Content Marketing Challenges of MSMEs

As leaders of emerging enterprises or new businesses are you concerned about the content marketing challenges that keep you up at night?

Me included, we as solopreneurs or startup owners have enough on our hands to keep us preoccupied with bettering our service/product – let alone have time for content marketing.

Even if we do so, the amount of time creating good quality content and sharing it on social platforms is enormous – leaving us exhausted.

You are not alone, and we hear you. This article below captures some of the key content marketing challenges that you as leaders are facing and how you can counter it. Check it out!

#Challenge 1: Creating consistent and good quality content

Rolling out a few content assets enthusiastically in the beginning and then completely forgetting about it is not uncommon. Imagine a keen prospect landing on your website and reading a blog that was posted five years back. Can there be a worse put off than this? So, if you are having a website, keep it current, keep it relevant.

Here are ways to overcome this challenge:

1. Identify a member from your team who has a flair for writing and has a grip on the subject matter who can pen, if not phenomenal but purposeful content. Tie it to his/her KPIs and ensure they are rewarded and recognized for penning good quality content.
2. Build a content calendar that is realistic and factors in upcoming events and milestones and then work backwards to build the requisite content assets. Planning is the key element to address the problem of inconsistency.
3. Hire a freelance writer to work in tandem with your organization objectives, and bring them up to speed with your products and services. Collaboration is important and you will have to ensure they are firmly integrated into your organization developments.

Of course, all this depends on how much budget you can allocate for this function – and accordingly you can opt for one or all of the above.

#Challenge 2: Content unable to penetrate the target segment

Having done all of the above business leaders are frustrated by the lack of lead generation. And I have seen this happen often where they lament on the lack of ROI for content marketing initiatives. As a result they drop this completely and go back to focusing on product betterment. Again, this is not a good practice, and its important to see what course corrections that can be done rather than giving up.

Here are ways to overcome this challenge:

1. Researching sufficiently on customer complaints and prospect problems and addressing them through content assets certainly would help. The more your content collaterals are aligned to market needs the more they will be read and shared. So, keep an ear to the ground.
2. Sharing it on the right platform is equally important as creating them. When a simple WhatsApp flier would suffice to address a particular problem don’t waste your time creating a complicated infographic to be posted on your website. Quick call to actions should be relayed to your content and design team to come up with something that is swiftly sharable.
3. Produce content aligned to the consumer purchase journey. Sometimes what you consider the basics of your product is what a prospect is searching for online. And when he/she hits your site and discovers this content that is bang on in what they are looking for, matchmaking happens. So, stop building content that your boss wants instead create what the buyer wants.

#Challenge 3: Lack of strategic business goals orientation

If content is not aligned to what the business wants to achieve then there is no point in a content marketing function. As organizations grow and expand the business priorities change and silos happen. When content marketing gets disconnected from sales, leadership and other teams they end up producing content that in unaligned to business outcomes.

Here are ways to overcome this challenge:

1. Constant interaction between teams spanning content marketing, sales, IT and others to ensure there is perfect alignment. Leadership involvement is significant to establish the big picture so that content team precisely knows what their content intent is.
2. Room for innovation is the needs of the hour, with so many advancements in technology and scope for creativity. Content marketing team should be up to speed to experiment with tools and hacks to make content production pointed and purposeful.
3. Repurposing must be factored instead of always creating chunks of content afresh. Many a times without a content audit some new pieces of content is rolled out to a customer who may have a copy of the old collaterals. That’s a spoiler. A master content repository with a chief content officer who has the knowledge of the client being serviced and the collateral he/she requires is a smart move.

The content marketing challenges that MSMEs and StartUps face are more and complicated. The above is top few that most of the organizations are grappling with.

That said, if your content marketing team has a clear direction and is aligned to the strategic goals of your organization then it can definitely unfold multiple benefits such as lead generation, brand awareness, product education, peer recognition, industry body association and overall recognition and reputation.