In a recent webinar put on by The Content Marketing Institute, there was a discussion citing that the biggest challenge that content marketers face is producing enough content and thus, there is a movement toward doing more with less.
Let me emphasize here that it's not laziness-it's a survival tactic.
To get noticed by consumers and their influencers (bloggers), we need to do A LOT OF WRITING! As the world of traditional marketing tactics continues to morph in to a content marketing focused world here are our modern predicaments:
- New and important social media channels are popping up everywhere and they are all being deemed important to have a strong presence on.
- The need to blog and be blogged about has become crucial to any company's success
While luckily there are tools like HootSuite to help us keep up with some of our social media channels and GroupHigh to save time in our blogger outreach campaigns, there are still so many channels in which to send out our message and content that it can be overwhelming.
A typical morning for me consists of tuning in to HootSuite to check out what people are tweeting about and who is mentioning my company; I then view and often comment on Facebook, Google Plus, my LinkedIn groups, Pinterest, and read all of the blogs that I follow. By the time I feel like "I've kept up with the world," it's lunch time.
After simply reading and commenting on all of my social media channels, I have to write on my own company's blog, schedule some tweets and Facebook posts, fulfill my guest blogging obligations, put up cool presentations on SlideShare, check out HootSuite again, write sections of an ebook, brainstorm infographic ideas with a designer, and most importantly-stay in contact with and make contact with influential bloggers. Meanwhile, I think about how all of the marketing blogs I follow are telling me that I need to be writing even more pieces of content for even more channels. Sigh.
Thus, a movement toward the "doing more with less" trend. What this means is that marketers should start out with one idea and see how many articles and avenues we can get out of that idea. Each general topic should get the following pieces of content in about this order:
- At least 5 blog posts for own site
- 1 ebook (sometimes the ebook will be made up of blog posts we've written on a subject)
- At least 5 guest posts
- 1 SlideShare presentation
- 1 infographic
- 50 tweets
- 10 Facebook posts
- 1 webinar
- 12 things to post within Google Plus communities
- 6 things to post in a LinkedIn group (especially B2B and these can be articles from own blog and guest blog posts)
- 10 pictures to put on Pinterest and Instagram (especially B2C)
- 1 enewsletter
- At least 1 digital magazine story
I did the math and this model means that we should be producing almost 100 different strings of words (of varying sizes of course) from each idea. Let's take a moment and let that sink in...
When we are so tired of putting our idea in to words that we begin to hate it, we're finished and ready to repeat this stage with a brand new brain child. When I have a few minutes between ideas and posts, I am always wondering what other social media outlets are going to pop up and become crucial to content marketing.
I would love to see comments below on how other content marketers keep up with all of the content outlets and if you think the number of channels we need to produce content on will continue to expand.