Two-thirds of companies say that a lack of access to skilled staff is making it difficult to manage content marketing campaigns effectively, according to a new report released by Content Marketing Institute (CMI).
The ‘2020 Content Management and Strategy Survey’ was compiled before the global pandemic, but it still offers a range of interesting insights and advice about how best to deliver content marketing at scale.
The first is that 72% of respondents say that content is viewed as a “core” business strategy and a similar number have a documented strategy in place.
The vast majority of companies are taking content marketing very seriously then, but issues still remain.
A few of the problems that are holding marketers back include a lack of leadership, a dearth of financial investment, and an organisational culture that does not align with content management.
These factors also lead to the creative aspects of content campaigns being driven by internal requests.
43% of respondents said that they create content based on projects that are outlined by key decision makers.
In contrast, just 30% use a “persona-focused” strategy aligned to a particular subset of a target audience.
Even less, only 12% say that “customer journey-focused” is the typical approach.
More worrying is the fact that 73% of respondents admitted that their company does not have the right tech or infrastructure to support content management.
CMI chief strategy advisor Robert Rose believes that this will have been brought into sharp focus following the outbreak of the coronavirus.
He noted: “Will that change in a post-COVID-19 world? As the shift to more remote work expands, will we see more collaborative content management and strategy features integrated into classic software suites?”
The skill shortage noted by many companies could also be addressed by outsourcing more content tasks to professional third parties.
Only 3% said that they would rank their content management proficiency as “expert”.
