All companies know the importance of content marketing but more than half of those same companies find it challenging. According to a recent survey, 64 percent of those businesses asked, felt creating content was a major hurdle.

A recent article discussed what Content Marketing Institute and MarketingProfs’ survey found to be the best tricks to have a successful marketing plan.

Here is the good, the bad, and the ugly of how you can make your content marketing more efficient and productive:

Employ a Dedicated Creator for Your Content. This is a no brainer. Having someone on staff, full-time, to manage your content marketing means consistent fluid content. This person is an obvious resource for the company. The only down fall is this person could come at a hefty price tag. The important thing to remember is your ROI. Content marketing is worth this investment.

Think Outside the Box: Crowdsourcing. In this case, outside the box really means outside the marketing department. Sometimes content marketing comes from other areas of the company.
No one knows your customers like your customer service department, right? So why not make them regular contributors to your company’s blog. The only trouble will be streamlining your content and ensuring each piece, from varying departments within your company, have the same tone. You need to maintain a similar style and tone.

Crowdsourcing can also be done outside your company with agencies that specialize in delivering content. This can be a great idea as you move back and forth with how you grow your content marketing strategy but can be costly and impact the overall voice of your brand.

Get Consumer Content. This can be a great tool to actively engage customer by allowing them to share their own stories of your products and services. The only downfall may be that this particular aspect of content marketing can be very time consuming. After all, tracking down customers willing to tell their story, write their story, and then share it on a regular basis may be difficult to mainstream.

Pay For Content. If you are short on time but can afford it, paying for quality content using various licensed media properties could be an option. While this gives you a quick way to deliver content to your targeted audience it falls short on results as far as SEO is concerned. These licensed content articles aren’t indexed.

Curate Other Content. This won’t cost you as much as licensed content and could be equally as time saving. However, the process is difficult to automate. It takes time to develop quality content and make it fit your current format.

Content marketing is great if you can find some sort of consistency. Let us help you find what works for you. The team at Susan J. Campbell Copywriting Solutions can help develop a long-term strategy with the commitment to product the quality content you need to get your brand up and going.