Whether you’re a marketer or not, engaging in active listening can be one of the most important methods to broaden your learning. So we’ve done just that.

In our latest survey, we asked 2,830 marketers seeking help with their content marketing one simple question: What’s your biggest challenge with content? No multiple-choice selections or series of check boxes. Just an open-ended invitation to reply — and to allow us to listen.

All in all we categorized their responses into 4,000+ challenges and 44 themes. We rolled themes into eight main categories: Production, Resources, Credibility, Talent Quality, Process, Strategy, Traffic, and KPIs.

When reviewing our report on the biggest content challenges, please consider:

  • Marketers were actively seeking content marketing information at the moment they were surveyed — which could affect the overall level of expertise expressed in the results.
  • Each marketer submitted their biggest challenge with content, not their only challenge. Roughly half of responses mentioned more than one “biggest challenge,” and we assigned them to multiple categories accordingly.
  • Responses ranged from single-word submissions to multiple sentences in length. About one quarter of responses were single-word entries. The total word count for all of the responses collectively exceeded 12,000 words (or equivalent to ~40 pages of a standard novel).
  • Our category breakdowns include percentages of responses by themes within their respective category.