Overcoming the Top 10 Content Strategy Challenges for Marketers

By Jayne Schultheis — If you've ever wondered why your content isn't hitting the mark, you may have some unseen challenges that are preventing the content from reaching your goals. This article offers practical solutions to the many hurdles content marketers face. Together, let's look at how to set the stage for content success by catching potential pitfalls before they affect your bottom line.

Understanding Content Strategy Challenges

The best way to prevent setbacks is to anticipate challenges before they arise.

Understanding your audience

Among the 22% of B2B marketers who said their organization is very or extremely successful, 79% of these top performers most often attribute their success to knowing their audience. But when you think about all the people who could potentially be your "audience," it's easy to get overwhelmed. Who are they? What are their shopping habits? Where are they spending their time online? What kind of budget do they have? There are a million questions you could ask, and answering them involves serious market research. From those insights, along with a thorough analysis of existing customers, you should develop a few different buyer personas — that is, detailed descriptions of your ideal, target customer. When you're trying to find that ideal customer, try using A/B testing to narrow the groups down.

Finding the right marketing channels

This can be a complex challenge, especially given the diversity of platforms available. With each channel catering to different audience demographics and content types, it can be difficult to determine where to invest time and resources. Marketers must consider factors such as audience preferences, engagement levels, and the nature of their content. And this must be done in the ever-evolving landscape of social media, blogs, email, and emerging platforms. Snags in channel selection can lead to ineffective campaigns, wasted budgets, and missed opportunities for engagement.

To choose the right content marketing channels, marketers should start by clearly defining their target audience and understanding where that audience spends their time. Conducting audience research through surveys, social media analytics, and competitor analysis can provide valuable insights into preferred platforms and content consumption habits. You can also test different channels through pilot campaigns to help identify which ones yield the best results.

It’s also beneficial to consider the type of content being created. Visual content may perform better on platforms like Instagram or TikTok, while long-form articles might be more suitable for a company blog or LinkedIn.

Lack of clear goals

When surveyed, among the B2B marketers who said their organization is very or extremely successful, 68% of them attributed their success to content that aligns with the organization’s objectives. You might be confused, thinking, "Isn't my goal just to get people to to buy my product or services?" Yes, that's your over-arching goal. But there can be many steps along the way, including, but not limited to:

• Brand awareness
• Lead generation, conversions, and customer retention
• Customer engagement or education
• Increased website traffic
• Improved SEO rankings
• Establishing thought leadership

Inconsistent brand voice or tone

An inconsistent brand voice or tone can significantly undermine a content marketing strategy, creating confusion and diluting brand identity. When different pieces of content convey varying tones—whether overly formal, casual, humorous, or serious—it can lead to mixed messages that frustrate audiences. This inconsistency can make it difficult for customers to understand what the brand stands for. It weakens their trust and emotional connection. Over time, this can result in diminished brand loyalty as consumers struggle to recognize the brand in a sea of competing voices.

Moreover, an inconsistent brand voice can hinder marketing campaigns. Content that lacks a cohesive tone may fail to resonate with the target audience, resulting in lower engagement rates and missed opportunities for conversion. If a brand’s communication shifts erratically across different channels or campaigns, it may also create a fragmented customer experience, where individuals feel disconnected from the brand's values and messaging. Maintaining a consistent voice and tone is crucial for reinforcing brand identity, ensuring clarity, and fostering deeper relationships with audiences.

AI

One of the biggest content marketing challenges facing companies presently is how to incorporate artificial intelligence into their processes. Nearly half of content marketers use AI to brainstorm new topics and 46% use it to research headlines and keywords. More than one-third (36%) use AI tools for writing, though many feel conflicted about the idea. Companies and consumers alike are grappling with the ethics and practicality of AI in marketing.

But there's a lot more to AI than just hitting a button and generating text. AI can be used in countless ways throughout your processes, even in analytics. At Rellify, we've harnessed the power of AI to make topic and keyword research exponentially more effective. With a Relliverse™, customized for your brand, you can easily discover topics and keywords that are already doing well within your industry niche. Then, you can create content that's poised to climb the SERP rankings and be better found by your target audience.

Competitors

The digital landscape is saturated with content vying for audience attention. With countless brands producing similar types of content, it's hard to stand out. This saturation not only makes it challenging to capture potential customers' interest but also raises the stakes for quality and originality. Content marketers must consistently innovate and find unique angles to differentiate their messages. This requires a deep understanding of both their audience and their competitors’ strategies.

Additionally, competitors often engage in aggressive SEO tactics, making it harder for new or smaller brands to rank highly on search engines. They may also leverage social media and paid advertising more effectively. Content marketers must not only focus on creating high-quality content but also continuously monitor competitors’ activities, adapt to shifting trends, and invest in strategic promotion to maintain visibility in a crowded market.

