Content Marketing Challenges for Lean and Agile Teams

(Disclaimer: Profanity.)

Based on my past five years of experience as a B2B content marketer, there are five roadblocks that prevent lean and agile teams from building a content machine:

1. Setting tangible and intangible goals: Most teams are incapable of defining their milestones, both in the short and long term. Either the objectives are plain wrong (don’t lead to real growth) or unrealistic.

2. Unskilled content marketing professionals: This is the root of all challenges. I’ve seen many companies cheap out and try to hire a seasoned professional like myself with an intern’s salary. That’s why most (Indian) companies have trash marketing.

3. Disjointed creation and distribution process: The distribution plan should be integrated with the content creation workflow. Growing B2B companies should never create content that can’t be easily distributed across multiple channels.

4. Clericalism and bloated workflow: For whatever reasons, content team members engage in make-work that generates little value for the organization. Making dumb reports, maintaining three different spreadsheets or Kanban boards, you name it. 

5. Absence of continuous iteration: Small marketing teams must maintain a log where they collate their learnings about the brand and everything around it. This continually refines and boosts the ROI of content marketing efforts. Sadly, it is usually nonexistent.

In the rest of this chapter, I’ve dived into why these problems occur (their origins) and what lean and agile marketing teams can do to solve them.

1. Setting tangible and intangible goals

Believe it or not, most CEOs and tech founders are clueless about what goals to set for their marketing team. The noise in the space makes them think that chasing ranking and organic traffic is the way, whereas their circles put a lot of emphasis on branding.

The fact is that content marketing objectives are rarely simple. As the subheading suggests, they can be segmented into the tangible and the intangible.

Tangible goals are measurable, such as ranking for certain keywords, social media engagement, impressions, and site traffic. Intangible goals, such as content impact, brand alignment, and knowledge about the niche, are qualitative and difficult to measure.

Each of the categories can be further segmented into micro and macro levels.

For instance, in the case of a tangible goal, a micro-level milestone is the number of views or likes for a content piece, such as an article or a LinkedIn post. The macro-level milestone could be the demography of people who engage with your content and the pace of content production.

Similarly, you can have two sets of qualitative metrics in the intangible section. In the micro-level, you can look at the level of enthusiasm in the engagement or the rate at which your content piece attracts viewers or site traffic.

The intangible-macro-level metric could be perceived brand value, knowledge recall, and thought leadership gain.

Whenever you are planning a B2B content marketing campaign, it’s pivotal to sit down and define each of them as clearly as possible. This will require you to identify where you currently stand as a brand and what the next realistic goal can be.

In most, if not all, cases, growing brands or companies with small marketing teams forget to consider the intangible metrics at all and pay little attention to the macro-level tangible metrics. 

This is partly due to the social media virality illusion, where every tech founder has unrealistic expectations from their marketing team. They just expect quick wins and want to achieve the brand value of established companies within months, if not weeks.

2. Unskilled content marketing professionals

There are plenty of impostors in the marketing industry. 

Anyone who says they are a “marketing strategist” or “manager” but lacks hard skills, such as writing and persuading, they are an imposter. Plus, anyone who speaks in jargon and focuses too much on the “clarity” of the process rather than the actual work is as useless as a Bible in a whorehouse.

There are plenty of reasons for this. 

First, these losers hide their incompetence by being a “team player.” The other team members do the heavy lifting while they create the reports and share updates with higher-ups. This middle-management-esque role has saved them for many years.

Second, they are hired or selected for a project based on their perceived talking skills and track record. Only a handful of marketing folks have driven tangible results and know the true meaning of terminologies like “audience engagement” and “hook.” But CEOs and HRs (the biggest losers of all time) don’t know that and hire them anyway.

Finally, monetary reasons. This is more of a problem in India because everyone wants things cheaply. Consequently, they end up with complacent and inexperienced content marketers who are horrible at everything.

It is critical to have an honest conversation with potential marketing hires. Ask them questions with the intention to learn, not to evaluate them. If you could actually evaluate them, you would be spearheading their marketing efforts. 

Their answers and explanations should be easily digestible. If they can’t describe what SEO is or outline a basic content distribution strategy on the spot, chances are they will massively struggle to promote your brand’s offerings.

And most importantly, don’t be a cheap trick. Quality content and long-term branding are expensive because of their ROI. It is better to hire one good person rather than five mediocre ones. At least go with someone who wants to grow their skills and improve, because their performance will improve with time.

