Countless businesses publish and promote content online for their target audience. Known as content marketing, it’s become a leading digital marketing tactic. One of the reasons for its popularity is a high return on investment (ROI). Statistics show that content marketing costs 62 percent less than outbound marketing tactics. However, content marketing has limitations that business owners must overcome to succeed.
Low Visibility
If an article, blog post or any other piece of content only attracts a handful of visitors, it won’t offer much value to the business. Low visibility is a major limitation of content marketing. Thankfully, business owners can increase the visibility of their content by optimizing it for search traffic, sharing it with their followers on social media and including it in email newsletters.
Too Much Content
Publishing more content doesn’t always translate into more sales or better results for businesses. According to the American Marketing Association (AMA), the average consumer is exposed to more than 10,000 messages from businesses each day. To make their message stand out, business owners should publish high-quality content that’s better than their competitors. A single high-quality article is more valuable for businesses than 10 inferior articles.
Audience Distrust
Audience distrust can hinder a business’s content marketing efforts. If visitors don’t trust the business after reading its content, they probably won’t buy its products or services. To make their content more trustworthy, business owners should create well-researched and written pages that project themselves as an expert in their field. Including trust signals like an antivirus badge, BBB logo and visitor comments can also foster trust.
Measuring Success
Another challenge is measuring the success of content. With other digital marketing strategies like pay-per-click (PPC) marketing or social media, business owners can see exactly how many leads or sales a campaign generates using the platform’s built-in analytics. Since content marketing is typically performed on the business’s own website, there are fewer analytics options available. However, business owners can still measure the success of their content marketing strategy by tracking metrics like view count, click-through rate (CTR), average time on page, number of social shares and visitor comments.
Like all marketing tactics, content marketing has limitations. With the right approach, though, business owners can overcome these limitations and differentiate themselves from their competitors.