A thorough competitor keyword analysis can also be a helpful strategy. This is the process of examining the keywords that your competitors target in their online content and SEO strategies. This helps you identify opportunities and threats in your own SEO strategy. A competitor keyword analysis can lead to a boost in your SEO when you successfully identify high-value keywords that your competitors are ranking for, then target similar terms with your own optimized content.

Tight budgets

Demand for high-quality content is high, but budgets are tight. Only 45% expect their content spend to ‌increase this year — a 13% drop from the 2023 survey. It's no secret that many companies are cutting their teams to skeleton crews and looking ways to save money. But when it comes to content marketing, you have to be careful where you cut corners.

A colleague of mine recently started a small business, and when asked how they intended to fill out their website with content, they said they asked ChatGPT for a list of topics and had it write the articles, too. This is an example of how you should not cut corners. Not only does a tool like ChatGPT lack the insights regarding SEO topics and keywords, it also generates its content based on pre-set algorithms and formulas. That sort of content is unlikely to ranked highly by search engines, nor ever be found and read.  

Marketers can adopt several strategies to maximize thin budgets, including:

• Prioritize content that offers the highest ROI, like evergreen pieces that remain relevant over time and user-generated content that leverages customer contributions.
• Repurpose existing content into different formats. For example,  turn a blog post into an infographic and cross-promote posts  on different platforms.
• Use cost-effective tools and platforms for content creation and distribution.
• Leverage organic social media reach.

Remember, the amount of time and effort you put into making content will be reflected in your returns.

Understanding and managing analytics

Analytics are a huge part of a healthy content strategy. They can help you zero in on what's working, what isn't working, and how to modify your strategy to improve your ROI.

While eight in 10 content marketers use content analytics to decide what to create, three-quarters of them aren’t sure of how that content performs. Interpreting vast amounts of data and translating insights into actionable strategies is a huge task. Without a solid grasp of data interpretation, marketers risk making decisions based on incomplete or misleading information, which can lead to ineffective campaigns and wasted resources.  

To tackle these challenges, marketers can leverage a variety of user-friendly analytics tools that simplify data analysis and visualization. Google Analytics is a powerful option for tracking website performance, providing insights into visitor behavior, traffic sources, and conversion rates. For social media analytics, platforms like Hootsuite or Buffer offer comprehensive dashboards that allow marketers to monitor engagement metrics and audience demographics across multiple channels. Tools like HubSpot and Semrush provide integrated solutions for content performance tracking and SEO analytics.

Rellify can pull analytic insights on content performance directly into the platform after publishing so you can plan, write, monitor all in one place. By using the right tools and prioritizing ongoing education in data analysis, marketers can develop a more nuanced understanding of their performance metrics and make informed decisions.

Difficulty keeping up with changes in the market

Rapid shifts in consumer behavior, technology, and search engine algorithms require constant adaptation and agility. What worked yesterday in terms of content formats or distribution channels may quickly become outdated as new trends emerge or audience preferences evolve. Anyone who's keeping up with the recent innovations in AI can tell you that. Marketers must continuously monitor these changes and be willing to pivot strategies, which can strain resources and complicate planning.

Additionally, the proliferation of new platforms and tools can make it hard for marketers to determine where to focus their efforts. Marketers face the challenge of mastering various formats and integrating them into a cohesive strategy. This constant need for education, experimentation, and optimization can lead to burnout and frustration, especially for smaller teams or organizations with limited resources. Ultimately, success in this dynamic environment hinges on the ability to embrace change and leverage insights effectively while maintaining a clear vision and consistent brand messaging.

Ineffective content planning

Ineffective content planning can severely hinder a content marketer's ability to execute successful campaigns. Without a clear strategy, marketers may produce content that lacks focus, fails to address audience needs, or misses key deadlines. This disorganization can lead to inconsistent messaging, wasted resources, and missed opportunities for engagement. When content is created on an ad-hoc basis, it often lacks cohesion, which can confuse audiences and weaken brand identity.

To overcome these challenges, marketers should implement a structured content planning process that includes:

• Setting clear objectives and KPIs
• Identifying target audiences
• Developing a content calendar
• Setting editorial guidelines
• Establishing a workflow for the content lifecycle
• Potential for scalability

This type of roadmap will help you keep content aligned with the brand’s goals and schedule a campaign to maximize reach and engagement. Regularly reviewing and adjusting the content plan based on performance metrics can also help marketers stay agile and responsive to changing audience preferences.

Preventing and overcoming content strategy challenges with the experts at Rellify

Rellify has helped many companies with their content marketing efforts and assisted them in setting and achieving their specific goals.

With an interactive content calendar for planning, expert topic and keyword research, and analytics pulled directly into the platform, you can seamlessly prevent and overcome any content challenges you might face.

And with a Relliverse™, you can harness the power of customized AI and deep machine learning to find topics and keywords that will naturally position your content higher in SERP rankings and resonate with your target audience.

Ready to find out more? Contact a Rellify expert today for a brief demo and learn exactly how Rellify can transform your content strategy, processes, and returns.