Marketers consider audience targeting a key element of their custom content campaigns, but many still struggle to engage their ideal prospects.

Brafton recently conducted a poll that found more than 68 percent of marketers believe creating content that effectively engages their target audience is a top content marketing challenge. Moreover, once the main segment of the market is pinpointed, developing content for these prospects becomes an issue.

Across a company’s web presence, its prospects are providing critical information about the type of answers they need to make a buying decision, and this translates into the type of content they want to see from brands. As such, social media marketing and other channels can be included in the content creation process when looking for ideas to inform a targeted custom content campaign.

68.6 percent of marketers say creating content that effectively engages their audiences is a top content marketing challenge.

Previously, Brafton cited data from PointRoll, which showed 97 percent of companies believe ensuring their articles, blog posts and other content reaches and appeals to ideal prospects is their top priority. Feedback, complaints and questions frequently fielded across different web marketing channels should be used to tailor content. This is an underutilized source of content ideas, as Brafton recently reported that less than half of social comments directed at brands are answered.

Despite knowledge that targeting is critical to converting website content readers, Brafton reported that less than half of marketers believe their marketing campaigns have been truly successful in appealing to their desired audience.

Similarly, many businesses actively relying on web marketing to drive conversions are not using much in the way of analytics data to gauge their success and make effective changes. A recent report from PulsePoint found that 27 percent of marketers use intuition to measure success, rather than data-driven web analytics.

Joe Meloni is Brafton's former Executive News and Content Writer. He studied journalism at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and has written for a number of print and web-based publications.