Being a content marketer is hard. I know that first hand! There is a ton of content to create, your strategy needs to be coordinated with various teams and internal customers, you need to know exactly the right content to create for the right buyer, and you need to provide it to that buyer at the right time. Plus, content creation can be a manual and creative process that simply takes time.
In my experience and in speaking to numerous content marketers over the years, here are some top content marketing productivity killers:
1. Too Much Guessing
When creating content, a big productivity killer is creating content based on your best guess instead of making data-driven decisions. As content marketers, there are a variety of elements to creating a content strategy: business priorities, industry trends, internal stakeholders needs, and so on. But, sometimes the decisions about what to create can be best guesses vs. decisions based on historical data about what content drives the most traffic, shares, leads, and revenue. And of course creating content based on best guesses is a huge productivity killer since you are not spending your time creating the right type of content that will ultimately move the needle for your business.
Instead of playing the guessing game, content marketers need to make sure they are tracking metrics on a regular basis throughout the entire sales funnel. Additionally, benchmarking content against your competitor content is a great way to see what your buyers react to and consume.
2. Coordinating Writers and Content Contributors is Tough
It takes time to manage a team of writers. It takes time to coordinate different tasks like creating outlines, writing, editing, reviews, and design. Many content organizations today are simply doing this type of coordination through email and spreadsheets, which can get confusing (and I know this from personal experience). Content marketers are asking themselves questions like “where is that ebook?”, “has it been edited?”, “is it in design?”.
Content marketers should become more sophisticated and implement tools that help them produce content more efficiently. There are many platforms, like Captora, and other project management tools that can help make the process of coordinating content much more efficient, manageable, and scalable.
3. Too Much Content, Not Enough Views
You are creating what seems like a lot of content—ebooks, slide decks, infographics, and so on, but your content is not being consumed. Clearly, the right buyers are not finding you online. Spending time creating a lot of content that isn’t resonating or isn’t even seen by your audience is a huge productivity killer. Coordinate with your teams to ensure content is distributed across the right channels, and make sure that your teams are using your content in campaigns at scale. For new content assets, consider promoting them through email, social, paid campaigns on search, organic campaigns on search, paid programs like content syndication and sponsored emails and your blog.
And then once your content does start being consumed track the piece and the campaign that generates the most leads and revenue.
4. Trouble Coordinating Content and Demand Generation Teams
Every company is organized differently. Sometimes content is on the demand gen team, sometimes it is on product marketing, sometimes it is on communications, and sometimes it is on an island of its own. But one of the most critical connections is between your content and demand generation teams. Content is created largely to support lead generation and lead nurturing programs within the organization, so it becomes problematic when the two teams aren’t aligned. And by alignment I mean demand generation should be in the know about what the content team is creating, and content needs to know what campaigns demand gen is running so that the two teams can be in sync for content needs. When this does not happen you end up with content that does not have a promotional plan, and promotional plans that do not include the right content.
Both teams should be in tight alignment with one another because content drives leads and provides color to a demand generation campaign.
Want to learn more about how to understand what your buyers are searching for and how to create content-driven campaigns at scale? Be sure to check out Captora’s webinar with Innotas, to learn how to attract and convert more top-of-funnel buyers.
I’d love to hear what kills your content productivity and how you’ve found a way to overcome it in the comments below:
By: Dayna Rothman
This content was originally published here.