Incredible, isn’t it? Despite all the fanfare and pageantry that has followed content marketing over the last few years, fewer than 6% of marketers confidently claim to be executing content marketing strategies properly.
It’s just one of a handful of eye-popping stats to come out of the State of Content Marketing Survey, a major new survey of senior UK marketers this month as part of a campaign to help create healthy debate around the misunderstood tactic.
With more budget than ever before pouring into the approach (60% of those surveyed said they were opening the purse strings further in 2017) 92% admitted to not knowing exactly how they should execute.
To check out all the results from the survey, click below (opens up in a new tab):
The biggest pain point of all to come out of the State of Content Marketing survey?
"Producing engaging content, consistently."
I had been reading all the results with mild interest until those words stopped me dead in my tracks.
You may think the source of that concern stemmed from the fact that such a thing should be easy to manage, but it goes deeper than that.
Success with content is predicated entirely on your ability to consistently produce content that engages, resonates and adds value to your audience’s lives. And if producing that is the single biggest barrier then we have a problem!
You see, investment in content is a waste of money if you don’t have a well-designed plan to deliver constant content.
It doesn’t matter how brilliant your campaigns are if your audience has no other content to come back to and engage with.
And this is where the constant content plan comes in...
Constant content
The concept is a simple one: no content plan is complete unless it's based around delivering content consistently.
To do this requires a focus on strategy, not just on a few blog posts and the odd bigger campaign.
The best way to explain this is to visualize it in a different way. Below, you’ll see a simple diagram to throw light on my point.
Here we can see how a campaign-led strategy exposes holes in your plan. While we have plenty of activity going on in both our owned and earned channels, the issue is what goes on between large content launches. Where do those people go during those periods of inactivity? How do we keep them engaged when there's no central content hub to pull them into?
This kind of approach is something we see often, especially from larger brands where budgets allow for more creative content campaigns to be run regularly, and here’s why it doesn’t yield positive ROI.
As human beings, we like variety. To keep us hooked, content delivery needs to reflect this. Campaigns need to be designed as part of a whole, becoming a peak content moment rather than the only content moment, pulling new audiences back to the constant content activity going on at the center of brand activity.
You see it in the way magazines are organized, starting with an initial section of often short-form content before you then hit a four-plus-page feature. This is done to ensure we keep turning the pages, experiencing variation as we do so.
This is something I like to call content flow. It’s a great strategic "tool" to help ensure you design your overall strategy the right way.
The approach to strategy
The key is actually very simple. It focuses the mind on the creation of a content framework that enables you to produce lots of high-quality regular content and the ideas that flow from it. I call it the "Constant Content Plan."
The right way to approach the content planning phase is to create a process that supports the building of layers of different content types, like we see below in our second diagram:
In this example, you can see how we intersperse the bigger campaigns with lots of owned content, creating a blog and resources section that gives the new visitor something to explore and come back to. Without it, they simply float back out into the content abyss and onto someone else’s radar.
That consistent delivery — and the audience retention it creates — comes from the smaller content pieces, the glue that binds it together; the strategy in its entirety.
"Smaller" doesn’t mean lower-quality, however, and investing lots of time through the ideation phase for these pieces is critical to success.
Creating smaller ideas
To do this well and create that constant content strategy, a great place to start is by looking at the ideas magazines use. For example, these are the regular content types you often find in the best-crafted titles:
- What I've learned
Advice piece from a heavy-hitter. Can sometimes be expanded to what I've learned in my 20s, 30s, 40s, etc. - The dual interview
Get two people together for an interview. Write an intro as to why they’re there, and then transcribe their chat. Bingo: unique content. - Have you ever/What do you think of?
Pose a question and ask ten people for their responses. Good reactive content to a particular event that might pertain to one of our clients. - Cash for questions
Get an interviewee/expert and pose them a series of questions gathered from real-life members of the public. - A day in the life
What it says on the tin — an in-depth look at someone of interest's working day. - Person vs person debate
Start with a question or subject matter, get two people, put it to them, and record the results. - Master xxxxxx in five minutes
A short how-to — can be delivered in pictorial or video format.
