Spending quality time on it! I think that content marketing is really only beneficial if you create great content, but great content takes time. When you're running a business, it's so easy to get distracted with other things that seem like they'll have more of an immediate response. But if you give content marketing the time, in the medium-term, it can have such a huge impact!

My biggest struggle is actually to produce any marketing content at all :). I have learnt that this is actually one of the most common mistakes for early entrepreneurs, i.e. not spending enough time actually doing marketing. When I finally kicked my ass to spend time in marketing activities I found that it takes a long time and perseverance to actually get any results, so it is easy to throw the towel too early instead of going for the long run.

pressure to be more creative

As a content creator (coder and 3d voxel designer), marketing does not come easy at all. One of the hardest parts that I find is actually knowing where to start with marketing, and how to get actual results. There is lots of theory and obvious stuff like website design and SEO, etc... but in reality these days it seems you have to just hit it lucky with big influencers on social media. As we created Voxies (https://voxies.io) we knew that marketing was our weakest area, but we assumed that just by making something good and high quality this would make up for that shortfall.... this seems to be a problem these days and what we discovered is that marketing probably accounts for around 80% plus of your projects success!

SEO is the #1 challenge. Trying to apply SEO in a broader way, in order to channel its specific technical endeavors into content marketing.

I've worked at a number of agencies and with brands and always found in the content / social team it was always a case of filling in a content plan and became content for the sake of content. Like you were just ticking off boxes. Over time I started implementing and using various techniques to find content ideas relative to my audience. From using Amazon, to Quora and a whole load of automations I was able to find a shedload of ideas. We all know the well runs dry after a while so you need that quick spurt of inspiration to keep going. (plus, when it's Friday and the content plan is due end of play....) Anyway, I don't mean to sound sales pitchy but I'm about to launch my eBook - the content ideas machine and I've included every technique I use to find content ideas. Head over to my Ship page to find out when it launches. www.producthunt.com/upcoming/the... Hope it helps!

Specifically for social media, it's getting started. I have read, heard, and can see the benefit of having a personal social brand to connect with users but as someone who hasn't posted something on social media personally in a long time... it's hard to rip the bandaid off and start!

Sorry, I got distracted...what was the question again? 😅

Great content is time consuming! Inspiration!!!

The continuous tendance of creating something brand new, something that no one has seen before. This is my number 1 content creation struggle, and not only mine, I think that every creator who seeks for unique content is tending to this. As an example of inspiration for me is PAN Digital Marketing https://pandigitalmarketing.com/, I am always amazed by the way how they can create something new on a topic which looks like there is nothing more to say about, everything is done, but they always find a way to make it new and original.

Something that was a struggle to us at https://llamarketing.co.uk/ was creating something new, that no one had covered in dept, but that a lot of people are searching for. We've utilized a few tools and we have decent progress in that direction for the last few months.