Why marketing will get harder and more complex to manage

We often talk about the high quality techniques needed to successfully create the best online content for businesses, and the importance of customer engagement and other thought leadership qualities. However, content marketing gets more intense and harder to manage.

What is it that causes marketing to become a more complex process to manage over time? Why can a business owner handle their own marketing early on, but find themselves struggling a few months or years in?

Increasing sophistication of consumer
As time goes on, customers become more sophisticated. If a business is using tricks and spammy techniques to capture their attention, customers will realize it. Savvy social media users can now spot a click-bait headline at ten paces–and that headline becomes less useful for the business. Potential customers will deliberately not click or engage with content because they perceive it as spammy.

Improvement in analytics that filter out spammy links and pages
We’ve seen this in the past ten years, and it’s only going to continue. Google is the big kid on the playground, and any company that wants to be discovered through search engines needs to work with their algorithms and search metrics. Perhaps, in the future, another big search engine will take over; after all, there was a time when we all used to AltaVista or Ask Jeeves. But then, that search engine will hold the same power over marketers. This is a thing that will need to be dealt with.

Professional content marketers and writers know the various updates and changes to Google’s metrics inside and out because it’s their job to. They know how to find great keywords that will help your blog or site rank, and they know how to use those keywords in ways that are helpful instead of harmful. Managing that knowledge and staying within the realms of good content for Google is, quite literally, a full time job.

Business growth leads to more content
The goal of all of this marketing is to grow your business, right? As your business grows, and you create more content, your business will grow, and you’ll need more content. You need to keep an editorial calendar, you need to complement content marketing with links to older posts without recycling content, and you need to foster engagement with your customers. As there are more and more customers, this will take more and more time.

As your business grows bigger, you may also have opportunities to win bigger sales and contracts, which can require a more delicate hand or finer touch.

Growth leads to both refining and expansion of your audience
As you reach more customers outside of your original target, you may find both subsets of that audience who benefit from different messaging, and also new audiences that need particular marketing.

For example, if you begin by opening a fitness business that operates in a particular city, after a few months, you might find that:

• Mothers in the community feel underserved and would benefit from prenatal and postnatal classes specially targeted towards them.
• Your community might benefit from a free afternoon program pointed towards giving kids something to do after school
• Neighboring communities might have enough interest for you to open additional locations.

While you certainly can continue to address all those diverse communities with the same messaging, in the age of the Internet, it no longer makes sense. You can create precisely targeted blog posts and social media for each targeted audience, and your business will benefit from doing so.

No matter how easy it is for your business to start the process of enacting its marketing plan, if your business is successful, managing that plan will become more intense and complex over time. The precise point at which it makes sense to outsource marketing is different for every business, but if a business owner finds that they’re spending more of their time creating an editorial calendar than they are actually interacting with their employees or running the business itself, it may be time to take the idea into consideration.