Marketers must learn to embrace content marketing help, not push outsourcing opportunities away.

The new year brings with it a lot of opportunities for brands to maximize their reach and build upon successes of the past. Content marketing remains a top priority for businesses of all sizes, but challenges prevent organizations from seeing the full benefits of a high-quality content strategy.

As Brafton has reported, choosing the right metrics and creating engaging content continues to hamper digital marketing initiatives for American businesses. However, solutions to these hardships may be easier to identify than most marketers think. Brands also note that producing enough content and having the manpower to stick with strategies often prohibits their efforts from becoming successful parts of their digital outreach programs. Engaging copy comes from the experience created among readers, not a hidden formula made up by some tech genius, and producing valuable media doesn’t need to be a timesuck or dry up corporate budgets.

Oftentimes, brands may not realize the full breadth of knowledge they have in house, and marketers are quick to publish broad media just to populate their web pages. Below Brafton has outlined three points to solve quantity and resource issues that stymie content marketing.

1. Diversity helps improve consistency

Internet users make increasingly specific searches on the web. In fact, most people know what they want to discover online before they visit search engines or social Pages.

10 Ways to Optimize Your Brand’s YouTube ChannelAccording to BizLaunch, the majority of small business owners (65.9 percent) follow approximately 1 to 10 brands online through social media and blog content. When BizLaunch asked these professionals why they followed specific brands on sites like Facebook, respondents said they engaged with companies because they provided exclusive offers (24.2 percent), shared information about future products (23.9 percent) and posted interesting industry-facing content (22 percent). Different users want different information.

At the same time, almost all online shoppers expect consistent updates from brands. In fact, BizLaunch also found that 73 percent of business owners want to see small business content from brands they interact with online at least once a week or more. Seventy-two percent of respondents also purchase products or services from brands they follow online due to these publications.

But how can brands produce enough content to attract the attention of these media-hungry internet users? By understanding what information can lead to multiple media posts.

Brands should repurpose media across several channels, turning blogs into bite-sized fun facts for Twitter, video tutorials for audio-visual learners and infographics for added social appeal. According to the Content Marketing Institute, B2B and B2C companies use an average of 12 tactics to distribute branded content across the web. Brands that spread their promotional content across the web via unique content types attract wider audiences, diversify their content portfolios and find they often have more media to post to the web than ever before.

2. Outsourcing doesn’t mean brands lose control

When the responsibilities of creating enough engaging content become too much, marketers shouldn’t fear outsourcing. Aquent reports that nearly two-thirds of marketing, digital and creative teams use some form of external workforce to help achieve marketing goals. More, 70 percent of hiring managers look to outsource when they don’t have the internal resource, funding or knowledge to deliver exceptional and consistent outputs for branding purposes.

44 percent of business-facing organizations and 46 percent of consumer-facing brands ask for help from content marketing services.

The Content Marketing Institute looked specifically at the percentage of B2B and B2C companies outsourcing content creation. The source notes that 44 percent of business-facing organizations and 46 percent of consumer-facing brands ask for help from content marketing services. Of course, these businesses don’t give up control of their campaigns. Outsourcing helps marketers complete tasks they don’t have the abilities to perform in house, helping organizations achieve their unique goals.

3. Brands must rethink how they approach content creation in 2013

Think Outside The BoxThe goal of any content strategy should be to provide new and existing customers with information they can use to improve their lives, whether by discovering a product they didn’t know they needed or by selecting the right company to work with, educational media spread across the web should always be designed honestly and for the end user.

While SEO and social shares are often cited as signs of content marketing success, businesses should take this a step further and look at the quality of the traffic or the kinds of interactions their blogs, landing pages and other media win. Consider content an essential ingredient to a positive brand experience, and let that guide the creative process.

Marketers know what they want to say, but they may not have the capabilities to put their words down on paper. Content services help transfer those value props into stunning visual media displays, ranging from blog copy to infographics to video clips, and sometimes it pays off to ask for help in the end.

Ted Karczewski is an Executive Communications Associate at Brafton. He works to develop his own voice and apply his passions to the evolving world of SEO and content marketing, but he doesn't shy away from writing for fun. After graduating from Suffolk University, Ted used his Communications degree to test out Sports Journalism before Marketing at Brafton.