This style of regular series content lends itself well to online strategy, too. By running these regularly, you create both variety and the critical stickiness required to keep the audience coming back.
Of course, with such variation it also then allows you to create better newsletters, social strategies, and even inbound marketing plans, maximizing that return on investment.
The strategy allows for informative content as well as entertaining pieces. In doing so, it gives your brand the opportunity to build subject trust and authority, as well as capturing key opportunities in the purchase funnel such as micro-moments and pain points.
This combination of informative and entertaining output ensures you're front and center when your customer eventually falls into the purchase funnel.
Some examples
One way of bringing this to life is to look at brands already executing well.
One of the best blog strategies I have seen in some time is the one by Scotts Menswear. One of the key reasons for its quality is the fact it's run by a very experienced print editor.
If we reverse-engineer what they’ve been doing on-page, we can clearly see that much thought has gone into creating variation, entertainment, and usefulness in a single well-rounded strategy.
Take the last ten posts, for instance. Here's what we have and how it flows:
- Seven Films We're Looking Forward to in 2017 – Video-based entertainment/lifestyle piece.
- Key Pieces for Your January Fitness Drive – Trending content with useful advice.
- Style Focus – A great regular piece that jumps on trending "news" to discuss the implications for fashion.
- Updated Classics from Puma – A news article on a new trainer release.
- Polo Shirts: A Wardrobe Staple – An in-depth guide to a key piece of clothing (part of a series).
- Our Guide to Valentine's Day – Lifestyle guide that helps convey brand positioning, tonality, and opinion.
- Nail Your Valentine's Day Outfit – Helpful guide to getting it right on a key seasonal event in the audience’s calendar. Clearly, they see Valentine's as a sales peak.
- Get Your Overhead Jacket Kicks – Guide to a fashion staple.
- 5 Brands and Acts Tipped for Greatness – Lifestyle piece tapping into the music/fashion brand positioning.
- Our 5 Favorite Trainers Online Right Now – Great list feature to help the consumer buy smarter.
You can clearly see how they're using structured thinking to create a blog of real variety and value. By combining this with a strong big-bang content plan that sucks in new visitors, you can build a hefty retained audience that improves critical metrics such as dwell time, returning visits, engagement, and sales.
Building our own plan
I know what you're thinking. "Sounds great, for a brand in fashion. It’s cool and interesting. But I work in a 'boring' niche and this type of stuff just isn’t possible."
While it could be a little more difficult that doesn’t mean it is impossible by any stretch of the imagination.
To prove the point, let’s look at a fictional example for a company in the medical products sector.
Here’s the deal: A2Z Medical is a company built up in the '60s and '70s. They have a huge B2B footprint but want to bring their marketing strategy into the current decade, in part because they are launching a consumer-facing brand for the first time. The new venture will offer medical kits for the general public and as such requires a proactive, content-led strategy to promote trust, awareness, and engagement alongside the obvious requirement for sales.
Audience research
The first step in building a content strategy is to understand your audience.
We could go into the detail of that all day long, but for the sake of this example we already have detailed data that tells us there are two main groups of people interested in coming to and buying from the site.
I've also written about the process I go through to define personas, and would always recommend this post too for background.
James is an obsessive ailment Googler, worrying over every little thing that he or his family suffers. He’s a detail man and wants to be prepared for all eventualities.
Chloe, on the other hand, has very different needs. She's a mum, works part-time to help pay the bills, and then devotes herself to her family and children.
She's time-poor and takes a practical view on life to make it work. Her purchase behavior is based on distress or urgent need.
Different need states
It is abundantly clear from this very quick overview that each have very different purchase journeys and needs from a content perspective.
We'll look at what this means for our content strategy a little later. Before we dive into that, though, we must also look at our understanding of the market opportunity.
This data-dive helps us to understand what people are looking for now in the space, where they get it from currently, and where the gaps may be.
