When LinkedIn opened its publishing platform in early 2014, no one could have anticipated that it would soon reach 7,000 posts per day. But it did! And the site’s level of activity lead many companies to be concerned about the amount of content they release and whether or not they should push themselves to release more.
Unfortunately, this kind of “more is better” reasoning often leads to content marketing burnout. And far from increasing website traffic and generating business leads, working too hard to deliver too much content can actually damage your brand.
Here are two important things to keep in mind when developing your company’s content marketing strategy.
Ignore the Masses and Focus On Your Customer
As the Content Marketing Institute explains, content marketing doesn’t work for two reasons: either it’s the right message in the wrong place, or it’s the right audience with the wrong message.
There are two things that matter most in this equation: placement and targeting. Your job is to strike a balance between the two by building the right audience on your social networks (including Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Google+) and customizing every part of each piece of content towards your customer.
Solve this problem:
Don’t be overwhelmed by trying to reach “as many people as possible.” In much the same way as your YouTube video will not go viral, your content doesn’t need to go viral either. It just needs to reach those specific, targeted customers that need to hear what you’re trying to say.
Create a Structure and Lean Into It
Promoting a single well-written article won’t overwhelm anyone’s schedule. But when you take into account the many moving pieces of a content marketing strategy, it becomes a real challenge.
Instead of viewing your content process as a process of “getting out as much as possible,” build a content marketing blueprint that you can rely on throughout your promotions. Having a structured plan around your blogs sending traffic towards your lead generation content will help you avoid burnout in the long run.
Solve this problem:
Map it out (we make our blog planner template available for free here). Evaluate which blog posts send traffic to which lead generation content offers like ebooks and resource guides. Review old blog posts and make sure each one sends traffic to the most relevant and current resources on your site.
Instead of focusing on frequency and saturation, turn your attention to the things that will improve your content marketing efforts without overwhelming your content team: promoting and targeting your content to specific customers and resting your efforts on a solid content marketing structure.
