With a changing buyer’s journey and better tools to deliver a cohesive customer experience, marketers have more means—and responsibility—than ever to engage prospects with meaningful, educational assets that deliver true value.
Unfortunately, like everything that sounds too good to be true, many marketers are running into similar obstacles that all have one outcome: content that doesn’t hit at the heart of its intended strategic purpose.
Either it fails to engage the right prospects, it’s never even seen, or—worst of all—it confuses leads with a misaligned message that ultimately loses a potential customer.
What Prevents Marketers from Creating Successful Content?
Of course, creating effective content isn’t a 1-2-3-done process. It takes strategic planning, aligned execution, and thoughtful analysis. But it’s also not a magical art that only a chosen few can master. At least, it doesn’t have to be.
There are a few key obstacles that block even the best marketers from executing fantastic marketing campaigns. Once overcome, the marketing team can function as a well-oiled machine, consistently rolling out content that moves prospects down the funnel and helps further business objectives.
With that, let’s meet the villains of the marketing fairy tale.
The Problem: Lack of Visibility
Speaking of a lack of information, blindness to what efforts are actually going on within your organization is a huge barrier to success. This happens when different teams are using multiple platforms (or even their personal hard drive—gasp!) to store and share content, and it royally messes with analytics.
The Problem: Silos
I went to an agricultural school, so it wasn’t until my career started that silo took on its true insidious meaning. When you’re working in a silo, you don’t have access to leadership’s business objectives or how teams are supposed to work towards those goals. This core lack of information from leadership trickles down to everyone, setting the example of not sharing practices and responsibilities between or even within teams.
The Problem: Wasted Content
When you can’t see what’s going on in your organization, guess what happens? You have an amazing idea for an asset, work on it like crazy for a month, and then deliver to your team only to hear the asset is a less-developed version of what was launched the month before you were hired.
Deep breaths, marketers.
You don’t have to live like this anymore.
The Ultimate Solution: a Content Operation
Here’s the thing: organizations work best when everyone rows together toward a defined goal, with full visibility into assets and teams’ efforts. Maybe that should go without saying, but see how I’m allowing you full visibility into my train of thought here?
I’d love to give you an easy 1-2-3 step plan to vanquish these villainous blockers to marketing wins. But, like most good things, it’s going to take some work. We’ve seen it time and time again with the thousands of marketers we work with—the only sustainable fix is a change in strategic thinking.
Effective marketing teams don’t just create content that magically addresses business objectives, aligns with other team’s efforts, and speaks directly to the prospect reading it.
And—take this from a marketer at a software company selling marketing software—purchasing more and more technology isn’t going to be the fix, either. AI might be getting better, but technology isn’t going to be able to do a marketer’s job (woohoo for job security!).
Remember those thousands of marketers I mentioned? We’ve seen the same story among them, again and again. They have the pain points I listed above, without any real concept of the root problem: limited processes in place to support the growing content demands of a personalized customer experience. Of course, more content isn’t always better, but the right content takes thoughtful effort to produce.
So, marketers, if you’re struggling with these core problems, chances are there are few leaks in your content operation. Here are some things you might be lacking:
- Full buy-in from leadership and all stake holders
- Consistent processes implemented in a content team
- Technology that supports visibility, creation, and strategic alignment
If you’re missing buy-in, the first step is to prove the business need for a content operation. From there, check out our many resources on how to effectively implement a content operation. It’s time to remove the barriers to marketing success—what are you waiting for?