The data-dive
This work is carried out by one of our content strategists before any creative sessions take place. This ensures we can validate ideas back to what the data tells us.
So, what does that process involve? Let’s look at each stage briefly now:
- Long-tail research
- Quora/Reddit/forum research
- Magazine research
- Pub beers!
It's a well-covered subject area, but also a very important one; it often yields ideas that convert fastest to traffic and revenue.
1. Long-tail research
Much has been written (including this piece I penned in 2015) on this subject area, and in much more detail than I aim to cover it here. Right now, let’s focus on some key tools and areas for opportunity.
It's easy to get lost in this process, so the key is to keep it simple. To do this, I stick to a small handful of tools:
- SerpStat – Has a useful long-tail tool based on Google Suggest to give you lists of questions by keyword phrase.
- Keywordtool.io – A similar tool, but free to use. Slightly more clunky.
- Bloomberry – A new tool by the makers of Buzzsumo. Does a great job of finding opportunities from other sources, such as other sites and forums. It also has a nice data visualization view that gives you volume and key competitor info, the latter of which can be helpful for a later stage in the process. Here’s an example of a search for "first aid":
- Storybase – A free tool that pulls long-tail phrases from a variety of sources for content ideas and also includes some demographic data. This can be helpful when it comes to matching ideas to personas.
For the sake of this process, we're not looking to build a full long-tail strategy, of course. This is solely about finding content ideas with search volume attached to them.
By downloading from a bunch of sources (such as those above), it's then relatively easy to de-dupe them in Excel and create a master list of ideas to pull into your overall plan.
It can make sense to segment or classify those ideas by persona, too. I do this via simple color coding, as you can see below. This allows you to create a shortlist of ideas that are on-brand and have the required level of opportunity attached.
Working this way makes sure you're thinking hard about serving the needs and pain points of the personas.
To further reinforce this point, it can work very well to include a mini-brainstorm as part of this stage, gathering a few people to talk specifically about the pain points experienced by each persona.
In this session, it's also useful to talk through the various micro-moment opportunities by asking what questions they ask in each of the following scenarios:
I want to go….
I want to do…
I want to know…
I want to buy…
You should end up with a list of content ideas per persona that covers pain points and interests.
2. Quora/Reddit/forum research
Another great source of information is the world of forums and aggregator sites. As you might expect, this starts with sub-Reddit research.
Within categories like those below lies a wealth of questions, the answers to which form brilliant article inspiration:
If we pop into the /AskDocs/ forum, we see a plethora of medical challenges from people looking for help — perfect real-world examples of everyday ailments that a site like ours could help to answer.
Q: I have a painful stomach when eating pork…?
Q: Will I need less sleep if I’m on a good diet and active?
Q: Swollen lymph nodes and nose bleeds. What could be going on?
The answers to these questions often require much research and professional advice, but by working through them for the less-serious everyday issues you could soon help Chloe out and become a useful ally.
The same is also true of Quora. You can play around with advanced search queries to drill into the juiciest boards by carrying out searches such as:
Another fantastic area worthy of research focus is forums. We use these to ask our peers and topic experts questions, so spending some time understanding what's being asked within your market can be very helpful.
One of the best ways of doing this is to perform a simple advanced Google search as outlined below:
"keyword" + "forum"
For our example, we might type:
The search engine then delivers a list of super-relevant sites designed to answer medical questions and we can easily pick through them to extract ideas for popular content.
And as an extra tip search for your keyword and “vBulletin” – a popular software used for forum sites. This will often surface rarely found sites with some real insight into particularly the older demographic, who are more likely to use traditional forums.
3. Magazine research
Another very important area to explore is magazine research. They contain some of the most refined content strategies in existence; the level of expertise that goes into idea creation and headline writing is without equal.
It makes sense, therefore, to find titles relevant to your niche (in our case, health and medicine) and look for great content opportunities.
