the basement, you would know how important content marketing is to grow your brand—especially now in the digital age. When done right, content marketing can help multiply your revenue, increase your brand awareness, establish you as a thought leader in your field, and more.

This is the reason why most brands have and continue to invest in some type of content marketing. They understand that content marketing can be a huge driver of their overall business success and give them a great ROI.

The Challenges of Content Marketing that Every Business Should Know

Despite the many benefits of content marketing that far outweigh the pain points, it’s still important to be aware of them. By being conscious of them, you will be better prepared and know what to avoid and seek on your content marketing journey. You’ll have a solid foundation to work with. And this is invaluable.

Content Marketing Pain Point 1 – Not Having a Clear Purpose

Similar to any type of marketing you do, you should have a purpose behind it. Don’t embark on content marketing because it’s all the buzz right now, and everyone else is doing it. Your content marketing must have a clear purpose behind it, or else you’ll end up wasting a lot of time and money.

Best practices are:

• Identify your top 5-6 objectives for growing your brand and tie these into your content marketing (brand awareness, more leads, etc.).
• Know your USP (Unique selling proposition)
• Identify your top 5-6 business pain points and see if content marketing can help remove or reduce these.
• Speak to your team about devising a content marketing strategy or hire content marketing experts to devise a tailor-made one for you.

Content Marketing Pain Point 2 – Lack of Audience Knowledge

This happens when you don’t know or understand your target audience. Both are detrimental to your content marketing. You must have a solid understanding of your audience and their overall needs, desires, and pain points.

If not, your content marketing will be scattered. You won’t know who to market to. As a result, you could fall into the trap of marketing to everyone and everything. You want to avoid this scattergun approach.

Instead, follow these best practices:

• Create an ICP (Ideal Customer Profile)
• Conduct extensive target audience research (demographics & psychographics)
• Create customer profiles
• Direct all your content marketing to your audience. Every single piece of content produced should speak to them.

Content Marketing Pain Point 3 – A Non-Tailored Content Marketing Strategy

Sometimes because of time constraints and just overall business pressure, brands will dive right into content marketing with a one-size-fits-all content marketing strategy. This is one of the worst things you can do.

Taking time to develop a tailored and well-crafted content marketing strategy is well worth the effort. It lays out a clear and relevant roadmap for your brand. Best practices are:

• Set time aside to create a robust SEO-optimized content marketing strategy or hire content marketing experts to devise one for you.
• Ensure you have established your audience first and even your ideal customer before developing a content marketing strategy.
• Review, monitor, and adapt your content marketing strategy as things change.

Content Marketing Pain Point 4 – Creating Original Content

In a world where no idea or content is new, or at least the chances of it being totally new are slim, it can present a challenge to your content marketing. After all, everything’s been said, right (or has it)?

We know that Google and SEO love original content. And many brands and content creators pride themselves on producing “original content.” But what does this mean exactly? How do you go about creating so-called original content?

Follow these best practices:

• Even if the topic isn’t original, give your own unique angle/perspective to it.
• Paraphrase content and don’t plagiarize.
• Put your content through a plagiarism checker.
• Study content that ranks well and find the gap (what can you add to it that hasn’t been added?).
• Ask: How can I innovate my content? What is something that no one else is doing with content? Tip: Think outside the box.

Content Marketing Pain Point 5 – Not Promoting Your Content Enough

Effective content marketing involves active promotion. That is, getting it seen by as many people as possible. Of course, keep in mind that you want the right people to see it (your target audience).

Many brands and individuals spend a lot of effort creating content but then don’t promote it or at least don’t promote it enough. This reduces its visibility and power. What’s the point of creating content that no one knows about?

Best practices are:

• Distribute and share content on your social media.
• Repurpose content into other forms.
• Leverage influencers to promote your content.
• Invest in paid promotion.
• Remember the 20% rule: Content creation 20%, content promotion 80%.

Content Marketing Pain Point 6 – Not Having the Right People Do your Content

You can do all of the above correctly, but if you don’t have the right person (or people) doing your content, it’s pointless. Every job requires the right professional. Content marketing is a skill and requires people that are proficient in it.

Don’t just get your friends and family—or someone cheap—to create your content marketing. Instead, follow these best practices:

• Hire content marketing specialists to do your content marketing.
• Ensure they understand your overall purpose, goals, vision, and target audience.
• Collaborate with your content marketers to ensure you are on the same page.

Content Marketing Pain Point 7 – Not Measuring and Adjusting

For any type of marketing you do, you must always measure and track results. This allows you to see what’s working and what’s not working. You can’t manage what you don’t measure.

With so many tools and resources in the modern world to help you measure results, it would be silly not to utilize them.

Best practices are:

• Track results using tools like Google Analytics, Oribi, etc.
• Perform AB tests on content to measure performance.
• See where leads and conversions are coming from (website, social media, etc.)
• See where you’re gaining traction and where you’re losing, and adjust accordingly.
• Stay on top of content marketing trends.

Keep in mind these 7 common pain points in content marketing and, most importantly, apply solutions. This will get you great results. For more guidance on content marketing for your brand, book a time with our team, who are happy to discuss your content marketing needs.