Conquering the Top 10 Challenges for Content Marketing Success

Are you struggling to create content marketing that impacts revenue? Having a hard time justifying growing your content budgets? Want to know how to overcome the biggest content marketing fail?

In this interview, Mary Keough, the Head of Marketing at Map My Customers, sheds light on the Top 10 challenges faced in content marketing in the B2B sector. According to Mary, content holds the utmost significance and should be the focal point of any marketing strategy.

During the discussion with Steve MacDonald, Mary Keough delves into the major internal and skillset obstacles encountered in content marketing. She places great emphasis on securing support from the C-suite or leadership for any content marketing initiative.

Mary Keough, Head of Marketing

Additionally, Mary highlights a common oversight in content marketing regarding the selection of appropriate distribution channels. She believes that many B2B companies fail to make the necessary effort to ensure their content is disseminated across the right channels, such as organic social media, email, paid social, and more. Mary underscores the importance of actively selecting and promoting the right content to reach the intended target audience effectively.

Specifically, Mary shares insights into how her B2B company leverages podcasts to produce its highest-quality content. For starters, podcasts serve as a platform for interviewing customers and creating case studies, as well as conducting interviews with prospects to foster relationships. She discusses how podcast creation not only helps her company solidify its product-market fit and go-to-market strategy but also enables them to maintain connections with prospects who may not be ready to make a purchase yet. Finally, Mary emphasizes the significance of broadening perspectives in order to contribute value to the industry and shares her tips on how to grow your content budget that will blow you away.

Learn how Mary overcomes all the most important challenges content marketers face:

Setting the stage for overcoming challenges to creating great content marketing
Overcoming the greatest internal challenges
Overcoming skillset challenges
Overcoming the biggest content marketing fail
Overcoming the challenges around content quality
Overcoming sales challenges
Putting perspective around content marketing challenges
Addressing the challenge of how much to spend on content marketing
The challenges of measuring and reporting on content marketing
The overall takeaway around the challenges to running successful content marketing
Overcoming the challenges of growing the content marketing budget

Listen to the full podcast here.

Introducing Mary Keough

Steve MacDonald: Welcome everyone to another exciting episode of the B2B Marketing Perspectives Podcast. And we have a great guest here, Mary Keough. Mary is the Head of Marketing for Map My Customers, and I’ll have Mary explain a little bit about who she is and the company. But the reason why Mary’s on the podcast here is that I started following her on LinkedIn.

She has very intriguing and thought-provoking posts, as well as the way she creates a community and stimulates ideas, insights, and conversations on LinkedIn. So that’s how Mary and I got connected. And Mary, maybe you can tell us just a little bit about you and the company, and then we’ll get right into the episode here.

Mary Keough: Sounds great, Steve. Thank you so much for having me. I’m really excited to share my perspectives on B2B marketing. As Steve said, I’m the Head of Marketing at a company called Map My Customers. We are a CRM specifically made for outside sales teams. So it’s a map-based CRM. A lot of our clients, a hundred percent of our clients, are outside, which means they’re in the field every day – if not every day, most days. So they need a map, they need a mobile-first solution, and that’s what we are.

I’m excited to be here, excited to start exploring the SaaS world and bring some of my experiences from maybe a more product-focused world into a more solution-oriented and software-based environment.

Setting the stage for overcoming challenges to creating great content marketing.

Steve MacDonald: Well, great. Let’s jump right in and talk about content. Tell me a little bit just about the challenges that you have. Content marketing is not an easy thing, it’s complicated. Tell me a little bit about your point of view and your challenges on how you approach the development of content.

Mary Keough: So my overall marketing philosophy is centered almost a hundred percent on content. In the B2B space specifically, the buying process usually involves multiple people. And the buying process is a little more complicated than if I go out and buy my swimsuit for this summer, where I might go on Instagram and buy the swimsuit and didn’t have to talk to anyone. The deal is done.

In B2B, that process is far more complicated. So you’re likely vetting other solutions. You’re comparing other solutions. You need input from multiple stakeholders. So it’s a little bit more complicated, and content is the way that you can infiltrate each stage of that buying process. So the way that I think about content is that buyers want to research and purchase on their time and under their own conditions.

And your job as a marketer is to put the right content in front of them based on what stage in the buying journey they’re at.