You can even do this online, to a degree. If you go to a site like magazines.com, greatmagazines.co.uk, other magazine subscription sites, or even perform a Google image search, you’ll find a myriad of headline ideas simply by looking at covers.
In the example below I've Googled "medical magazines" and found numerous cover lines that would form great digital content. Here’s an example from just one, 4Health Magazine:
4. Pub beers
And last but certainly not least, we have the tried and true "chat-in-a-pub" approach. It might sound like an excuse for a beer, but it’s actually very useful.
If you can find a handful of people aligned to your personas, offer to buy them a few drinks and chat through their experiences and challenges. You’ll be surprised what you find out!
Product range
Of course, it pays to add some level of alignment to the plan by understanding which products offer the best margin or are most important to the business.
This info should come out of your initial onboarding and overall strategy creation process, but it can also be found via Analytics (if set up correctly) by looking for the best-selling products and finding out their trade cost.
The creative process
By this point, you’ll be overflowing with data and ideas for content. The challenge, however, is ensuring that you can add variation to that ideas mix. I call this stage the "Magazine and Hero Process."
Magazine ideas
To create that level of engagement and stickiness, we need ideas that are less practical and more entertaining. Any good content strategy should include a good mix of both informational and entertaining ideas; the first part of our creative brainstorm focuses on concepts that will achieve this balance.
We follow a structure that looks loosely like the below:
Stage one:
We start by asking "human" questions about each of our personas. While we may have completed all the keyword research in the world, it's important to take a real-world view on pain points and so forth.
From here we discuss the purchase funnel stage, ensuring that we have ideas not just for the top of the funnel but all the way through it, backed by a mix of content types to support that variation aim.
That conversation will then be followed by a look at the brand's wider marketing plan and seasonal events to ensure we plan key periods of activity thoroughly.
And the icing on the top is the quick look at our "swipe file," a treasure trove of old ideas we've seen, to see if we can borrow a concept or two for our plan.
Stage two:
The second and final stage of our ideation is a forensic exploration into what magazines can offer. I am a voracious devourer of specialist magazines; it can really pay dividends to look for clever ideas or content series to bring into your plan before the massive validation process begins. This will sort the possible from the impossible.
By following a set way of discussing ideas, you'll leave no stone unturned.
The discussion around the purchase funnel often turns out to be incredibly important: it ensures you look not just for ideas that help with awareness, but also further down the funnel. It's also possible to tie content types in to this to ensure variation between the types of content you produce.
To do this we use the Content Matrix I created specifically for this purpose; you can see it below:
The idea here is that it makes it easier to decide what content types fit with which parts of the funnel best and also the relative size of that content in terms of the man hours required to create it.
Working in this logical fashion will help with overall content mix.
Hero ideas
Once you've worked through that process, it's time to open up bigger ideas. These are important for one very simple reason: they help you find and reach new audiences to pull back into your sensational constant content plan.
We won’t go into detail here as to how to come up with consistently good big-bang ideas, as the point of this post is to look at the more regular content strategy, but if you want to read more about it click here.
For now, it's enough to note that you should also include time to think about campaigns and how they fit into your overall plan.
Pulling it together – process + example
By now, you should be swimming in great ideas of every kind imaginable, every one of which ties back nicely to your personas.
In our example, we've been focusing on Chloe and James. The next job is to lay those ideas out based on what you know can be delivered.
This process is broken into two parts:
- The laying out of the content based on ensuring variation and content flow.
- Fitting that plan into an operational format that's deliverable and based on available resources and/or budgets.
Getting that to work is little more than trial and error, but the result should be a content calendar that delivers on the promise of a great mix of regular content ideas, entertaining pieces, and helpful content that makes both James and Chloe want to come back to again and again.
Here’s an example of a two-week window to give you an idea of how just a portion of that regular content might play out:
Free downloads
Fancy giving it a go? You can use this free brand-as-publisher download to make the process easier. It contains all the tools and templates you need to ensure your output joins up the dots to maximize engagement and ‘stickiness’ from your regular content and to critically fix your issues with content marketing effectiveness.
