Maneuvering the biggest content marketing challenges

When it comes to content marketing, the challenges of early-stage SaaS founders are understandably straightforward-

1. Don't know how to do content marketing
2. How to find the right person/consultant/agency to help with content marketing?

However, the challenges of content managers - the masters of their craft, are more nuanced and primarily fall under the following four categories:

1. Ensuring alignment between strategy and content
2. Lack of bandwidth for execution
3. Getting quality work from freelancers and managing them
4. Proving ROI and getting buy-in for resources from leadership

How do I know this?

I’ve asked 42 content managers from early to growth stage SaaS companies for their most significant challenges. Here is the aggregate (and slightly rounded off) representation of their answers:

Survey result

Whether you are a founder or marketing head, it is your responsibility to help content folks in your team successfully maneuver these challenges and feel safe and encouraged so that they can do what they do best.

And, if you're an early-stage founder, you should avoid setting your business up for failure and plan ahead against these challenges. Set up a solid strategic and operational content marketing foundation from day one.

With context in place, let's look at how to successfully maneuver the biggest content marketing challenges.

Ensuring alignment between strategy and content

Aligning strategy and content creation is a two-way process -

#1 - The content strategy should factor in available resources and your content creation capabilities. For example, if there is just one content creator on your team, it is probably not a good idea for the strategy to recommend publishing five long-form posts and 50 social media posts per week.

#2 - The content creation process should incorporate the elements of content strategy and follow the guidelines regarding voice, intent, keywords, topics, formats, funnel stage, etc. There should also be synergy between content created for different channels - blog, email, YouTube, LinkedIn, Ads, etc. The scope includes everything from creating the main content piece, breaking it into many short-form content pieces for redistribution, transforming each into different formats, and ensuring everything fits into one larger strategic narrative.

Most companies try to address this problem using content briefs. But as the survey shows, the challenge is beyond the capabilities of the humble content brief.

If you explore this problem as a true operational challenge (instead of a human problem), you will find that you can solve it by adding two ingredients to the content strategy workflow:

1. Actionable: Make the elements of the content strategy actionable during the content creation process. You can systematize this using a dynamic guiding and verification workflow.
2. Accessible: Allow all content creators to access the content strategy on the fly without compromising company-wide privacy.

Let's understand these with examples.

For most companies, content strategy lives on a Google Doc or Notion; many also use these tools to create written content.

In Notion, it is not easy to invite external collaborators like freelancers without risking a breach of sensitive information unless you give them access to individual pages with guest rights instead of the entire workspace. Imagine working with a freelancer content creator, giving them guest rights to tens of individual Notion pages to create content, and when they stop working for you, going through each of those pages to remove their access. Now, visualize the privacy horror by extrapolating the scenario to ten freelancers working with you for two years!

The problem is the same with Google Docs. You can design a workaround by creating separate folders, but things don't scale when it comes to collaboration and multiple content creators. Managing rights and privacy while ensuring quality work is a pain that eventually leads to substandard content and failed campaigns. What benefits do you see in making content managers go through it? It's a recipe for disaster.

But the problem does not end here; it's just the accessibility part; there is more.

Content strategies living on Google Docs or Notion are static. They can recommend ground-breaking ideas, keywords, and action items. Still, they can neither guide content creators during the creation process nor help the editor ensure the strategy's correct 'follow-up.'

Agree, you can give freelancers access to the strategy document, and they can read it. But what ensures that it is followed during the creation phase? What option do you have instead of relying on an individual's judgment? Even if you work with highly trained creators, they may falter at one point or another without a systematic approach. When people work under deadlines, as they should be, they are susceptible to errors without adequate checks and balances, i.e., tight workflows. Where is the failsafe? Where is the mechanism to ensure the quality standards set by the strategy? I'm not talking about the editor's good judgment'; I'm talking about actual data and system-backed quality assurance.

The truth is, most content strategies are not actionable. Don't get me wrong. Google Docs and Notion are great software; they are just not purpose-built for SaaS content marketing. The credit for those who perform wonders goes to content managers who grind and work their asses off despite inefficient systems.

