At one point or another, we all struggle to keep up with the demand for content – not only for immediate content marketing initiatives, but also for demand generation, sales enablement and other marketing operations as well. In fact, Aberdeen Group content marketing research shows a clear execution gap – 92% of responding marketers rated high-quality content as valuable, but only 54% said they were effective at actually creating high-quality content themselves. We’ve all been there… we know the Best-in-Class tactics, but time, resources, or other obstacles hinder us from executing on the same level. To help make the aspirational potential of high-quality content marketing a more attainable, easier reality, here are three practical options for enhancing your initiatives.

Incorporate Third Party Content:

According to Aberdeen’s content marketing management research, only 32% of companies consider themselves effective in generating enough content to meet their marketing needs. In other words, the majority of us are all under the gun when it comes to feeding the content marketing beast. The good news is that if we can’t build every content asset we need to fuel the 10 marketing touches it takes, on average, to progress a new prospect to a closed-won deal, we can buy third party content from trusted industry institutions to fill in the necessary gaps.

Beyond just the “build or buy” dilemma, though, third party content also serves as a bridge between the solutions of our organizations and the pain points of our buyers. With third party content, we can serve up valuable market trends or opportunities to our prospects that support the value propositions in our products or services without actually having to directly talk about our products or services. In the discovery phase of the buyer’s journey, this means earning attention without losing credibility for pushing product. In the consideration phase, third party serves as trigger for connecting the value of a product or service to the business advantage it yields. In the final evaluation stage, third party content can even be the key differentiator between your offerings and a competitor’s.

Company-Wide Content Creators

Just because it’s called “content marketing” doesn’t mean we marketers should be the only people creating content. Karen McPhillips, VP of marketing for PlumChoice, points out “your subject matter expert might be a product manager.”McPhillips goes on to note that it doesn’t really matter where people sit organizationally; so long as you have a team that can manage the content marketing process. From sourcing entertaining yet insightful war stories from sales, to amplifying the vision of the CEO, some of the best content marketing assets available to us are sitting around our offices.

Reuse and Repurpose

One common fallacy when it comes to content marketing is that each piece of content can only be one thing. This isn’t the case at all. A single blog post alone can be turned into an infographic, rolled into a whitepaper, and even turned into a video script. Conversely, a whitepaper that’s 15 pages long could be cut into many smaller pieces of content as well. Along with such tactical, campaign-oriented content, we can also create more timeless, value-oriented content (often known as “evergreen content”)that can both serve as a foundation for other content, while also continuously standing on its own. These content types tend to be more of a stretch from actual product offerings, but often address enduring market challenges, patterns, or even human behaviors.

In the end, even if we master incorporating third party content, tapping internal talent, and reusing and repurposing content effectively, there are always new content marketing challenges to overcome, but stating with this framework, we can make the rapid rate of change in marketing all the more manageable.

To get more insights on Best-in-Class marketing tactics, download the complete report, 5 Habits of Highly Effective Content Marketers.