And for those of you that want to see the Content Marketing Survey results in full click on the banner above to claim your free results ebook, complete with commentary, or scroll below for the highlights...
Hi Simon,
Amazing study!
I can see that you cover all the ins and outs of the Constant Content. Great.
Normally, I have difficulties when recommend a content strategy. Most clients cannot understand that it is not only for improving the SEO rank, that it should be an strategy.
Cheap/poor content is harmful, as we all SEOs know.
Sometimes, I prefer not to mention it, if I know for sure that the cheap/poor content will be chosen, better none and keeping the bounce rate under control.
That's an interesting Veronica. However, I find it interesting that you said no content is better than poor content. The author tries to argue that during those doldrums of no content is where a business suffers most. To your point though, you say that poor content is more harmful. I'm curious of your reasoning because I feel like a lot of marketers are pushed (and oftentimes rushed) to deliver content even though more time would yield a better final product. I'd be interested to hear your opinion on that.
Here's a link to my marketing blog. https://meldrummarketing.com/ I'd be grateful for an SEO professional like yourself to see if I'm on the right track in my SEO course.
If you've made it to the comments thanks for taking the ime to read this. While I write on a semi-regular basis here rarely have I ever felt so passionate about a post and subject area.
The results of the State of Content Marketing Survey concerned me. With so many marketers not sure of what 'good' looks like in content there is a real risk that all this amazing investment in the space could disappear through lack of results.
We need to tackle this head on, together...and sharing thoughts on how we may go about improving that picture is the start of that process....
Thank you, Simon, for your work on this subject. I work at a non-profit (marketing team of one) and there are many helpful tips in your post, especially the bullet list of smaller ideas. Cheers!
This is very useful. I know I write content for a few sites that are in the medical industry and knowing these little things can help with content a lot.
Bloomberry I have used before and from experience it is a very good tool if it used correctly. To learnnhow to use it properly you are better watching videos online as you can get data that changes the topical trust flow of your site to something you really don't want.
Also the customer service for Bloomberry is very good. The minute you log on there is a mini box in the bottom right if you get stuck. But it is very easy to use and is pretty much common sense.
Thank you for this article Simon very useful!
One of several great tools Cory absolutely! Thanks for commenting.
Simon, you are the man. Sick post! I feel bad for any readers that hopped off this page before reading it's entirety, as at the end that free brand-as-publisher download is a life-saver. It took me two days to really go through this post with a fine comb, and I took notes the entire way, not knowing about the download you provided at the end to make the process easier. Thank you very much for this amazing information, one of my favorite Moz posts in a while.
Great long read for sure with amazing graphics. I think many times people overthink about the way to properly produce content that will keep visitors engaged. I also think it all comes down to the client you are doing it for as well. I recently have been doing some content and video marketing for a martial arts school and it is amazing how much the audience is taking to the posts and overall content being produced, but that same game plan for a auto repair shop has been super challenging. You made some fantastic points about content that will actually get read and not just filler content to get it out there.
Great contribution to the community thanks.
Thanks Simon this is an amazing article. You passion is contagious my friend
Thanks Nathan!
Content generator now focusing on social media for content marketing and even using quora, but its very rare that user who came from google search will come back again , he will again use google search for same keyword and visit that website which will appear 1st in search results.
Love the graphics Simon. I keep swiveling the laptop over to my wife saying - look at this. Previously, for my content calendar I was working off the social media rule of thirds where content is, more or less, divided into site conversion, pay pieces and personality pieces. That paradigm falls apart with your layered approach and I think you are probably correct. Your Content Matrix shows the high interval pieces are for advocacy and loyalty while upper right corner is the Big-bang pieces for advocacy, I think this paradigm is a much more informed and useful approach than simply dividing output into thirds.
Hi Simon,
Great read, very detailed and love the content matrix, very useful!
