How to focus on content, rather than simply publish it

Boost efficiency using focus and spotlight

There are many different content types that can boost marketing impact. Chances are your marketing or client account team has explored an array of different content formats suited to a diverse mix of channels. However, this doesn’t mean it has been a focused effort. As important as it is to create a wide net of content to fuel all your marketing campaigns, this is only as effective as the focus you place upon it.

Here’s what I mean by this. Let’s say you’ve built a wide variety of articles on your blog. For marketing’s sake, they’re only as effective as their reach. Certainly, it makes sense to share them extensively. However, these efforts are potentially overwhelming and time-consuming. So how can we streamline this process and achieve greater reward for our effort? It begins with prioritisation.

If we decide to limit the volume of our published content, we can essentially boost the effectiveness of our overall marketing. Think of it this way: let’s say we promote all our articles equally (sharing them on social media, etc.). This means our efforts are split. We don’t prioritise the pieces which could deliver far greater performance if their creation was given more attention. Instead, we should take our most powerful articles, blogposts, graphics and resources, and make bigger efforts to design and share them. The more focused our promotion, the more pinpointed our successes will become.

Building our content with a focus on excellence instead of abundance

It’s natural to want to cover a lot of different areas for multiple audiences. The issue that often arises with this strategy is that it favours mediocre content instead of powerful, immersive articles and visuals. Resist this temptation and switch your focus from widening the range and quantity of your content into a strategy focused on making more on-topic, unique pieces.

To replace your time previously allotted to creating so many pieces, consider instead implementing a more extensive research process and use this extra research to create higher quality pieces. Commit more time and effort to make content that better relates and speaks to your audience.

If you have numerous team members creating a lot of different content, consider having them unify, reducing content output while at the same time increasing content quality and sharing target audience insight. From the research phase to the ideas and writing, the more people coming together to deliver a truly engaging piece of content, the better. When it comes to effective content marketing, the higher quality the better.

The audience is key

Marketers should thrive to create and focus content around their target audience. It seems like an obvious assumption that most campaigns are designed for specific audiences – typically customers and prospects. However, this fails to be the case way more often that it should. In fact, all too often marketing content is built to promote brand ideals while failing to accurately relate to the specific target audience demographics.

With this in mind, it’s important to periodically develop an understanding of who your audience is, what matters to them, and how you can speak to them with credibility. Consider the following scenario. A marketing team builds its content to appeal to a certain group of consumers. Initially, this proves to be rather successful. However, after a year or so, their engagement rates drop. The issue is likely that they didn’t re-evaluate who their content was aimed toward in a world that’s constantly evolving. To avoid this type of scenario, set up a schedule to ensure you closely track your target audience groups and adjust your approach to content accordingly based on these insights.

Look to organise your future marketing endeavours around high-quality content. The more willing you are to commit to this idea, the more everything will fall into place.

Cory Schmidt is head of marketing at Canto.