Marketers are still finding it difficult to deliver personalised content marketing materials to audiences at the right time but are getting better at creating tailored messages, a new joint study by Vennli and Content Marketing Institute (CMI) has found.

The Optimise Content Marketing Performance Through Active Audience Listening study released last week aims to get to the bottom of common challenges and issues marketers are dealing with on a daily basis, including the advance of cutting-edge tech and the need for strategies and long-term content planning.

The good news is that documented strategies are now helping to lay the foundation for strong creative distribution. Six in ten marketers say they have one, which is a healthy 17% increase over the number reported in the 2018 whitepaper. However, while marketers are putting down strategies on paper, acting on them is proving to be difficult.

Nearly half of those surveyed said they are still forced to adopt a “project-focused” mindset where they must react to internal requests and changing conditions rather than being proactive. This is making the task of aligning content output with a planned strategy more troublesome than it otherwise would be and is having a negative knock-on effect in other areas.

For example, just 22% said they are building content based on buyer personas, which are essential for serving up more targeted articles, videos and messages to end users. Furthermore, a mere 15% said they can currently align content with a customer’s journey.

“It’s clear that companies know what message they want to convey to their target audiences,” Vennli CEO, Marty Muse, said. “However, what they want to say versus what their customers want to hear doesn’t always match. Incorporating solutions, like content intelligence, can confirm the right messages at the right time at the right place so that marketing teams no longer have to guess.”

All these issues are holding companies back in their efforts to deliver content at the right time to the right customer. More than half (51%) said they disagree or remain neutral with the notion that they can deliver timely content through the right channels to engage with the audiences that matter to them. Just one in ten had a strong feeling that they could do this effectively.

“What the research revealed is that today’s marketers are too busy managing content to manage content well,” CMI’s chief strategy officer, Robert Rose, said. He added that many brands still have a blind spot in terms of knowing exactly what their audiences need and want to hear, primarily due to a failure to implement listening strategies. To address these issues, marketers could outsource all or part of their content efforts to a third party to free up time and resources to implement core strategies effectively, leverage new technology (including AI and automation) to improve the quality of repetitive tasks, and move away from a culture where internal requests from different parts of the business take precedence over a unified strategy.