Overcoming the greatest internal challenges.

Steve MacDonald: So what are some of the biggest challenges you have putting that content in the right stages so they see it at the right time? What are some of the challenges and some of the things that maybe you’re doing that you could share with us?

Mary Keough: So I’ll start more strategically at the outset, and then I’ll get a little more tactical. So, higher level, one of the biggest challenges I see is buy-in – a hundred percent. The idea and concept of content marketing aren’t new, but there’s been a lot of, I don’t wanna say snake oil salesman, but a lot of people who have put ideas of content into the heads of people in the C-suite or in leadership, and it didn’t pan out.

So they invested a lot of money, a lot of resources, into maybe some content program that didn’t produce results. But now we have systems in place. We’re a little more sophisticated than we were 5 to 10 years ago. So the process of content marketing can be measured.

But I think that concept hasn’t really seeped into the C-suite and leadership of many of these B2B companies. So at a high level, the hardest part of content marketing is getting buy-in on your content programs. In most of the jobs I’ve had recently, I made sure that they were bought into content at the outset before I joined the company.

Overcoming skillset challenges.

Mary Keough: And then as we get a little more tactical, the challenges are really more in skillset. So we have podcasts, we have videos, we have text posts, we have blogs, we have case studies, etc. The mediums of content are so multifaceted that finding a really skilled person in each of those categories is probably the most difficult part of content marketing.

Now, because quality is so essential, we are just inundated with content on a near-constant basis. So if your content doesn’t stand out, if it’s not high quality, you’re going to fail. And the only way that you can really get quality content is to get highly-skilled people into each of those content mediums.

Steve MacDonald: You said two things that are really important there. First off, getting that buy-in. Three weeks ago, I had this conversation with a VP of marketing that said, Steve, we’ve been doing content for a long time, and we haven’t gotten any leads off of it. We’ve put a lot of time and a lot of effort towards it.

And when you peel back the onion, there are a couple of things that usually go wrong. One is getting that high-quality content right, because you can’t just be saying the same things as everyone else. And you can’t be just product-focused. You’ve gotta be leading the conversation and introducing new ideas, right?

Then the other one is an area you wrote about in a LinkedIn post about the biggest fail or the biggest miss in content marketing. Please explain more about what that is please.

Overcoming the biggest content marketing fail.

Mary Keough: So I think you nailed it right there. A lot of people are producing a high volume of content. So the biggest miss in content marketing right now, I believe, is distribution. So in creating high-quality content that can be distributed or put into multiple channels. For example, you might do a podcast, and I think this is maybe where a lot of B2B companies fail, where they just release the podcast out into the wild.

It’s on Spotify, it’s on Apple, and they just assume everyone’s gonna listen to it. Maybe they occasionally promote it via email, but they’re doing nothing else to distribute that content in any organic channels. A podcast just, for instance, is one of the most difficult organic channels to get going, to get a lot of momentum behind.

So you need to do a lot of promotion of it—same thing with anything else. So if you write a case study and you just let it sit on your website, and maybe your sales team occasionally sends it out to a prospect, it’s not really doing much for you. Now if you are distributing that on paid social, maybe your CEO’s organic LinkedIn, you’re getting more traction.

So I think that that’s where most content teams miss is just making sure the great content they’re creating, it’s, I’m sure it’s great content, but then they’re just missing on distributing it.

Overcoming the challenges around content quality.

Steve MacDonald: You know, it, it’s interesting, I wrote a whole article on the quality of content, and it came out of Gartner and Forester and a lot of different perspectives on the quality of B2B content.

There are two levels of content. There’s the regular content marketing that’s really focused on problems or products and features, and then there’s thought leadership content, right? That actually pushes the industry forward and introduces points of view and new ideas. And that’s what sparks a lot of conversations.

And so, one thing that I’ve noticed is you said that a lot of B2B companies do podcasts. Also, a lot of B2B companies don’t do podcasts either. Yep. And when you and I first started having a conversation, you started talking about how your podcast was one of the greatest sources of high-quality content.

Could you explain a little bit about that? Because I think that’s something that would be really interesting for everybody to know.

Mary Keough: Yeah, absolutely. So our podcast is fantastic. It was already going when I joined Map My Customers, and the way that we were sourcing content for the podcast was by interviewing current customers.

