Author: Andrea Fryrear / Source: Marketing Insider Group The flow of content into the world has gone from a steady drip to an unstoppable
The flow of content into the world has gone from a steady drip to an unstoppable firehose in just a few short years. For those working in content creation this might seem to signal a bright future full of steadily rising paychecks and effortless promotions.
But this rosy picture actually leads to content overload and depressingly low levels of engagement.
What’s more, it’s a vicious cycle that many of us find hard to break.
As audiences experience content fatigue, the performance of each piece we send out begins to lag. So to get the same results we were getting six months ago, we figure we need to do more.
If each piece was once generating 10 leads, and now we’re only getting 8, we need to produce more to continue hitting our lead targets.
Sadly, this tactic won’t work. We might briefly maintain equilibrium in the short term, but soon our ability to do more will fall behind our content’s steadily deteriorating performance.
To pull ourselves out of this downward spiral, content marketers need to adopt a more Agile approach to the way we plan and execute. We need an Agile content strategy.
The Content Marketing Tidal Wave
In the early days of content, marketers were fighting for budget. Just a little something to get us started, just enough to prove the value of this “new” approach to marketing.
We quickly became victims of our own success, believing that if publishing three blog posts per week was working well, publishing five per week would work even better. Now we are veritable content factories, churning out content at a breakneck pace.
Emarketer reports that 60% of marketers now create at least piece of content everyday.
When we couple that statistic with a few others, it becomes obvious very quickly where the tidal wave of content comes from.
The Content Marketing Institute’s 2017 research report revealed that now 93% of B2B marketers and 86% of B2C marketers use content marketing. Practically every marketing team out there is using content to reach their marketing goals.
What’s more, most of us are still attached to the “more is better” mantra.
70% of B2B and 73% of B2C content marketers say they’ll be creating more content in 2017 than they did last year.
But here’s the problem: most of that content isn’t doing its job.
The Content Engagement Black Hole
Sirius Decisions reports that 70% of the…
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