CCC Expert Chats: Meet Eric — Our Content Marketing & Copywriting Specialist

Current Trends & Challenges in Content Marketing

Eric broke down the current challenges and trends he sees throughout the industry. Let’s dive into these issues and then explore how we help our clients overcome them.

Must Focus on the Buyer’s Intent

Attracting quality leads is the top B2B content marketing challenge, and that’s usually often because businesses are not focusing on the buyer’s intent and customer journey. It’s no longer enough to just have an audience in mind. Instead, Eric believes it’s become essential to tactfully consider the audience’s intent.

And that starts by asking questions like:

• What do they really want?
• Why is a visitor reading the specific piece of content? 
• What is the pain point they’re trying to solve? 
• How does the article respond to the audience’s intent?

Businesses need to think about more than just who will read the article — they need to have a detailed understanding of why the audience is reading it. This means understanding how it relates to the specific stage in the buyer’s journey.

Every Asset Must Feed Into the Rest

An ongoing trend in content marketing is its overall cohesiveness beyond standalone articles. And while this has been part of the process for years, it’s never been more critical. 

The average Internet user has a short attention span, so you need to create value by creating an integrated content marketing strategy. And in many cases, this means guiding your customers into other related content that can help them.

Instead of trying to write a single catch-all piece — try creating a series of articles that approach a topic from a high-level, more focused, and niched down approach. This will allow you to ensure each piece provides valuable information without overloading the reader.

Attention Spans Are Dropping

It’s probably not surprising that attention spans are dropping, primarily attributed to other trends throughout the digital landscape. 

Content needs to be quicker, and every word needs to count. Fortunately, short articles are still the most popular type of content, with 83% of B2C marketers indicating their creation and usage. Long-form articles came in at 44%, but it’s worth noting that this percentage is up from 22% during the previous period. 

However, many surveyed B2C marketers also believe video will continue its rise to become the most effective form of content. As a result, it’s never been more essential to pack a punch with every post.

How CCC Tackles Current Content Marketing Challenges

Fortunately, we have Eric helping CCC take on the industry's current challenges to keep our clients growing. Here’s how we do it.

Designed for Effectiveness from Strategy to Execution

Our process with any new client begins by fully understanding your industry and business. What is your overall unique selling proposition (USP)? How does it specifically address common pain points in your industry? What types of content do your potential customers typically seek out?

After getting a feel for the landscape, we understand the general types of content we need to write. Next, we’ll know how to educate your audience about your USP and move them through the buyer’s journey, which we’ll discuss below.

Additionally, we define your brand’s voice if not already in place. Your brand’s voice should be defined early and helps guide the writing style of every piece of content we produce. Essentially, it’s a blueprint that builds cohesion throughout your articles and reinforces your brand’s messaging. 

Break Content into Stages per Funnel

You can’t always go for the sale — people are aware and skeptical of sales tactics. So instead, Eric says understanding where each asset fits into the overall buyer’s journey is vital to finding quality leads. 

So, you need to understand your entire buyer’s journey to design the right assets for every step. The overall journey from a content marketing perspective involves the following steps:

1. Education
2. Awareness
3. Validation
4. Final Decision (Conversion)

You need to design and write content specifically for each step. If every article is focused on step four, then you’re not taking leads through the entire process. 

CCC creates comprehensive campaigns with individual articles geared for each step, so you always help people along their journey.

We Write for the Reader — Not Search Engines

Search engines are undoubtedly essential and likely send your website valuable organic search traffic. However, writing content focusing on search engines simply isn’t effective in driving real growth for your business. 

Instead, write using everything we’ve talked about above to gear your content specifically for potential customers. Millions of hits per day won’t mean anything if they aren’t becoming customers.

And these goals aren’t mutually exclusive. Search engines have continually made updates to prioritize quality content that keeps people on the page. CCC writes content to convert readers into customers; search engines take it from there.