Have you ever wondered what stops business owners from creating their own content marketing? Some may not know how, or fear their content wouldn’t be any good. Barriers can be mental, practical, or logistical. But content marketing barriers should not stop you from creating.
The power of content marketing to spread awareness of your business and brand means getting through all barriers is valuable. Consider these six common barriers stopping business owners from completing their content marketing goals, and how to break through!
What You Need To Make Good Content
Think about what you need to create quality content marketing. Beyond the essentials like a device to make and upload the content with, or some level of skill perhaps in writing, what is required of the content marketer?
Time, of course. You would be unlikely to create much content without the time to literally create it. But do you have that time? If you’re busy running a business, how often will you want to spend any of your leftover free time for content marketing?
Breaking Through: Perhaps the answer to this first barrier is too obvious for many business owners, but the solution will be to do the same thing you do every time you need more time in the day. You hire someone or outsource!
If you wanted to write the content marketing yourself, go ahead, but consider this: your time as a business owner is worth money. Spending time writing for yourself, unless you truly love to do so, will often cost you more than spending money to have someone else do the writing.
The Key: If you’ve never tried writing content marketing before and you have the time, give it a shot. You may love this form of building your brand just as much as you love running your business, and alternating between the two can make for a healthy balance. But if you don’t have the time or don’t enjoy it, spend a little money to outsource and watch the content roll in.
Creating Consistently Great Content
Anyone can write a few words and call that content, some of which will even get recognized as good material that helps their brand or supports an idea. Yet the true mastery of content marketing comes from writing great, high-quality content so often that people begin to associate you and your brand with good content.
This consistency in quality is a big part of great content marketing, but is it possible? As content marketers know, you will be encouraged to create content every day, at least! Even professional writers don’t write bestsellers every day.
Breaking Through: Great writing doesn’t come from a great idea, or from too much research, or from getting in the right state of mind before you start. No, good writing comes from a lot of writing.
The creation of content marketing is a skill like any other, one which you must practice to get better at. Great writing is what you pull from a lot of good writing.
The Key: Consistent quality in content marketing comes from practice, plain and simple. So just start! Keep creating and eventually, you will be producing high-quality content
Being Heard Among The Crowd
There’s a lot of content marketing being published every day. The internet is full of content, much of which could be said to be content marketing for someone.
If your content isn’t seen by anyone, what’s the point? Did you post content only to be missed by everyone except your friends who already know about your business? Will your content be forgotten in the wave of content coming tomorrow, the next day, and the day after that?
Breaking Through: Try not to underestimate the potential of your content. Yes, you could go unnoticed for quite some time. But the moment your content is seen, two things can happen if you’ve been creating consistently good content.
First, a piece of content might go viral and reach far more people than expected. No one really knows what will happen and so your content has a chance of being right on topic in some way that a lot of people can relate to.
Second, when people notice one thing they are also likely to look back through your archive of content. This demonstrates ability to produce thought-leadership material, authority in your space, and credibility that you know what you’re talking about!
The Key: While going viral could be awesome – don’t let that be the goal. Keep the quality of your content consistently high so that when one piece of content marketing gets noticed, the past and future of your content has a better chance to be seen too.
Focusing Content On What Matters
There are many forms your content marketing can take. Articles and blogs, video and photos and podcasting, fun versus educational content, direct brand marketing which might bring in partners and employees, and even old-fashioned marketing to bring in potential customers.
So which kind of content marketing needs to be first? Do you focus on one form at a time until each seems to stop helping, or try to do a little of everything and look for what works best?
Breaking Through: When you need a plan for your content marketing, the best ideas will come from the people paying you. Your customers have things they want to learn, and your goal with content marketing should be to think of them. Asking isn’t a bad idea, but hopefully, you know them well enough to have some general ideas.
Focus on answering their questions, providing them education on the things that matter most to them and above all, make them feel like digesting your content helped them and provided value to them.
The Key: Don’t think about what you should create, or what would make you look best, or what would fit your business. Good content makes your brand look great no matter what form, so the only thing to consider is what kind of content is best for helping your current and potential customer base with their questions about you.
Finding Your Brand’s Tone And Voice
Along with what kind of content you’ll publish, you’ll probably also be considering the style. Will your marketing be emotionally soft or loud? Stoic or gushing? Plain or just a little fancy?
The fastest way to turn customers away from your content marketing is to create something which feels wrong for your business. Some tones fit a brand perfectly while the exact same tone for a different business would make people wince or roll their eyes. You don’t want to associate your brand with pain-inducing content, so what can you do?
Breaking Through: The answer is a lot simpler, actually, and is one of the things many businesses gain naturally over time. Every brand has a voice that naturally fits and which can be applied to any kind of content marketing.
If your business is just starting out, you have a little freedom here to experiment with your brand’s voice. Try creating an ideal customer profile who can then speak to your customers as one of them. Or consider the kind of voice that most people expect from your type of business, and alter that over time to become unique.
The Key: Don’t stress too much about finding your brand voice. A good voice will find you, just as long as you listen. Think about what your brand represents and the best outcomes your business can achieve, then describe the voice that comes to you first.
Bringing Content To The Right Platform
So you’ve got content, you’re feeling confident about the quality, and there’s even a good voice starting to form. But … where should you publish? Everywhere? Only the platforms you already use? Some website you’ve heard is good for getting brand recognition?
There are risks to many of the options here. Publishing literally everywhere you can find would be an almost infinite task. The platforms you already use could help you learn where and how to post content, but you probably want to spread out to the places you’re not already on.
Breaking Through: Not all platforms are created equally, and some are simply better for certain kinds of content than others. So the answer certainly won’t be to post your content everywhere, though you can adjust the content to match each platform and then have outgoing links which point curious people to the best form of that content.
Consider hiring a social media manager to watch the various places you drop content marketing. They can do the work of responding to people, noticing when good things happen, or just posting little pieces of content throughout the day to balance out the larger posts you write.
The Key: Posting content in more places will be better, so your goal should be to look at what form of content is best for your business and brand, then create that content and post to the platform which is best for that form. Don’t think about the platform, think about the content.
Your Bonus Key
With all this to consider, you might be thinking the idea of outsourcing your content marketing to a team sounds pretty great. We can help! At Breezy, we specialize in helping to identify the best content marketing for you. Our Content Creators are ready to create consistently great content marketing that will stand out and match your brand, audience, voice, and preferred platform. Contact us to learn more!
