ClearVoice explores the biggest challenges of marketing content in their new survey. The poll uses open-ended responses from 1,000 marketers to provide insight on challenges like time, content quality and creation, idea generation and distribution.
The simple question “What’s your biggest challenge with content?” yielded a variety of responses and identified the various elements of a successful marketing campaign, including reaching the appropriate audience and channels — in addition to crafting content that shows genuine passion and credibility.
1. Time Is Constantly on the Mind
The survey notes the word “time” as the most frequent single-word submission, highlighting the numerous ways that time can impact the marketing process. Time is where most of the difficulties arise inherently, although many of the responses highlighted specific instances that lead to feeling as if there’s not enough daylight.
Disorganization, an over-abundance of goals and poor collaboration can all lead to the feeling of a time crunch. Organization can help lead to more room for great ideas and content creation, with time and organization going hand-in-hand.
The marketers’ responses point to time as significantly outweighing management and planning as a challenge, with examples of time-related challenges including scheduling the calendar, managing the review process, involving all stakeholders and collaborating with various departments.
2. Content Production
Marketers note challenges when trying to come up with original ideas. Even when there is an original idea, it can be difficult making that idea compelling for readers, requiring an idea that is not only original but also appealing to the target demographic, as well. As a result, it’s not a surprise that 27 percent of respondents find producing creative content to be the biggest barrier to getting in touch with their creative side.
Marketers spend ample time trying to make their content feel genuine while also being clear and concise. Some brands have upped their engagement by intertwining original ideas with compelling storytelling, helping to make abstract ideas more tangible for their audience. Airbnb accomplishes both innovation and storytelling in immersive form, via Airbnb community stories, which they integrate across various marketing platforms and campaigns, such as the “Belong Anywhere” campaign.
Airbnb show they value their users’ artistic and giving nature, a great strategy for a business whose infrastructure is fueled by users both providing homes and seeking places to stay.
3. Establishing Credibility
Some 51 percent of marketers note content quality as the biggest challenge to establishing credibility — more than twice that of engagement. Naturally, quality content tends to engage, hence the 51 percent to 23.6 percent difference.
Titan Alarm is one example of a brand that provides a good range of quality content on their blog. It features a mix of how-to posts, local guide posts and posts capitalizing on recent trends. Each post appears to be well-researched and is accompanied by helpful visuals that help readers more easily digest the information presented.
A feeling of being genuine is another challenge for content, which can be difficult for corporate entities to accomplish. Still, several brands can achieve a very genuine feel regarding their credibility, especially when showcasing their passion.
For example, Asana’s marketing goes a great job of establishing genuine credibility. Their site lists partners like NASA, General Electric and Airbnb as using their product, immediately establishing credibility. For a feeling of genuineness, their product tour uses a NASA space mission as the project example, reinforcing the NASA collaboration and showing passion in the uniqueness of each user.
For marketers worrying about hitting their KPIs, six in 10 marketers point to lead generation or conversion as the biggest challenge. By establishing credibility and showing passion for their niche, marketers can better turn content to conversions while delivering ROI.
4. Abundance of Marketing Channels
There’s such an abundance of content channels that marketers rarely referenced them by name in the survey. Google has one mention while Facebook has two mentions. Marketers seem more focused on social sharing in general instead of individually specifying channels. Moreover, the challenges for traffic include having the content go viral, reaching the audience and being visible on search and social media.
It’s a common aim among marketers to produce viral content, which reaches millions of views and generates ample conversation. Mercedes-Benz achieves viral success with its #MBPhotoPass campaign, which began in 2014. The company provides social media influencers with the keys to a Benz, helping them to tell a story using the vehicle. In recent years, they utilized YouTube’s 360-degree video technology, shown in this video featuring Instagram celebrity dog Loki. The campaign generated 173 million impressions and 2.3 million likes/comments.
The ClearVoice survey finds that time, content quality and content, scaling content, idea generation, talent, distribution and strategy to be the biggest challenges to marketing content, in order of mentions, with time having the most mentions. The marketers’ response was to their “biggest challenge” — not their only challenge.
Marketers and brands continue to overcome these challenges, as shown in the above examples, but there remains difficulty among marketers in time management, producing content and establishing credibility across a variety of channels.