So they’re usually sales leaders, so VPs of sales, you know, territory managers, what’s their job like, how did they get into sales? What’s the go-to-market strategy of the company? And then how did they use Map My Customers or a CRM to help push that sales process forward? Such amazing content. First of all, the first thing that should go into any marketer’s head is case studies.

So the first thing I did was create case studies from all of the customer interviews that we did. And then, if it wasn’t a customer of Map My Customers, then it was, how can we make this a blog post? So, for instance, we had a guest on recently, Luke Whitten Brocker from MacTech, and he’s the sales leader there.

He does not use Map My Customers, but he talked about how he implemented a sales process from the ground up for his sales team. This is a huge, huge problem for outside sales because outside sales reps are kind of rogue. They’re mavericks in the industry. They kind of do what they want when they want.

So getting a sales process going and having them track that sales process is really difficult. So to your point, Steve, hearing the perspectives of other people in the industry and how they’re addressing the challenges faced by your customers and prospects, in my case, it’s outside sales teams, is just really important to help push the industry forward.

Steve MacDonald: And you know what’s incredible about that: when recording podcasts where you’re interviewing your own customers is that they know right away everything they say is going to go up, and it’s going to be audio, or it’s going to be video, right? So you can take any bits and pieces of that and pull it together into a case study where if you were to pick up the phone or do a call like this and say, let’s talk about doing a case study…then what ends up happening is you interview them, you write up the case study, you send it back for approval. They send it around, and literally, maybe a quarter of the case studies you actually interview clients for end up being case studies that are approved in the end. They just, they fall into this quagmire. Where how you are doing it, you have an almost unlimited amount of case studies you could create just from the podcast episodes. That’s a major, major benefit of podcasts.

Overcoming sales challenges.

Steve MacDonald: We also talked about how a great way to use podcasts is to interview prospects. Yep. The goal is to get the conversation flowing with somebody that’s a prospect. So have you done that, and what’s that been like?

Mary Keough: I think it was really valuable from a couple of perspectives. So number one, if they didn’t buy from us, it was, what can we learn from this persona, this person who we thought fit our ideal customer profile but ended up not purchasing from us? So what about their process or their persona is different from our usual, so someone who would actually buy our product?

So I think, in a lot of ways, it can help solidify product-market fit or your go-to-market strategy and who you’re targeting. Then on the other side, it can help just establish relationships. One of our interviewees, for instance, was like, look, we just don’t have the budget this year.

It’s not gonna happen, but you guys are our first choice, we promise. So it helps continue that relationship so you’re not just checking in like, “Hey, just making sure we’re still on your radar.” You know, everyone hates to write that kind of email, but if you can write an email four months down the line, that’s, “Hey Andrea, would you mind being a guest on our podcast?” It’s just a really great way to maintain relationships.

Steve MacDonald: Well, I love that word perspective. We named the podcast, you know, B2B marketing perspectives because I think it’s bringing those perspectives to our existing customers, to our own C-suites internally, or to our prospects. The more that we can expand the perspectives that they have and do that as an industry, that is value add. In fact, if you look up the studies, building that relationship is as important as the product and the offering of the company itself.

There are plenty of really, really good companies out there that haven’t built the relationship and aren’t trusted because if you go with a wrong choice, that’s a big risk. Right. So yes, you’re gonna want to go with somebody that you trust, and if you see that there’s plenty of customers that have been interviewed, use cases, case studies, you’re learning from the prospects, you’re adapting, that builds trust in a big way.

You can also get an hour with somebody on a podcast and recording, and by the end of that, you’re best friends. I love what you’re doing.

Putting perspective around content marketing challenges.

Steve MacDonald: So I’m going to ask you a different question. In terms of the overall importance of content on the success of the company where, on a scale of 1 to 10, let’s put a number on it, and then we’ll talk. Where 1 is not important at all, and 10 is where content is vital to the success of the company. Where would you put content on that scale?

Mary Keough: You know, I’m obviously biased as a content marketer, but I don’t think I’m exaggerating when I say it’s a 10, especially for B2B companies, because if you don’t have content, you have nothing to earn what we’ve been talking about, which is trust, reliability, and credibility.

So without content, you can’t establish any of those, so you’re just left with maybe an outbound motion. Even then, it’s a go-to for B2B companies where you still need a narrative. You still need something to talk about. You still need a solution to problems.

