Why do small to medium sized business struggle with content marketing?

Welcome to this episode of Likely Marketing. I keep hearing from marketers from the SMB segment how they struggle with content marketing. In this episode, let's explore the key reasons and what are the likely avenues available to them. In this episode, I will:

• Talk about the key challenges faced by SMBs in content marketing

• Share practical steps for getting started with content marketing

• Dive into major behavioural and cultural pitfalls to avoid (that no one talks about)

• Share my views on the likelihood of better adoption of content marketing by SMBs

Over the past 2 decades, content marketing has come of age thanks to the rapid growth of smartphones and social media networks. Content marketing has become important primarily because it allows businesses to build brand awareness, reach customers, and retain them at scale. Due to its inherent nature of building out pillar content and re-purposing it across digital marketing channels, it is also the most cost effective way of increasing brand discoverability and reach. Content marketing is a gift that keeps giving.

Challenges faced by SMBs in Content Marketing

Still, SMB marketers struggle with enjoying the benefits of content marketing! Here are the 5 key challenges faced by SMBs in succesfully adopting Content Marketing:

1. Limited resources: Compared to larger sized businesses, SMBs have limited financial capacity to hire dedicated content teams or invest in marketing technologies. As a result, they have smaller teams, and less time to dedicate to content creation and promotion. This can hinder their ability to compete effectively in the digital space.

2. Striking balance between content quality vs quantity: Many SMBs struggle to create enough content to stay relevant while ensuring each piece meets the standards of their target audience. Consequently, they either start publishing low-quality or less relevant content or they come to a grinding hault.

3. Building engagement: The businesses who manage to sustain a certain level of activity in publishing content, they struggle to reach their target audience and engage with them.

4. Less reliance on relevant data and analytics: Most of them use free tools of data reporting like Google Analytics or in-platform analytics offered by social media platforms. They combine these with vanity metrics like views and likes which soon loose their importance. They do not deep-dive into the available data that could potentially provide insights to sharpen their marketing efforts.

5. Rapidly changing algorithms: The digital marketing platforms have been rapidly changing to stay relevant to the users. The algorithms behind these platforms are self-learning and are constantly changing. This becomes a challenge for organizations with small marketing teams as it becomes hard for them to recognize changing trends and adapt quickly.

While these challenges pretty much cover most of the issues SMBs face, these are problems that can be solved. I decided to further probe into why SMBs struggle with solving these solvable problems. That brought out striking commonalities that sit at the core of the 5 challenges I talked about. Let's look into these commonalities:

1. Lack of messaging clarity: Depending on their size, SMBs either have an active sales pipeline or are in the process of strengthening one. They have customers and are hungry for more. Staying on a high growth revenue curve requires significant time, effort, and recalibration. What that means is that there is a good component of a 'free-wheeling mindset'. Sell at all costs. From a sales perspective, it makes full sense. But, content marketing requires consistency and focus. This creates a state of conflict for the management, and of course, sales comes first. What that leads to is SMBs starting off with a content marketing calendar but then renege on it as soon as a differentiated messaging seems relevant to close a deal. Quick changes in messaging and/or editorial calendar compromises quality and consistency that is required for content marketing.

2. Reacting instead of responding: The 'close that deal' approach is necessary to win in the market. However, it comes with the price of external validation seeking or me-too behaviour. Leadership starts focusing on content that their target audience likes or simply repeating things their competitors are saying. In short-term, it helps generate some quick content, but it pushes the brand messaging into an already crowded space. They seem to miss the crucial point that it is presumptuous on content creator's part to decide what the audience will like. Bigger brands are still in a position to do that because they have tested and honed their marketing strategies over the years. For a growing brand it translates to wanting to run a full marathon with a week's training. Frustrated and desperate to be seen in the market, SMBs react by starting to copy or mimic competitors not realising that they are publishing content that has already got fair amount of traction.

