The bottlenecks of content marketing

We’re told all the time how ‘content is king’ and that utilizing content marketing strategies is going to pay off when it comes to growing our businesses. And, of course, that’s right. Content marketing is massively important and sits right at the heart of most digital marketing campaigns. It’s all about getting valuable, insightful, usable content in front of those who are going to benefit from it the most, and then encouraging those people to buy from you, a feat that is much more easily achieved when the content has done most of the persuading for you.
Yet although it’s clear that content marketing (in the form of blogs, videos, eBooks, and even social media posts) is crucial, it isn’t without its issues, and unless you’re an absolute expert, those issues – or bottlenecks – are going to hold you back quite significantly. This is why it’s best to hire an agency to create your content for you, or at least help you when you need assistance. Read on to find out more about exactly why this is the case.

Increasing Competition

Websites are easier than ever to set up (although good websites are a different matter), and if you want to start blogging about something, you can be doing so in a matter of minutes. If you can, that means plenty of other people can too, and therein lies the problem; competition. With millions of websites being created every day, there are sure to be others who are creating the same kind of content as you. Plus, whatever content you’re creating, there will be others who have been doing so for a long time already, and who have a big following.

Many business owners find they’re stuck between the two; they find it hard to compete with the established businesses, and they find it hard to rise above the crowd due to the number of new sites coming online.

An agency can make a big difference here. The content you publish has to be the very best, and even if it’s similar to what someone else is writing about or making videos about or posting about, if yours is better, it is much more likely to be seen. Hiring a professional to help you means that there is a bigger chance of this happening.

Ambitious Publishing Schedules

Quality is important when it comes to content marketing, but so too is quantity, and you can’t have one without the other if you want to be successful. Unfortunately, the punishing publishing schedules that business owners can make for themselves are just not sustainable when you take into account all the other tasks that have to be done to grow – or even maintain – a business.

Eventually, something will have to give. Either you will start creating less, or the quality of what you’re creating will suffer. In some cases, when business owners are extremely busy, there might be fewer pieces of content and they are of a lower quality. In all these cases, your content marketing is suffering, and therefore so is your business.

An agency can take the burden away from you. Using an agency to outsource your content creation to means that you don’t even have to think about it anymore. You can focus purely on your business, and let the agency create high-quality content to your specific schedule.

Focusing Too Broadly

A common mistake that business owners make is making their content too broad. When this happens, your target audience won’t stick with you – although some of the content you produce will be just what they want to see, much of it won’t be, and this scattergun approach, trying to please everyone and draw in as many people as possible to your site, your products, and your services, means you miss the mark more often than not.

Conversely, by being too narrow in your focus you can also have a problem. Too narrow means that although your audience is going to remain loyal, enjoying piece after piece of content because it speaks to exactly what they are interested in, there won’t be enough of them. Too small a niche and your audience will be too small too, and your business won’t grow even if you do make sales.

When you engage an agency to help with your content marketing, you can be more confident in what your business is creating in terms of content. An agency will have the skills and knowledge required to research exactly the type of content that will work best for your business and create that content to a high standard.

Impatience

Content marketing is something that can really drive your business to success. It can take it to new heights. It can make you different, needed, it can make dreams come true. Assuming you get it right, that is. And assuming you can be patient. Because this is an important point about content marketing; the results are not going to come in overnight. In fact, it can take some time to build an audience and prove to them that you can be consistent in your content marketing efforts.

Even if you’ve been posting every day for months, you might not yet have hit the sweet spot in terms of breaking through and making a name for yourself. This is where many business owners fail; they give up because they are being impatient. They stop just short of what they might have been because they’re not seeing results.

Now, a good content marketing agency is not necessarily going to be able to make the positive results come any more quickly (although it will if the problem is due to quality, quantity, or any of the other issues mentioned above), but it will be able to create a plan with a timeline that a business owner can understand. By tamping down the impatience factor, the content marketing agency can go about its business, offering excellent content to its clients, knowing that change will come. And the business owners themselves will be much more content to wait it out, knowing there is a structured plan in place.

Conclusion

When it comes to content marketing, an agency really is your best option. Although there is a cost associated with outsourcing and working in this way, it’s a cost that can be outweighed by the positives that an agency can bring. If you want to grow your business, you’ll need to spend money somewhere, and content marketing is the best choice you have.