5 Reasons Content Marketing is Getting Harder

I hate to be a purveyor of gloom, there’s too much of that around these days. But I’ve been thinking about this and want to share my thoughts with you.

Here are some reasons content marketing is getting more challenging. There exists:

1. A shift away from focusing on your products and services (what you know well)
2. A shift towards the reader/customer and their needs (what you may not know very well)
3. A business environment that is changing rapidly (what is unknown)
4. More people online in your field writing about the same things (some better, some worse)
5. A huge volume of content about everything possible, creating information overload for readers

This makes it harder for you to grab readers’ attention and get through to them. However, readers are still hungry for solutions and are looking for trustworthy professionals to work with.

I know this because I’ve experienced it personally. In spite of the recession, people are still hiring consultants to help them with their content marketing strategies and with writing quality content for business marketing.

As marketing guru Seth Godin writes:

“With 80 million other blogs to choose from, I know you could leave at any moment (see, there goes someone now). So that makes blog writing shorter and faster and more exciting.”

That makes content marketing on a blog more challenging as time goes on. So what to do? How do you improve the quality of your content marketing? Here are a few suggestions to think about:

1. Sit down and try to figure out what you need to do the most to get best results, make a list of your content marketing strategies
2. Pick up the phone and call a friend or colleague and talk about it
3. Surf the web in search of solutions
4. Get totally confused and go eat something or go work out
5. Come back and find an expert to work with, send them an email asking for help at a price you can afford

What else? Add to this list by leaving a comment. How would you help someone who needs to improve their use of content marketing, for example, with a blog?