The good news is that the content strategy in your Thoughtlytics account is both actionable and accessible. With just one click, you can add team members and freelancers with editorial or viewing rights and ensure privacy during and after their tenure. The app facilitates the actionability of the strategy by adding ideas, themes, keywords, etc, within the content creation workflow and mapping the content to the strategy for you to verify the strategic alignment.

I made a quick video to demonstrate the workflow 👉

Lack of bandwidth for execution

Like most things in business, a lot of operational challenges in content marketing come from bad system design. Most companies use a combination of 5 to 10 independent tools for content marketing.

Here is an industry-wide, generally accepted, and default tech stack:

1. Strategy: Google Docs, Slides, Notion
2. Content Calendar & Planning: Google Sheets
3. To-do lists & agenda: Asana
4. Storage: Google Drive
5. Content Creation & Collaboration: Google Docs
6. Communication: Slack
7. Research: Semrush, Ahrefs
8. Analytics & Attribution: Google Analytics
9. Project Management: Asana, Trello, Airtable
10. CMS: WordPress, Webflow

It is a reasonably good stack, as good as it can be with independent general-purpose tools. The inefficiency of the content marketing system built on this stack lies in that none of these tools are purpose-built for SaaS content marketing.

When you've to work with multiple tools, you invariably spend a lot of time updating each one, ensuring individual permissions, fighting information loss by spending hours searching for files and information, and managing the workflow. As a result of these inefficiencies, productivity decreases, forcing you to hire more.

Wider business consequences of such a system are reduced creative output, low-impact content marketing, and low growth.

Thoughtlytics is not only less clunky software but also helps you deliver more with less. I have been intentional about not bloating it with hundreds of never-to-be-used-but-fancy-to-promote features.

When you have everything you need to strategize, plan, and create content natively in one web app, you spend less time managing and more time delivering.

Here is a visual representation of the software.

Thoughtlytics software model

Lack of bandwidth for execution

Freelance content creators work on multiple projects at a time and usually do not have a 360-degree view of your business like you do. The best you can do is to let them access your content strategy to gain insights into your target market, strategic goals, brand insights, and other elements. This understanding will help them over and above a solid content brief.

A content calendar can be very helpful in planning and managing freelance creators.

Thoughtlytics offers a built-in calendar for planning. In it, you can assign tasks to individual content creators. For example, you can assign blog posts to one creator, LinkedIn posts to another, etc. Then, receive email notifications on upcoming posts.

Creating SOPs (standard operating procedures) is another helpful and necessary step to improving the quality of content created by freelancers. Detailed SOPs help them understand your processes, get quick help without your involvement, and thus improve quality and turn-around time.

In addition, there is also an element of finding skilled freelancers.

Proving ROI and getting buy-in for resources from leadership

When it comes to managing business problems, CXOs have a lot on their plate, and the scope of their work far exceeds that of any department head. They have no choice but to always focus on the biggest problems and allocate resources to high-impact solutions, and sometimes it means ignoring other problems.

There are two aspects to proving the ROI and getting leadership buy-ins:

1. A single-minded focus on the North Star Metric: Craft a content strategy with one goal - improve the North Star metric. Content that does not lead to growth one way or another is of no use. Growth is the sole aim of content marketing; don't fall for fancy brand marketing unless the business reaches a significant scale. Content for the sake of content wastes resources and is hope marketing.
2. Attribution and meticulous tracking: With a solid content strategy and workflow in place, it's time to set up analytics and attribution. They are essential to prove ROI and help you iterate and improve your strategy. There are many attribution models. I've found a mixed attribution model with the last touch having about 80% weightage to work best. Dig deep into the data, focus on conversion rates, and identify areas for improvement. If you can show an increasing metric that ties back to the North Star metric, CXOs will likely understand and agree with you.

Content marketing is a proven growth channel for SaaS when it's done right. To make it work, you need a solid strategy, thoughtful planning, and flawless execution. Random actions can lead to wishful thinking and, at their best, can move vanity metrics. Run-of-the-mill workflow can only take you so far. It's time to opt for purpose-built workflows.