Since blogs typically perform poorly compared to other pages for conversions (in my experience), I think the product range subsection you mention is very important. I like the idea of trying to create content around the products so when we write, we are naturally referencing them. Getting a consistent readership is vital, and attracting new visitors is awesome, but for blogs it seems business leaders are concerned with the costs of time to something with traditionally low conversion rates.
The importance of fresh, regular, and relevant content is clearly outlined above. But I was curious, were there any particular ways you increase conversion efficiency (linking/mentioning products in the content, shop the story, etc.)?
Thank you,
John
Hi John-Paul - great idea for another post! The key is to understand the user mondset and journey in reading the content. Help them continue along their path and you will 'convert'...
Hi Simon Penson,
i have read your article about the content marketing, it`s quite interesting to hear the message from you.
I would like to know whether I`m doing the correct format for content marketing in my website.
Will you please send few moments for us to check the content marketing:
I have own- scripted content for my website. I would love to write the content as one of the leader for my business and it is more convenient to write about my products in elaborate. Eventhough, my website doesn`t crawl with search engines, will you please check my website whether we have done right in our website: www.denariusoft.com.
We will be more honors if you give us the feedback.
Thanks,
Krishna
Hey Simon! Love your idea about constant content and thanks for sharing some amazing tools. It`s true that you may loose one of the two things between keeping up with an engaging content and adding value to audience`s lives while writing content consistently. In my opinion throwing consistent content is not difficult but keeping the people glued to your website by producing top notch content is nerve-racking. I personally feel the magazine approach is something which may turn out effective. As more people are fascinated by click-bait headlines and juicy contents.
Hi Patrick. The variation is the key. We (can) get bored very easily and by presnting content that doesn't just 'sell' or 'inform' but also entertains and adds value across varied content types, then you are in a much better place to retain and keep them coming back for more...
Very complete article Simon, keep it up!
Hi Simon!
Great post. I think content is one of the most important parts of any website that you want to position. In an e-commerce for example that is my case perhaps the creation of content at first serves us more to position than to attract users. But in the long run, when the project has already started and what matters to us is to gain traffic, we must take care that the content we create is "attractive" for our visitors and provides something that comes looking for, a solution, an explanation Or a clarification.
A greeting.
Simon, you were my inspiration for this first post. We've identified three persona's for our websites' visitors and actual clients, using quantitative and qualitative data (between Google analytics and our sales agents verbal feedback). Now we can begin developing our content calendar as you instructed in this post by utilizing the magazine approach explained above and using a variety of posts (from educational, to entertaining to the big bang!). I would love to hear your feedback on this (personas explained inside images). "DEBT: User Persona Comparison of People in Debt Who Need Help". I truly believe now that we've identified this vital information, these personas can be the basis to all of our content strategy moving forward, ensuring we speak directly to the people visiting our site and of course our clients. I welcome negative feedback too. I wish we did this 13 years ago when we started our business!
Love the article and info graphic! Also Answer The Public is a great tool for long tail Keyword research as well... worth checking out if you haven't already. Well done article sir
For small business companies content marketing is like headache for SEO guys. Because companies don't want to invest on contents hence below are the short and simple ways to do:
1) Update the company website's blog section - Weekly 2 content least. It should be well categorised and make sexy Title.
2) Participate in Question and Answer Forums - Weekly 5 Posts least. Latest one!
3) 1 Company News and use minimum 5 variation to distribute as a Press Release. Like we daily see, same news reported differently in USA Today, New York Times, The Wall Street, etc.
4) Some Quality back links for most relevant Latest posts. Weekly 5-10.
5) Optimize Google My Business Page Regularly. Updating Photos, Content, etc.
6) If Company's target audience are local then update the website with local events, local stories. company can also organize outdoor Social activities to promote the awareness.
7) Maintain Social Media platforms on daily basis. Use twitter for Polls. Don't forget Google Plus.
8) Monthly update YouTube Channel relevant videos.
These are the minimum things to do for small business companies. I hope it helps!
Hi Simon! I think it's important for everyone to realize the significance of this line in your article: "One of the key reasons for its quality is the fact it's run by a very experienced print editor."
