According to CMI & Marketing Profs research in the 2016 B2B Enterprise Content Marketing Benchmark Study, only 22% of enterprise marketers feel their content marketing is effective. With an 6% drop since 2015, it seems marketers are facing some challenges when it comes to their content marketing. Aside from some of the common website mistakes made by content marketers, some of their major challenges include:

#1. Producing engaging content

An overwhelming 82% of enterprise marketers say that engagement is their number goal for their content marketing, so it’s understandable this is also the number one challenge they face. But how can it be fixed?

You created a killer piece of content that you know for sure will be a hit within your target audience. You’ve done the research, you have the ideal buyer in mind, and you have all the information laid out in an easy-to-read format. But no one is engaging with it. Or at least, not that you are aware of, because you aren’t using the tools you have to provide you with the insights you need to create the content your audience is craving.

“The problem is, too many marketers fail to promote their content enough: In fact, there’s a pretty good chance you’re not using modern tools and resources to help with promoting all the new content you’re creating. If anything, you’re publishing more content, and spending twice as much time on manual promotion to get fewer results.” – Sujan Patel

With 93% of B2B marketers leveraging social media content, this is an ideal platform to do more than just engage in conversation with your audience. Social media also provides enterprise marketers with insights into what types of content their audience is consuming, sharing and engaging conversation with.

Thankfully, unlike other CMS’s on the market, WordPress has an abundance of free plugins you can install right from your dashboard. Using a social sharing plugin from the WordPress directory to your website and blog not only encourages users to share your content right from your website, but it can also show you where it is being shared the most. Using this information will help you understand what content is resonating with your audience the most and will allow you to create more content they will engage with in the future.

#2. Measuring the effectiveness of content

More than just gaining insights into your social media world, WordPress also integrates with most tracking and analytics software to provide you with your site’s performance. Diving into your most important website metrics will show you the pages that most viewed, how long users are staying on each page and which types of content is viewed most frequently. You can also set up your tracking to show you which blog posts are performing best, as well as which one’s aren’t doing so well.

Remember, Google loves WordPress websites. With 68% of enterprise marketers reported that web traffic is the most important metric to measure their content effectiveness, using this feature in your WordPress dashboard will give you the exact answers you need to find the effectiveness of your content. These insights can better tell you which web pages need to be tweaked, removed or updated to cater to the preferences of your visitors.

#3. Producing consistent content

As budgets increase year-over-year for content marketing efforts, it’s safe to say that content marketing teams are increasing in size as well. Even more, 74% of enterprise marketers reported to producing more content than they did last year! While more people to power up content production is great and seems to solve the challenge at hand, it can also cause major repercussions if the workflow is not set up properly. When not paid attention to, you may accidentally assign a new employee with access to publish when they should only have access to contribute or edit. This may result in the wrong piece of content going live on your site without notice.

Using user roles in your WordPress site can ensure you assign the right contributor with the right access to your site. Aligning this with the insights from your social sharing will allow for you to produce consistent content that your audience is actually engaged with.