A recent survey by ThoughtStarters shows that over 85% of B2B buyers believe the quality of content they receive is of poor quality & does not demonstrate thought leadership effectively.

Biggest Content Marketing Challenges:

1. Producing the kind of content that engages prospects/customers
2. Producing enough content
3. Budget to produce content
4. Lack of buy-in/vision from higher-ups inside your company
5. Producing a variety of content
6. Budget to license content

While the investments in content marketing is increasing leaps and bounds year on year, may be it is time for marketers to pause and ask themselves, “Is this really working?” The fact remains that there still exists a proven process of content marketing that can help grow your business. So how can marketers crack this? Here are 3 things to fix if your content isn't working. 

1. Research & Listen To Your Audience

The popular belief that content creation doesn’t cost money and the availability of free tools and publishing platforms has resulted in easy-to-produce, repetitive information in volumes! But, this form of content marketing doesn’t connect well with your potential target audience. This leaves you thinking, “why isn’t my content generating ROI?” Creating quality content requires one to focus around research, listening and being empathetic.

2. Create Targeted Content With a Purpose

There’s no substitute for capturing mind share to capture market share. However, the key is to create focused content and schedule it in the right frequency (probably once a week) so that your audience will see real value in it and will look forward to receiving content from you every week! Identify the buyer persona you want to target and custom create your content to meet that persona along their buying journey. Those are characters whose attention you aim to capture and whose challenges you aim to address.

If you content marketing is for everybody, it's for nobody. Joe Pulizzi 

3. Map A Content Character

One size fits all doesn’t augur well for content development. Hence it is important to maintain a content calendar so that you have clear visibility into the type of content being created or promoted at any given point of time targeting a specific buyer persona. So before you start creating content for the week, ask yourself “ Who do you want to create content for this week?” In your content calendar, map who you’re serving, so that you speak to that buyer persona regularly, but there’s no need to be too strict about it and you can make exceptions to the schedule basis business priorities for that month.

Conclusion

It’s important to have precise information about each buyer persona with respect to how they think, feel, see and do things. By spending time to get deeper insights into your buyer persona you can ensure that any content asset you are creating- be it articles, podcasts, videos etc feels like it has been specifically created for them and is offering insights to address their challenges or priorities. This will ensure there is better engagement for your content and thereby offers better ROI.