More Answers to Your Top Content Marketing Challenges

Don’t Worry – Here are Some Content Marketing Tips
I recently polled a group of content marketers in order to better understand the top challenges in content marketing. Last week I shared 6 tips for the top 2 content marketing challenges.

Here are the top challenges by your vote:

1. Driving More Traffic – 33.33%
2. Boosting Customer Engagement – 22.22%
3. Getting Support from those Outside of the Marketing Department – 11.11%
4. Achieving More with Less – 11.11%
5. Lack of Time/Budget – 11.11%
6. Lack of the Right Staff – 11.11%

In this post I will provide some suggestions to solve your top third and fourth issues.
Getting Support from Outside of the Marketing Department
In many startup and expansion stage tech companies, the marketing department is often limited to one to three individuals. It is imperative to utilize other members of an organization for this reason. You will find that widening the content responsibilities to those in sales and customer service may provide more insightful and compelling content since these are the people that communicate with customers and prospects (ahem, your target audience!) every day.That could be a surefire way to boost customer engagement! So how do you get these people involved anyway? Here are 3 quick tips to get people outside of marketing involved in your content development efforts:

1. Get support from the top down. It is critical that your CEO explains the importance of content marketing to the entire firm.A great setting for this could be during an annual planning meeting. I would recommend to take it a step further and have your CEO (or department head) build content marketing into everyone’s goals in some shape or form. For example, each member of the company is required to write a blog post on a regular basis OR each member of the sales team is required to identify and secure a customer for a case study each quarter.
2. Start small.  Requiring all employees to contribute to a massive content marketing strategy may be a daunting task. So avoid it. Instead, require that each employee participate in a corporate blog. If your team is large enough, it may be as little as submitting a blog post on a monthly basis. And don’t worry about not having content for videos, articles, podcasts, and ebooks – a corporate blog is a wonderful idea generator for future content projects. For a complete guide on starting a corporate blog program, download our ebook.
3. Hold contests to boost motivation. Sometimes all it takes is a little competition to get everyone excited and involved. Create a competition around which blogger can get the most pageviews in a week or month. At the end of the competition award the top blogger with a prize such as an extra vacation day or nice bottle of wine. At OpenView, we saw a huge boost in participation when we held a blogging competition last year. For more tips, check out this article I wrote for the Content Marketing Institute.

Achieving More with Less
Similarly, in many startup and expansion stage companies the marketing budget is small. This leads to the small team sizes I just wrote about, but it also leads to getting creative. So how can you create and market more content with less human capital, time, and money? Here are 3 quick tips to start doing more with less:

1. Use freelancers. Hiring cost efficient freelancers can be a great way to complete more work in a shorter period of time without having to hire another internal team member. We have had success finding freelance copywriters on Craigslist that won’t break the bank. If you are ready to start outsourcing some of your content development, check out my tips on finding freelancers.
2. Repurpose and recycle content. A great way to do more with less is to repurpose. Take the ideas from the blog posts your team is writing and work with a freelancer on doing some research to create a longer form article or report. This is a great way to save on some human capital and time since your team may not be able to dedicate time to writing a longer form article. Here are 4 steps on repurposing blogs into articles.
3.  Curate. Curate. Curate. Chances are there are several other great resources online that are blogging or otherwise creating content for your target audience. Instead of trying one of these sources, curate content from them. Content curation can often be completed more easily, quickly, and cheaply than creating something new from scratch. To make curation even easier, encourage your company to flag great resources for your target audience and use a freelancer to summarize and add commentary to the content. For more tips on content curation, read this post.

Next week I will share the final tips to solve your top content marketing challenges.