Are you feeling exhausted? If you’re following popular advice about how frequently you need to be creating new content, you should be.
We’ve read blogs from experts who say the average business needs to create at least 60 new pieces of content each month in order to keep up. That’s more than two new pieces of content every business day.
And apparently, some B2B firms are taking that advice because in a recent survey 42 percent of marketers said they publish new content at least several times a week, with 16 percent publishing new pieces at least once per day.
We’re tired just thinking about keeping that sort of writing schedule.
The truth is, most B2B organizations don’t really need to publish new content that often. And if your team is working that hard on generating new content, you probably aren’t putting enough time towards the strategic planning initiatives that can have a much bigger impact on your company’s bottom line.
We know, we know, SEO is important, and you need to have fresh content in order to stay on the first page of Google results. But you can get a lot of SEO mileage out of reusing and repurposing old content.
Think about how your customers and prospects consume content. Most customers will tell you they don’t really want to hear from you every single day. After all, their email and voice mail and to-do lists are way too full—just like yours. They already have too many articles and blogs and tweets to read.
It’s much more important that you have really good, strategic marketing content than that you have something new every single day. Put more time into creating “evergreen” pieces that can last you a long time instead of wasting time creating a large volume of pieces that are much less effective.
Of course, if you pursue this strategy, you’re likely to get some push-back from sales (and some marketing folks). They get tired of using the same sales pieces all the time, so they want something fresh and new.
But your sales and marketing people aren’t your target audience. Keep in mind that the vast majority of prospects who are seeing your marketing materials are seeing them for the first time. It’s not old to them the way it seems old to the internal people on your team.
If you’ve developed some pieces that work really well, why would you toss them out just because they are a few months or even a year old? Instead, think about refreshing your successful pieces so that they stay up-to-date but keep the same arguments, proof points, structure, flow and tone that have worked well for you in the past.
Naturally, if you’re in a very dynamic industry where new products are launching all the time, you’re going to need to create new content to support those new products. Just make sure you are learning from your past successes and failures and re-using the approaches—and whenever possible the actual text—that have worked previously. That strategy can help keep your marketing costs low while maximizing profitability.
For more tips like this, check out the webinar on Creating Compelling Content. It can help you ignore the hype and focus on the techniques that are actually working for other B2B firms.
Creating Content That Actually Works
While every marketing pundit and publication is fueling the hype around content marketing, the hypesters are omitting some important facts and glossing-over some crucial processes. In this on-demand training webinar, you’ll learn about ten proven strategies for creating more effective sales and marketing content.
