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Editor's Note: Take a look at our featured best practice, Digital Transformation Strategy (145-slide PowerPoint presentation). Digital Transformation is being embraced by organizations across most industries, as the role of technology shifts from being a business enabler to a business driver. This has only been accelerated by the COVID-19 global pandemic. Thus, to remain competitive and outcompete in today's fast paced, [read more]
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Being consistent in creating and distributing content is a cornerstone of successful content marketing. It’s something we have talked about for a long time, often expressed in phrases like “content marketing is a marathon, not a sprint” – but even so it continues to be a problem for a lot of companies.
The latest research from Content Marketing Institute and Marketing Profs for 2016 shows that the challenge of producing content consistently still ranks high among the concerns of US content marketers in both B2B and B2C.
Among B2B marketers it takes 3rd place, behind “producing engaging content” and “measuring content effectiveness:”
Among B2C content marketers we find content consistency tied for 3rd place with “measuring the ROI of content marketing programs”, and again behind “producing engaging content” and “measuring content effectiveness”.
But even though consistency in content production ranks high among challenges in content marketing, I don’t believe that we spend enough time thinking and talking about. Or rather we used to talk about it more a couple of years ago. It has taken a back seat to other topics, mainly distribution, formats and measurements in recent years. I believe we need to change this.
Now, what I don’t mean is that we should talk any less about distribution, formats and measurements – quite the contrary, those are very important topics. But we do need to make sure we address one of the very fundamentals of content marketing – producing content consistently.
I would like to see all of us who work with content marketing spend more time on writing and talking about basic questions like how to successfully create content over time. And how to do it in a way that ensures both quality and efficiency.
There are a lot of very talented content marketers out there, that all have very good insights on this topic to share. It’s natural for us to want to develop and talk about new challenges, but considering that the challenge of creating content consistently continues to pop up in most surveys we obviously have not addressed it enough.
Having proposed that we spend more time talking about this, I’d like to do just that. If you work with content marketing and struggle to create content consistently I want to point out that there are three things that are absolutely necessary to ensure consistency in content creation:
Strategy: If you don’t have a strategy for your content marketing, take the time to create one now. Among many other benefits it will help you to develop a process for content creation.
Editorial calendar: Having an editorial calendar not only helps you with the obvious parts of planning, deadlines and publishing. You can also use to get an up to date overview of what you plan to publish and what you have published, which makes it possible to what topics and areas you haven’t covered.
Teamwork: Creating content is not a one person show (unless you’re the only employee). Involve your colleagues in all aspects of the creation process, from ideas to writing. Both you and the content will be better for it. They can bring new perspectives and insights on your customers that can be translated into a lot of new content.
There are many more tips and insights that can help you find a way to create content in a consistent manner, but if you have not implemented these three things that should be your starting point.
What are your insights and learnings on how to create content consistently? Share them in the comments below. And more than that – share them among your fellow content marketers locally and globally. We need to start talking about achieving consistency in content production and distribution again.
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