4 problems you will face in your content marketing strategy

Just like every garden has its weeds, content marketing has its own problems, and the man in charge of this part of the brand’s communication will have to find the easiest and fastest solution to these problems.

Below, we’ll take a look at the 4 issues that any content creator (for a personal brand or a specific brand) will most certainly face (whether a marketer, someone dedicated in particular to content marketing, social media manager, pr specialist, copywriter, etc.).

1. When there’s too much content

When you have too much firewood, you risk killing the fire because it can’t “breathe” anymore and can’t get the necessary oxygen in order to ignite.

The same goes for your content marketing strategy. When you end up creating too much content, you risk loosing your followers. Why? Because they don’t have the necessary time to “chew” each type of content you publish and they end up frustrated and will eventually give up on following you.

Even I have chosen to unfollow or unlike someone that ended up posting 3 or 4 articles per day on a blog relaunched in the magazine style.

Of course, even though everyone praises and declares that “Content is the King,” I believe that when there’s too much content and too little marketing strategy, the risk of losing over time is a pretty big one.

My recommendation is to find an editorial plan that does not tire the followers, but, at the same time provides the content at an appropriate time.

2. When there’s too much marketing

Don’t get me wrong, I believe in marketing just as I believe in content and I think that these two practices should go hand in hand. But I also believe that when there’s too much of one and too little of the other, something is definitely wrong and money will be thrown out the window.

This usually happens when there’s too much marketing and too little content. Even though lately everybody talks about an increase in content (I’m not going into details of quality vs. quantity), I think we shouldn’t brush past the fact that marketing has evolved as well.

Today’s marketing has evolved and the best practicians in the industry understand what permissive marketing (if you want to read more about permissive marketing I recommend Seth Godin‘s book) and programmatic marketing means (btw, watch out for the replacement of the human part with the programmatic part. I.e. the fact that you schedule automatic messages on Twitter when someone follows you is pretty bad. Don’t let a robot do the part that a human could do 100 times better, and with added emotion), what social media marketing means (retargeting, search retargeting, boosted posts, etc.) and other clever tricks that bring results.

My recommendation is to have a marketing budget for everything that means content that you create and publish. Budget for applications, for creation, for development, advertising and other costs that come with the content marketing strategy.

3. Everywhere and nowhere

This is one of the issues that I see both in small businesses, and large ones. They start being present on all existing social media channels and communicate the same idea, the same content and in the same form.

Maybe this strategy actually works for some, but I believe that each platform has its own audience – with its own needs and desires.

For example, it would be quite unusual to post the same article on LinkedIn and Medium. Why? Because on LinkedIn you have businessmen, business experts who have a particular need (a desire to learn business stuff, to find out information that has a direct or indirect connection with their job), and on Medium you have people looking for stories and inspirational storytelling. Of course, I’m not saying that you cannot post a business oriented article on LinkedIn and then rework this format towards storytelling on Medium, but I do not recommend a copy-paste from your Medium blog to your LinkedIn and, who knows, maybe on Facebook Notes as well.

So perhaps the best strategy would be for you to choose the top 3 social media networks to be present on (let’s call them the top 3 primary networks) and then the next 3 side networks.

4. Visual vs Text vs Audio

That’s going to be a quite difficult problem for whoever is in charge of content marketing strategy. Why? Because visual is as important as text, and audio is starting to grow more and more.

So you can’t say ” I’ll write articles every day on the company’s blog so that it might attract more readers” without paying attention to the image you use for the article and the visual you create to attract people and make them into readers. But you also cannot say “I will invest more in visual than in text so that it might attract more readers on the blog” because they will come to your blog, they will see that the information is weaker than the promise of the visual and they will leave the blog like they came.

So my recommendation is to be just as careful regarding both visual and writing, but keep in mind that audio is on the rise. And maybe the best way to find a balance between these 3 forms of content marketing is for you to take a look at the big players and the way they manage to split between the three.

Conclusion

So as to finish the article in a positive note, I leave you with the following solutions to these problems:

1. Find an ideal balance between content and marketing through an editorial plan and a marketing budget.
2. You don’t have to be present everywhere, but where you are present, you should be the best.
3. The overall quality of visual and text should be the same. And start experimenting with podcasts.