3. Disjointed creation and distribution process

In the prologue of this chapter (linked at the end), I outlined a comprehensive content marketing campaign for B2B brands (although the strategy can be leveraged by B2C companies too). 

It basically started with a long-form content piece, like a 2000-word article, which will serve as “inspiration” for other digital assets, such as LinkedIn posts, Instagram carousels, and short-form Medium articles.

That was me thinking in distribution terms from the get-go. Fundamentally, distribution is publishing snackable content that promotes your main content. And the most valuable content piece or marketing message is the one that can be distributed easily and forever.

When planning a content strategy, say a set of blog posts around a new product feature or service offering, consider distribution. It doesn’t matter if your articles are “the bomb” if you can’t attract readers to them effectively.

Of course, businesses or publications with an established readership or domain authority can do it organically. However, if you are a brand that’s starting out, you need to do it the old-fashioned way.

Sometimes you might have to tweak your outline or rethink the topics so that the final piece becomes more distributable. Do this before drafting.

Visualize the amount of infographics and social media posts you can create around it. Imagine how you can build contextual backlinks around that content piece. Approve the titles and outlines if these numbers are impressive for your brand’s current state.

4. Clericalism and bloated workflow

Any kind of digital marketing campaign runs on content. Whether it’s paid ads on search engines or digital PR efforts to build authoritative backlinks, every brand promotional effort is driven by content.

Unfortunately, plenty of morons in the content marketing industry are incapable of realizing that despite the fact’s ubiquitous influence. This goes back to the widespread presence of impostors in this industry.

As a result, the majority of B2B content marketing workflows have a bunch of tasks that don’t contribute anything toward content. In fact, they prevent the fast production of quality digital assets.

Complex approval workflows, nitpicking each draft or outline before publication, and too many instances of manual data entry (spreadsheets and Kanban boards). Check these as soon as possible. You don’t need templated documents that look official for everything; just create content and hit publish.

5. Absence of continuous iteration

No content marketing team can nail a campaign on their first try. Even if they do, it’s highly likely that their upcoming campaigns will fall short of their expectations. And there could be many reasons behind this.

You may misunderstand what your audience values most in your product or service. The tone and style of your content may fail to engage your readers. Your workflow may not have the best tools to accelerate and streamline your creative efforts.

And that’s the point of continuous iteration.

Content marketing professionals, especially in B2B, need to constantly make tweaks to remain competitive. The tweaks depend on what worked and what failed. It could be during ideation or managing the approval process.

Furthermore, the progressive improvement should be well-documented to prevent past mistakes and to guide the upcoming team members. As you continue to produce more branded content for a particular audience within a niche, you gain more knowledge about the whole thing.

These insights or nuggets of wisdom enhance marketing enablement assets, such as ICP, editorial guidelines, and distribution tactics. 

However, the absence of institutional knowledge forces B2B companies to follow the same patterns and repeat the same mistakes. Moreover, when new guys come in, instead of building on the existing foundations, they are more inclined to reinvent the wheel, which fucks the long-term branding impact.

The workaround is to log your monthly updates as a diary entry. This allows you to think and qualitatively assess the impact of your content marketing efforts. Plain numbers reveal little. 

Collate what everybody has learned and use that knowledge to try a slightly different approach for the upcoming month or quarter.

Conclusion: There is nothing static about marketing

Strategy, workflow, tools, people, beliefs, target audience, brand objective, and more. Everything continually evolves, especially for growing brands like SaaS startups that are finding their feet.

Hence, it’s critical to start with the right expectations and move from there. Set achievable targets based on the resources at hand. You can’t expect an intern to perform at the level of someone with years of experience.

Another key thing you need to do is to build a good marketing team. That doesn’t mean hire the folks with the most decorated resumes. It means getting people who want to improve and learn. 

Once upon a time, I was an entry-level content writer, and now I have the capacity to run end-to-end content marketing workflows for a medium-sized company on my own. The attitude of “never good enough” got me here.

Finally, you will make mistakes. Get over it and move on. There will be articles and social media posts that bomb. Landing pages that don’t resonate. Infographics that fail to retain people. Learn what you can and do the only thing you can — keep pushing.

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Next Chapter: Coming Soon

Previous Chapter: The Goal of a Content Marketing Strategy

Index (with Prologue): Content Marketing 101: For Lean and Agile Teams