3. Next one is one of the biggest ones - Overthinking: Unclear messaging and me-too approach to content leads to deeper doubt about the content marketing strategy. This leads business owners to keep going back to the drawing board. Existing content that is in the pipeline keeps getting re-drafted driving teams into the analysis-paralysis loop.

4. The 'viral content syndrome': All the commonalities I just talked about lead to desperation within the teams. Sales becomes desperate for adequate marketing support. Marketing experiences despair that their efforts are not bearing fruits. Management loses patience. Result - everyone starts hoping to create a piece of content that goes viral and gives a huge spike in visibility. This further drives up the frustration and they miss one crucial fact - there is no formula for viral content. And God forbid that happens because if you get a viral content, you will keep struggling to do better. The market is full of many such instances.

5. Little or no ROI: Having stuck in this loop of unthoughtful marketing efforts, there is little or no ROI to show for the money spent.

Practical steps for getting started with content marketing for SMBs

Having spent a considerable time with some high performing marketers, I have found that content marketing is the most cost-effective way for SMBs to build a brand that garners the attention of the target audience and enjoys their engagement. Just like building a successful business takes thoughtfulness, time and effort, so does leveraging content marketing to build a robust digital brand. Here's what you can do to start building a digital brand for your business:

• List top 3 values your product or service can deliver for your customers. In other words, which problems does your product service solve for your customer.

• Treat each of those values as a theme for creating content.

• Connect features of your product or service with the corresponding theme.

• Create content on the theme highlighting your product features.

• Publish long form content, 600 words or more, on your website.

• Pick key takeaways from that content and turn each of them into a social media post text.

• Develop a creative using a template on tools like Canva. Start with a free version and get a paid one later if you can't afford it up front.

• Create a social media calendar for 6 to 8 weeks. It will give you time to think and create more content in the mean time.

• Post 2 to 3 times a week consistently. The keyword here is consistently.

• Analyze data to see which posts are performing well and create more content around that theme.

Major behavioural and cultural pitfalls to avoid (that no one talks about)

All this sounds simple because it actually is. But, many businesses still struggle to do this not because they are incapable, rather because they fall into certain behvioural and cultural pitfalls like:

• Prioritizing sales over marketing: It's absolutely fine and understandable, but if limited brand awareness is a challenge for your business, you need to re-evaluate and re-calibrate your priorities.

• Don't equate marketing with sales: This is fallacy almost every business suffers from. In the world of digital marketing, marketers are well-equipped to contribute to the top line as sales. But, marketing has a capability that sales doesn't have and rely heavily on marketing for - reach a larger set of audience faster. So, use leads generated as a KPI for measuring performance in the short term, but don't ignore the long-term value it can create through better discoverability and awareness.

• Invest in, not spend on marketing: Traditional wisdom considers marketing as a cost function. In 2023 and beyond, thoughtful allocation of budget on marketing will yield leads in the short-term and a strong brand presence and trust in long-term.

• Focus on quality and building scale: Getting started with content marketing has its own teething issues. Focusing on quantity of content over quality of content can result in wasteful efforts that yield sub-optimal results. Build good to high quality content and scale gradually, just as you would with a product or service.

Likelihood of content marketing being adopted by SMBs

The potential and effectiveness of content marketing in building a robust and trustworthy digital brand is proven beyond dispute. It would be misleading to say that SMBs are ignoring or unaware of content marketing. The deeper behavioural and cultural issues and the associated pitfalls create a glass wall that takes time to recognize, and eventually, break down.

Achieving topline growth and increasing brand awareness is a difficult balancing act for business leaders. I think maturing of social media networks, and technological advancements like no-code or low-code apps, automation platforms, CDPs, creative development platforms, and AI can solve most, if not all, of the challenges faced by SMBs. What needs to be borne in mind is that clarity of objectives and consciously addressing the behavioural & cultural issues is critical. Removing these hurdles can help leverage the power of content marketing.