5 Steps to a Super-Focused, Super-Successful Content Experience. When I interviewed content marketing aficionado Robert Rose last year, he observed how marketers in general have “become so focused on becoming an on-demand vending machine of content for sales enablement, for filling social channels, email newsletters, and blogs—all those things that have grown up organically over the last seven years—that we’ve forgotten how to create high-impact content.” That constant drive to expand content, to saturate the market, to produce more, more, more, it’s like marketing’s version of gravity—a constant but unseen force that we never consciously notice. Unless we’re mindful about process, strategy, and results, our content volume will continue to grow. But what if all teams with a content-related role shared the same work management and reporting tool, with all relevant information gathered into a single source of truth? But time spent in the field listening to actual customers has a way of bringing us back to reality. “To make content development leaner, define a strategy and stick to it,” says Lucas. He produces content for only two reasons: To maintain engagement with his current readers and audience. The point is that they both have a strategy that informs a documented content map, and they stick to the strategy. Unlike so many other aspects of content marketing, there’s just one right answer here, and you’re only five steps away from making the right choice for both your customers and your team. Get a weekly dose of the trends and insights you need to keep you ON top, from the strategy team at Convince & Convert.
Few marketers would admit to valuing quantity over quality—or volume over effectiveness—when it comes to content. And yet for many, their actual output tells a different story.
When I interviewed content marketing aficionado Robert Rose last year, he observed how marketers in general have “become so focused on becoming an on-demand vending machine of content for sales enablement, for filling social channels, email newsletters, and blogs—all those things that have grown up organically over the last seven years—that we’ve forgotten how to create high-impact content.”
That constant drive to expand content, to saturate the market, to produce more, more, more, it’s like marketing’s version of gravity—a constant but unseen force that we never consciously notice.
Unless we’re mindful about process, strategy, and results, our content volume will continue to grow. And what’s so bad about that? According to Shelly Lucas, an Austin-based B2B content marketing consultant, when you create too much content, “it doesn’t get used, the quality is lower, and optimization falls by the wayside.” And it becomes less focused, targeted, and effective as a result.
Lucas points out several factors that contribute to marketers’ tendency to produce too much content:
- They don’t have a content strategy (or they don’t stick to it).
- What they produce isn’t getting the results they want or expect, so instead of testing and optimizing, they create something different.
- What they create is working, and everyone wants a part of it.
- A certain critical mass of content is needed to feed digital campaigns.
These are all compelling forces to reckon with, but they can be overcome with five simple practices and changes in perspective.
1. Tear Down the Silos
Siloes are problematic when they stand between:
- The marketing department and other departments, especially sales
- Individual teams within the marketing department
- Different software tools that don’t play well with each other
In all three cases, these barriers make it difficult to get the right information into the hands of the right people at the right time. Content teams are usually too overloaded to deal with a laborious process for tracking down the performance results of their most recent releases. With a dozen deadlines always looming, they have no choice but to move on to the next piece, more or less blindly.
But what if all teams with a content-related role shared the same work management and reporting tool, with all relevant information gathered into a single source of truth? When this is the case, content marketers always have the latest analytics at their fingertips before they start a new campaign, ebook, or video. They have the intelligence they need to pivot and react in real time, effectively building upon past successes and avoiding recent failures.
This, of course, requires the CMO or another department leader to recognize the benefits of unifying all teams into one solution and appoint someone to start the discovery process of finding the right tool. It will take some up-front effort, but it’s worth it in the end.
2. Start and End with the Customer
“We’ll never be perfect at every step of the customer’s journey,” Rose says, “but how do we become remarkable at a few strategic steps, so that the thing the consumer wants is to have another experience with us?”
We can start by shifting our mindsets to be more customer-focused, rather than relying too heavily on internal talking points. This can be done by following our personas on social media, hanging out where customers congregate online (whether that’s LinkedIn, Instagram, Twitter, etc.), interviewing actual customers, and other similar practices.
We can then use these discovery experiences to compile a list of questions that real customers and prospects need answers to—and design a content experience that satisfactorily answers those questions in the right order and the proper place in the funnel.
“I recommend that producers shift from trying to catch every keyword to trying…
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