Quality vs Quantity in your Content Marketing Strategy

Unless you avoid B2B content marketing publications like the plague, you will be all too familiar with the declaration that ‘content is king’. Regular blogging and content production encourages more social shares, improves your SEO and creates more opportunities for prospects to engage with your company. So yes, saying that ‘content is king’, is for the most part a fair statement. But, how much is really enough when it comes to content frequency and is there such a thing as too much? Unfortunately, there isn’t a one-size-fits-all solution for every company’s content marketing strategy. How much content you produce depends on multiple factors: 

Is your voice worth being heard?

First things first – are you creating content for the sake of creating content, or is what you have to say actually going to benefit anyone? The internet is already bloated with boring, generic and unhelpful content – don’t add to the problem! Before you create anything, be it a blog post or an e-book, answer these questions:

• Will this piece of content resonate with my prospects?

• Has my business’s persona been considered?

• Does it successfully identify and solve a persona pain?

• Does it encourage further action from readers?

If the answer to any of these questions is no, then consider scaling back your content marketing schedule until you nail these key features. We are strong believers that at the foundation of every piece of great content is a fully-developed persona. If your content is struggling to achieve the above, we highly recommend you read our guide to creating personas.

Don’t let quantity sacrifice quality

Is your business the type that churns out a new blog post or e-book like clockwork? This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but in B2B it is easy to fall into a rut of repetitiveness and uninspiring content. This does place B2B businesses in a bit of a predicament. As HubSpot argues, to grow a blog, you need to consistently publish content that readers also enjoy reading and find useful.  

In-depth, tactical blogs and infographics take considerable time to research, produce and publish. However, as Hubspot’s research discovered, these content types generate the most traffic and leads, in comparison to syndicated content and news pieces.

Of course, in the real world, businesses don’t have unlimited time and resources to constantly create deep tactical blogs. The solution is to reach a balance between quantity and comprehensiveness by producing a balance of content types. 

Planning is the key to productivity, as well as avoiding the dreaded writer’s block. It’s recommended to create a content marketing plan that covers at least one month of activity (although the longer the better). By creating a detailed plan, you can shape content around your targeted keywords and persona pains, as well ensuring a balance of content types. 

Are you producing evergreen or time-sensitive content?

In a similar vein, you need to consider the shelf-life of your content and how this impacts the frequency of your activity. Evergreen content is still relevant to prospects weeks, months or even years after its initial publication date and will continue to drive traffic for a considerable period of time. Typically, evergreen content will be in the form of a tactical guide that will take longer to produce than a standard blog post. While you may be able to produce several shorter, more disposal blog posts in the same time frame, in the long term, the ROI is much greater for evergreen content. 

Once again there is a balance to be reached. Arguably, news-related and timely content will result in a higher spike of traffic initially, while evergreen content is still gathering steam. Furthermore, topical content helps your business appear ahead of the curve and up to date with the latest industry developments.

So what is the right balance? Favouring the production of evergreen content will help you to continually attract prospects over time, while the occasional topical post will enable you to benefit from traffic spikes. 

Are you planning to repurpose content?

If you are not, then you really should. Repurposing content breathes new life into old content by reimagining it in a different media format. The possibilities are endless. For example, you could spin an in-depth guide into a series of smaller blogs, an infographic or a video. Similarly, you could group blog posts exploring the same topic into a summary list-style post. 

Repurposed content doesn’t even need to require that much effort. An evergreen post can be quickly updated for relevance and accuracy (i.e. updating statistics), and you have a shiny new post once more. If you’re struggling to decide what to repurpose, the best strategy is to look at your analytics and identify the best performing blogs and guides. The content piece you choose should be easily updated or transformed into various media types. 

Content is only one piece of the puzzle 

You could be churning out multiple pieces of content a day, but without an effective inbound marketing strategy in place, your results are likely to suffer. The principles of inbound marketing are getting found by prospects, nurturing them with content and then converting into leads. So you have the nurturing part covered by content, but what about the other pieces of the puzzle? To help you get a better understanding of how you can integrate content into an inbound marketing strategy, we’ve created a step-by-step guide, which you can download below.