What problems do you solve for this specific person and why? That’s all content marketing, so in my opinion, my very humble opinion, it’s definitely a ten.

Steve MacDonald: It is the introduction, right? It’s how people get to know you. Especially since most companies aren’t well-known brands, right?

We’re not household names. So you would almost put us in the position of a challenger brand, a position in the marketplace that applies to most B2B companies. If somebody doesn’t immediately understand who you are, then we need to carve out a space in their mind so that when they are seeking a solution, we’re actually included in there.

And over 50% of the actual buying decision is based on emotion. It’s risk aversion, right? It’s all about trusting in the people that I’m getting into business with. So, you’re right. Content marketing is huge.

Addressing the challenge of how much to spend on content marketing.

Steve MacDonald: So, if you feel the content is that vital, as you are the Head of Marketing, talk to us about the allocation of your budget. Not how much you’re spending, but just how you spend your marketing budget concerning content.

Mary Keough: So our budget is probably 60% distribution and 40% content creation. Ideally, I would like it to be much higher, but our budget is limited, so this is a really good tactical tip. Anybody with a limited budget should probably spend a little bit more time on content creation and especially distributing in organic channels. Since my budget isn’t necessarily low, I would call it mid-tier, I’m spending a little bit more on distribution, so that’s how I think about budget allocation as far as content right now.

Steve MacDonald: And what are your favorite distribution channels and organic distribution channels?

Mary Keough: Yeah, so for organic love, YouTube. I love LinkedIn, love email if you have a decent list or you have a persona who reads their email a lot, some don’t. And then, as far as paid love, LinkedIn, Facebook, and Instagram.

Google Ads isn’t terrible. It’s not my favorite, but it’s kind of almost like a check-the-box play at this point. And then we’re looking, once we have a decent YouTube library of organic content, at pushing that out through paid as well.

Steve MacDonald: So I think everybody here would probably say, yep, paid LinkedIn. That makes sense, right? When you start talking about Facebook and Instagram for a B2B sale, here, what have you found in terms of your ROI on Meta advertising versus LinkedIn?

Mary Keough: Yeah, absolutely. So Facebook is still the cheapest paid social distribution play that you have at your disposal. CPMs, cost per 1000 people reached on LinkedIn, tends to be anywhere from $35 to $55, sometimes as high as $70 if you’re going after a leader. And then Facebook gets more like $8 to $15. So you can just reach a higher percentage of people at a much, much, much lower cost. And then the ROI is as simple as, if you get three or four opportunities a quarter out of Facebook, you’re breaking even if not exceeding your budget.

The challenges of measuring and reporting on content marketing.

Steve MacDonald: So you talked at the beginning about the content and getting buy-in, but also tracking, measuring, and developing that ROI. Tell us a little bit about how you’re reporting to C-Suite when you’re saying, okay, well, here’s what’s working. Here’s what’s not. What are you looking at? What are you using to put forth the ROI for your content marketing efforts?

Mary Keough: So I’ll do the same thing I said earlier in our conversation. We’ll start really high level, and then we’ll break it down from there. So for the really high-level reporting, when I have two minutes with my CEO…all I’m reporting on is inbound, pipeline, and revenue through the website, quarter over quarter. That’s it. How much pipeline or revenue did we source from the website this quarter versus last quarter, this month versus last month, and then this year versus last year? So that’s super high level.

Suppose I have something closer to 10 minutes. In that case, we’re breaking it down by sources within HubSpot or whatever your CRM or marketing automation platform of choice, which is organic traffic and direct referrals as one way. So we’ll break it down by HubSpot source. And then we also have self-reported attribution, or “how did you hear about us” sources.

We break that out through a workflow and HubSpot. So if someone says, I heard about you on LinkedIn or social media, it goes into a bucket. And I report in two different ways. So both the HubSpot source and then the self-reported attribution source. And then, if we want to go even deeper than that, we’ll start doing more leading indicators. How many form fills are we getting per week, per month, per quarter, per year? How are those converting to pipeline and revenue? So it just depends on how much time I have and then how soon my CEO’s eyes glaze over.

The overall takeaway around the challenges to running successful content marketing.

