Are content marketers “losin’ it!”?

Virtually everyone in every business feels overwhelmed at one point or more in the work week… or the workday… or by the hour—well, you get the point. But as content marketing continues to play a bigger role in more organizations—and feeding the voraciously hungry content beast becomes increasingly challenging—content marketers are feeling the pain at a whole new level. Yet, according to this Open Letter to B2B Content Marketers, it may be for naught.

 

The rant highlights that, despite the fact only 22% of organizations are seeing success from their B2B content marketing efforts, they continue to spend more money to generate more content—with only 35% taking the time to actually implement a documented strategy. This, according to author Carlos Hidalgo, is the definition of insanity.

 

While we’re not going to come out and say B2B marketers are losin’ it, we fully understand how expanding roles and growing responsibilities can make it easy to lose sight of what’s important: the people reading your content.

 

The power of content marketing comes from providing relevant, informative content to your audience—content that people want to read because it will make their jobs easier, or provide answers to a common challenge, or help them decide which vendor is worthy of their business. This means understanding the people that comprise that audience. It means taking the time to understand their challenges, their favoured forms of content, their preferred means of consuming that content and giving them what they want to ensure they keep coming back for more. Because if they don’t come back for more, it’s hard to imagine the allotted funds for content marketing efforts will stay around forever.

 

We recognize this is easier said than done, which is why a third party perspective can come in handy sometimes. External content generation firms have the benefit of focusing on the task at hand. Because of this, we’re able to see when the tone of an article is off, or the channel isn’t quite right, or a piece of collateral requires a bit more research to provide the level of depth an audience would expect.

 

Being overworked isn’t the same as insanity—although it may feel that way at times. To alleviate some stress, and have a second opinion on hand, it might be worth acquiring a stable of trusted external writers to ensure your content is top-notch. To learn how to do that, check out our ebook The Perfect Fit: How to Outsource Great Writing.