Content is king!
It’s all about content.
Digital marketers are flooded with mantras like these on a daily basis, all of which underscore the importance of content. The numbers back it up as well.
According to the Content Marketing Institute:
- Content marketing can generate three times as many leads as traditional advertising channels
- 72% of marketers say content marketing increases engagement
- 91% of B2B marketers use content marketing
As customers increasingly step away from traditional advertising channels, connecting with them through helpful, informational content simply makes sense.
So that means you should create as much content as quickly as possible, correct?
Not so fast.
While creating content has never been more important, simply creating more content with reckless abandon can negatively impact your marketing efforts. Here’s why.
1. Content without strategy delivers bad leads
Are you creating a new piece of content because you should? Or because you can? Many digital marketers fall into this trap, creating content about any topic that strikes their fancy or – worse, creating content with loose connections to their core business goals.
The result dilutes your brand message and purpose, coupled with leads that do not align with your core business initiatives. Your content can’t be all things to all people so don’t try. Create content with a clear focus, rounded in strategy and move forward. This makes it easier for potential customers to understand your mission and interact with you if their initiatives truly match your own.
2. Inaccessible content abandons your audience
Today more than 25 percent of the U.S. population claims some form of disability. Reaching this important market requires more than just crafting content around topics they’re interested in.
When creating content, digital marketers must be mindful that they are crafting stories that can be consumed by screen readers and other assistance devices. This means:
- Including accurate alt text for your images
- Effectively contrasting your design color pallet for low-vision users
- Providing text alternatives for all your links
- Creating accessible completion forms
Finally, don’t forget to step outside your comfort box and create content in other media forms, including video, podcasts, and infographics. It’s the best way to make sure your content truly offers something for everyone.
3. Repetitive content makes the journey a slog
The content you create should support a broader customer journey. But if you’re producing too much content – particularly too many materials focused on similar topics – you can muddy the waters for your readers.
What content should they consume first? What content is most important? What path are they supposed to follow?
Drowning users in repetitive content not only aggravates visitors, but it can also confuse search engines as like-minded topics cannibalize one another in your search results. Be choosey about what you put online and never assume you should post everything and let users find the pieces that work for them. Digital marketers must act as tour guides, providing a clear path to navigate the customer journey, one piece of content at a time.
4. More content creates more waste if you’re inefficient.
From the writing and reviewing to the design and implementation, there are costs associated with content creation and the more content you create, the more those costs can pile up.
When executed efficiently, content marketing costs 62% less than other marketing channels. However, time and bandwidth considerations – plus the cost of remediation – can blow your budget.
You can streamline your content and improve results while protecting budget by:
- Executing better content from the beginning through effective keyword search, accurate headlines, meta titles, and descriptions and adding high-value backlinks.
- Incorporating accessibility including alt text, high-contrast images and copy written at a 6th-grade reading level.
- Automating the content review process to streamline reviews and eliminate bottlenecks.
- Turning to your analytics for fresh ideas.
This Hidden Costs of Content Creation eBook will show how you can incorporate three easy steps to execute better content from the beginning.
5. Maintenance beats new content in many cases.
Work smarter not harder. It applies to your content as well, and if you’re spending all your time churning out new content without updating your existing pieces, you’re not working smart.
Updating older content pieces with new keywords, information or links can bring these pieces back to relevance and introduce your content to an entirely new audience. These updates can also help the content perform better in search and bring older, previously forgotten pieces into new roles as pillars of your interlinking strategy.
Finally, refreshing your old content also protects your subject matter expertise. Remember that readers will make opinions about your company based on the content they interact with, and it’s up to you to ensure every piece is as up-to-date and robust as possible.
Siteimprove helps our 7,500+ customers make their content exceptional—ensuring content always lives up to the required standards of enterprises today.
We understand that creating consistently meaningful content experiences is complex, and it will continue to be. The most important thing is to ensure that marketing teams consistently deliver impact—impact to the business, impact to wider audiences, impact across digital channels – all with confidence.
If you’re looking to deliver impact but are missing visibility into what’s working well, what’s not working, and why across your digital experience, contact us today.
About Siteimprove
Siteimprove drives growth by empowering enterprise marketing leaders to amplify digital marketing efforts, deliver an outstanding user experience, and uncover actionable insights that maximize ROI.
Our Digital Marketing Cloud provides powerful, predictive insights throughout the entire content production lifecycle – so you know exactly where to invest to create the maximum impact.
Siteimprove has native reporting capabilities, cross-channel dashboards, and BI suite integrations to streamline digital marketing reporting to help teams demonstrate how they impact the bottom line.