Steve MacDonald: Sounds good. Well, I’m sure the numbers are a big indication of whether the eyes are glazing over or not. So tell us a little bit about what should be our takeaway. How should we be thinking more about making more out of our content? I want to drive more leads. I want to create more revenue. You know, what are the things that you would have us take away or things that we maybe haven’t covered yet on the podcast?

Mary Keough: My biggest takeaway is you probably have all the content you need right now to be successful, so that I would maximize your distribution. First of all, break out your high-quality pieces of content. Maybe you have a case study, maybe you have a blog that gets a lot of traffic. Maybe you have someone on LinkedIn right now who’s a part of your company with a big following. Maximize your organic channels first and see how to distribute that content on other channels. So, for instance, I have a decent following on LinkedIn. If I were someone like me at the company, I would be saying, hey, can I interview you for a YouTube short, and then I can turn that YouTube short into distributed content on our company LinkedIn page. Then we can put it on the website, we can do email. So definitely maximize your organic content and see how you can make the most of it.

Overcoming the challenges of growing the content marketing budget.

Steve MacDonald: Fantastic. Well, Mary, I really appreciate you coming on and sharing all of this. The last thing that I guess I would ask is when it comes down to allocating dollars in the budget, that’s one of the biggest ways you can see whether or not you’re getting more support within the company. Because if something’s working, we’re willing to put more behind it, right? If we’re going to make $4 or $5 for every dollar we invest in marketing, we’ll do more.

What’s your perspective in terms of trying to increase your marketing budget and the things that we can be doing internally in order to be showing that the justification is there, We need to be spending more because we’ll be making more as a result.

Mary Keough: Yeah, that’s a really good question, Steve. So the way that I approached it with my CEO is because, you know, we are a fairly small, a series A startup, so we’re just getting going as far as allocating a lot of budget towards marketing. So I talked to him a lot in timeline phases. So not necessarily putting dollar values on the ROI of marketing, but timeline values on the ROI of marketing.

So the more you invest in marketing, the faster you can see that marketing ROI come in. If you give me X budget, I promise it will be recouped in 12 months, but if you give me Y budget, it’ll be closer to that six to nine months timeline. So that kind of puts the impetus on your leadership team to say, how fast do we want to grow and how big of a risk do we want to take?

Steve MacDonald: I like it. It’s some shared responsibility there.

Mary Keough: Exactly. Yep.

Steve MacDonald: Well, Mary, I can understand why you’ve got a decent following on LinkedIn, and we’ll all be very happy to follow you. Would that be the, if somebody wants to get ahold of you, would that be the best place?

Mary Keough: Yes, please.

Mary Keough: You can DM me any time. I answer all my DMs. I comment on my posts and will comment back. We can have a conversation back and forth. But yeah, LinkedIn’s the best way to get ahold of me.

Steve MacDonald: Well, fantastic. Thank you, Mary, for coming on. It’s been a very exciting conversation here, and a lot to be thinking about that you shared.

Steve MacDonald: I appreciate it.

Mary Keough: Yeah, you bet. Thank you, Steve, for having me.

Next Steps

As Mary put it, “My overall marketing philosophy is centered almost a hundred percent on content.”. Equally as important is getting internal buy-in, learning how to grow your budgets, and getting the paid plus organic distribution channels down right. To learn more about how to efficiently create highly successful, revenue-producing thought leadership content and pipeline enablement strategies on an ongoing basis, CLICK HERE to schedule a 20-minute strategy session.

ELEVATING CONTENT MARKETING STANDARDS RAISES A CRUCIAL QUESTION:
Why shouldn’t the very act of creating thought leadership content also spark new conversations with in-pipeline deals, top prospects, and high-priority customers for revenue expansion? Or serve as the cornerstone for learning and applying voice-of-customer strategies? That’s the power of ABM Podcasting—engaging B2B buyers and customers in meaningful conversations that uncover essential go-to-market insights, support long sales cycles, reinforce your market perspective, build peer-level trust, and dismantle objections that kill deals.

Steven MacDonald

Steven MacDonald is the founder of Content Strategies, CEO of a MarTech SaaS Company, fractional CMO consulting with leading B2B companies and former Director of Strategy and Client Service at top ten digital marketing agencies.

Follow Steve on LinkedIn.

Steven MacDonald

Follow Steve on LinkedIn.