What’s holding back your content marketing function?

Picture the scene – your writers and designers have pained over your latest ebook. It’s full of valuable insight, compelling evidence, and it looks fantastic. It’ll be a surefire winner with your prospects. So, how many will get to see it?

As part of a recent Content Maturity Roundtable, we asked participants to benchmark their content marketing operations. It turns out, surprise, surprise, they’re good at producing content.

However, this review of capabilities also identified several challenges restricting their ability to deepen maturity and achieve an even greater impact through a fully optimized – and operationalized – content marketing function.

Here, we’ll look at the main challenges we identified and outline why this is a problem for any organization looking to drive significant business impact through its content function.

For many, it’s a struggle to ensure content is effectively distributed. Largely, this means a lack of systems governing how assets themselves – and awareness about their use and business value – are shared.

Despite investment in content creation, distribution was found to be a major weak point for those who benchmarked their capabilities. As was an understanding of how this can negatively impact performance.

The problem here is that, if unchecked, poor distribution can result in individual teams going it alone. They create their own content, or rely on a few key pieces, rather than utilizing a suite of engaging and suitable content mapped for a whole customer journey.

All this does is invite inefficiencies, inconsistency, denude the impact of an overall content strategy, and put ‘quality’ and reputation at risk.

A lack of frameworks, tagging, and adequate organization means valuable content is often underutilized. Much like distribution, our test found that curation was one of the least developed areas of the whole content function.

The result of poor curation is that marketing and sales teams will struggle to find and/or use appropriate materials at the right times. In turn, this leads to wastage – from the time and effort spent creating assets that are quickly forgotten – and means the process of supporting prospects as they move through a buying journey will be largely unoptimized.

At the same time, there is an impact where sales teams spend time crafting material to fit the conversations they want. The knock-on is then how they’re able to focus less on engaging potential customers.

Lack of engagement, little excitement, and an absence of the compulsion to find out more and drive through the buyer journey that comes from great content, these things can all lead to a sales dead end.

Many organizations still rely on basic engagement metrics, such as clicks and downloads, but struggle to connect content marketing performance to business outcomes. 

Our test tells us that few organizations have clear pipeline attribution models for linking content to revenue impact.

When an organization can’t understand how content impacts pipeline or revenue, when robust measurement frameworks aren’t in place, marketing teams struggle to justify content investment or know how to optimize and shape future campaigns.

Organizations in our test were shown to lack formal governance. That means little use of campaign, strategy, and development frameworks. It means a lack of best practice.

At the same time, there is little consistency across how and what is created. That means a lack of processes for maintaining standards, version control, and approvals. 

Such a situation can lead to a scattergun approach – where quality is varied, assets aren’t always available for every buying stage, and where expertise and experience isn’t communicated sufficiently well to build the necessary levels of trust, loyalty, and desire amongst an organization’s prospects.

Addressing these challenges requires a structured approach to content maturity. The Momentum ITSMA Content Maturity Test helps organizations to pinpoint weaknesses and implement targeted improvements that unlock greater content marketing efficiency and impact.

In the next blog, we’ll explore some specific recommendations for overcoming the challenges identified here. Of course, if you can’t wait for that – feel free to take our simple, five-minute content maturity test yourself.