I feel that many companies still expect content to be done on the cheap. However, experience tends to cost money. Your study is a prime example. The people involved probably didn't do all that research and design work for $50 and "exposure."
Have you encountered this attitude, and how do you try and overcome it?
It's a tough one to win I'm afraid. All you can do is educate and throw enough facts at them over time. Everyone will 'get' it eventually but for some 'eventually' may be too late...
Content calendars are a thing of beauty!
Content production is the easiest part of content marketing. Anyone can produce filler content for the sake of "constant content". Having it be truly relevant to your audience and then actually getting that content in front of them is the hardest part. A well organised content calendar, however, can help to strategise the topics to write about and when, and help to form a cohesive, well thought out plan on how to get each piece in front of its intended audience.
Don't get me wrong, this is a great post! Lots of ideas in here to inspire idea generation for publishers with an existing and expectant audience. However, I believe that smaller businesses should be investing more in the quality than the quantity of content. At least, at first.
This is about quality entirely not quantity Ria. I agree with you completely!
Ria, I was thinking very similar and you've made your point much more succinctly and clear than I did. :)
oh wow so much of informative infographics.
That is a fantastic infographic. 79% --> 6% hehe.
Hi Brendon - they are two different questions if you were confused? Hope that helps.
Hi Simon,
I appreciate your post and the angle you're coming from. But one concern jumped out at me when reading through (and I'll admit, the TL:DR node in my brain did come into play as I was reading, so I've scan read certain sections - if you've covered this point, I apologise), the type of constant content that goes into weekly monthly magazines that sell - that content is often garbage. Regurgitated every year.
It's filler content. Meaningless, quickly out of date and ultimately, (imo) worthless.
As you point out - it's easier to get away with that with fashion etc where trends change and you can write the same post every year but change the pictures.
Personally, I strive to move away from that content - the web is crammed with it. I'm a little bit bored of creating content that gets shared on social media at the right time of year and then sits in a blog archive attracting little to no visitors - which if I'm not mistaken, is the kind of content you're suggesting for the small pieces (it's certainly what I thought when I looked at the Scott's Menswear example).
Maybe I am missing something - and please let me know if i am! :) - but I find far more value in producing content that's going to stick around and gain traffic over time, not lose it. I appreciate you're saying there's room for both - but I find the reality is the small content is easy, so we do more of that and less of the big, amazing, (10x) content.
So I would argue against these small content pieces and I work towards minimising all throwaway content. I personally think it's better for a site to have fewer, high quality content pieces than lots of poor quality stuff.
I completely agree with your audience research a lot of the creative process too. I just think your plan for constant content works for a tiny percentage of content marketers and for the vast majority, stripping out the 'small' pieces and focusing on big, excellent, well researched, well targeted pieces with clear CTAs will benefit you far more than trying to weave it all together with (often) limited resource to do so.
Probably worth you reading it in detail Daniel as that is not the type of content I am talking about. The whole point is consistently delivered and very much audience focused pieces that create variation.
Magazines offer some of the very best content you'll ever see - their very existence relies on it!
Really? You pointed to a website that has content such as valentine's day outfits. To me that's very much boring content with 0 value.
Like I said - appreciate your entire post but who has the resources to achieve all that? Very few people/businesses.
Just offering a suggestion that this approach isn't for everyone. From my experience a lot of brands try to do this and fail because quality decreases. They focus on doing the small stuff because it's easy. Personally I'd recommend the majority of content creators spend their time on big, excellent, valuable pieces in their industry.
If they're lucky enough to have Conde Nast resources, then sure, things change.
I love magazines btw - Cereal is cool, as is Boat. But to me their content is focused on extremely high quality, valuable stuff and less on the annually regurgitated filler that you find in glossy mags that sell millions of copies.
Thanks for your reply. Appreciate your thoughts.
I have to agree with you Simon 100% about magazines although sometimes the content can seem pointless it still allows for marketing to work.
Appreciate the comment Tim.