I speak to a lot of B2B content marketers. It can be exhausting. Not speaking to them, of course, but hearing them talk about all the stuff on their plates. The list of To Dos is overwhelming. I’m truly worried that in trying to adopt the new mandates for continuous content development and distribution that we’re going to start seeing major burnout.
The inspiration for this post goes to Eric Wittlake (@wittlake) who wrote a post about how social media is lowering our content standards. His premise is the more we feel the need to share content, the less interested we are in reading it. But additionally, that the pressure to churn it out is resulting in mediocre content development. Amen and Kudos to Eric for focusing the spotlight.
It’s been a project to try and substantiate and shift the perspective of value in regards to lead generation from quantity to quality. Please don’t tell me that the “quantity” mindset is now invading content marketing.
Here’s why I’m concerned. I see marketers with To Do lists that look like this:
- 2 – 3 blog posts weekly
- 1 nurture asset for each campaign every 3 weeks – B2B companies average 3 concurrent campaigns.
- 1 white paper per month
- 1 case study per quarter
- Tweet 5 times per day minimum (only 1 about our stuff)
- Produce at least 1 webinar per quarter
- Record and post 1 – 3 videos per month
- And more.
Often that’s the plan. There’s no strategy, except for quantity. The justification is SEO, getting found, staying top of mind, staying current. No wonder executives are asking, where’s the frickin ROI? Sure it’s great to achieve that list of things, but there needs to be more to it than that.
The point is really not how much content is produced, but how compelling a story it tells that help your prospects and customers find the answers to the problems they’re trying to solve. If that means doing so with less, but better content, then that’s what marketers should do. That’s what turns prospects into customers – not how many of your content assets they read.
Quite frankly, if the content produced and distributed is medicre, it’s a reflection of the impression your company will make. If the impression is bad, then you’ve just wasted all that effort to generate followers, opt-in subscribers and web traffic because it won’t work. It’s not about the amount of stuff, it’s the substance.
Once again, let’s please show quantity for quantity’s sake the door. The focus must remain firmly fixed on quality.
