Three in every five marketers believe that “not enough staff” is the greatest challenge they face, according to Zazzle Media’s State of Content Marketing Survey.
Some 60% of respondents also said they struggled to consistently produce content, while two thirds found it a challenge to produce engaging content.
The survey also revealed some positive trends for content marketing, with 79% of respondents describing it as either ‘quite’ or ‘very’ effective and 70% expecting to increase their spending on content marketing this year.
Content marketing does seem to be gaining a lot of traction with brands, but this increased demand is apparently leading to a shortage of staff capable of creating engaging content on a regular basis.
If you experience similar staff shortages, you have a few different options. Hiring full-time staff can be an expensive long-term commitment, but if you decide to go down this path, you could look for recruits from the declining print journalism industry. Good journalists are already adept at writing engaging content, but some may be reluctant to make the leap to marketing.
A second option is to recruit freelancers to create your content, thus avoiding any long-term commitment. This can work both ways, however, and freelancers may often move on when offered a new project they feel will be more lucrative or fulfilling. A certain amount of redundancy is needed to compensate for these situations, as well as the inevitable health and family problems your writers may encounter.
A third, and arguably simpler, option is to outsource to a content agency. These agencies manage their own pool of writers, so you never need to recruit writers directly for your tailored news feed or other content channels.
This year looks set to be a big one for content marketing, so it’s important that you have everything in place.
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