The rallying cry of Jason Nesmith (played by Tim Allen) in the movie Galaxy Quest was "Never give up! Never surrender!"—which are excellent words of advice for many content marketers. One of the biggest challenges facing content marketers is that too often their executive management is looking for instant results and therefore struggles to buy into the basic tenets of content marketing, i.e. it is a long-term strategy of producing quality content customers crave, not a short-term campaign. Another huge challenge is often that the content marketer is completely overwhelmed and cannot keep up with the demand. The "never give up" advice is equally important in that case as well.
But in both cases, "Never give up! Never Surrender!" is easier to say than it is to adhere to.
Get Executive Buy-In for Content Marketing
Unless the driving force behind your content marketing efforts happens to be your CEO or someone else in your C-level, you might be faced with pushback from the top. Top management is geared to want to see the ROI of all substantial investments, and while less expensive than traditional advertising, content marketing is a long-term commitment. Realizing the results within your measurement tools can take time to establish.
We would recommend making sure that you have executive buy-in before you ever embark upon a content marketing strategy. Today there is a significant amount of substantive data that can be used to make a compelling case for content marketing, and it is worth taking the time to persuade your management of the real and striking benefits of a successful content marketing effort.
One of the devices we often use when beginning the discussion about the profound importance of inbound and content marketing today is to ask our clients' executive management one simple question: "When you have decided that you are interested in buying or learning about a product or service, what do you do first?" Invariably, the answer is going to sound something like "I Google it!" To which your answer should be an immediate and emphatic, "Exactly! And that's where inbound and content marketing come into play." Now, they may indeed have already committed to SEO and website upgrades, etc., so that's certainly not likely to be the end of the discussion, but it is a great springboard from which to begin the process of educating and persuading. If you proceed with content marketing efforts without first getting this buy-in, you do so at the risk of ultimate surrender.
Build a Team and/or Outsource
We often talk about the importance of developing a robust content marketing team or considering outsourcing. It can certainly be a challenge to fill all the roles that are important to the success of a solid inbound/content marketing program. But take heart. You likely have great resources and possibly a big cache of content already. You just may not have looked at it that way. Remember though, your content should be geared toward educating and benefiting your prospective customers in their language, not just "selling" them with flashy marketing-speak or boring them to death with internal technical-speak.
And while the long list of roles may seem daunting, certainly many of them initially may be filled by only a handful of internal folks. You may even discover that your C-suite can produce some pretty amazing content (even if not polished prose). Quickly establish the core roles, and build on it. If you decide you need to outsource some (or all) of your content creation, be sure that whomever you outsource to is demonstrably producing quality content of their own. If they aren't doing it for themselves, they probably aren't who you're looking for.
Once You Commit, Never Give Up, Never Surrender
The most important thing, of course, is to really commit to content marketing. But once you commit, you've got to keep going. You can always start out slowly (say, one blog post or how-to video a week) and build from there once you have your team in place and your content inventory squared away. Create a schedule, and then stick to it. It's always easy to fall back into old habits, but don't allow yourself that luxury. If you determined to deliver two blog posts a week, then by golly, deliver. Nothing will frustrate your results (and therefore your C-suite) more than faltering on your commitments to deliver high-quality content consistently.
Which brings up another critical point here. Never giving up, and never surrendering also includes being relentless in pursuing excellence in your content. Haphazardly generating content because it's on the schedule is a pattern for disaster. You must have a strategy for your content creation, and part of that strategy must be to create content that your clients crave. Anything else is a quiet surrender.
If You Need It, We Can Help
Of course, you know that you can count on 30dps to help complement your existing marketing team with content strategy, content ideation, content creation, marketing automation implementation and support, custom website development, constant improvement through growth-driven design (GDD) techniques, and creative design. So if you're feeling stuck, let us know.
