5 Signs You Need to Re-evaluate Your Content Engine
As budgets tighten and sales expectations grow, content is an increasingly critical centerpiece for B2B marketing plans. In a post-pandemic marketplace, B2B buyers have moved online and are now comfortable making $1M+ purchases without ever interacting with a salesperson. In addition, the pool is smaller and full of more discerning buyers. The challenge is to meet them where they are with information and messaging that resonates right now. And that’s precisely what a thriving, engaging content engine does.
A well-designed content engine ultimately lowers the cost of marketing and grows your business by:
Increasing the number of prospects in the sales pipeline
Accelerating prospects through the sales cycle
Helping to close deals
Reinforcing the value proposition post-sale by facilitating onboarding, usage, and adoption
Your online content is not only how your buyers evaluate your product to decide if they’ll make contact with you, it’s also how they determine if your company is credible. A well-designed content engine also offers a platform for your audience to stay engaged with your brand through community.
What makes a good content engine?
It takes a village — and a tightly aligned stack of tools, workflows, and plans – to build an effective content engine. One of the most common issues we find across all industries is that content marketing attempts yield little results. This is often due to a disjointed approach where producers are working in silos, strategy isn’t unified, and the development plan lacks data.
To create content that drives results, every piece of the machinery must be aligned. Strategists need to know how they’re feeding one another and work together to create a unified approach that’s continually informed and optimized by data. If you don’t understand how the end-to-end strategy feeds into the rest of your marketing ecosystem, and ultimately your business goals, it will fail.
What’s stalling your content engine?
While many marketing leaders understand the importance of building a strategic content engine, they often struggle to integrate the teams, tools, and strategy into a unified system that efficiently and effectively produces results. Here’s are five signs you need to re-think your content marketing strategy:
1. You’re unable to tie your efforts to business results.
A good content engine requires significant time and effort. When done right, the results can become invaluable to your business. However, if you don’t know how to measure the impact, generating content can feel like a lot of wasted time and effort.
It’s essential to know which business goals each piece of content supports and use analytics to understand what’s working and what’s not. Key performance indicators (KPIs) like traffic, click-through rates, time on page, bounce rates, and reach can provide valuable insight into which topics and content types appeal to the target audience.
Use KPIs to ensure your approach is having an impact on your business and continues to improve growth. A successful content campaign should become more efficient over time, driving more direct responses such as opt-ins, subscribers, lead-forms, and shares.
For more info, download our How to use kpi’s to inform your content guide.
2. Your efforts result in little visibility, engagement, or both.
If you’re consistently putting out content and getting no audience engagement in return, you may need to take another look at the type of content you’re distributing and how you are distributing it.
Analyzing SEO, keyword, and hashtag data is one of the easiest ways to look into your audience’s minds to understand what they want to learn about. This data can answer key questions, such as:
What questions are buyers asking?
What are their pain points?
What information do they need to evaluate and make a decision?
What resources do they use most often in this process?
Create content aimed at answering these questions and providing relevant information. You can supplement it with other valuable knowledge and insights that establish your company as a trusted source in your space. Focus on guiding your audience to the information they actually need when considering your product or service.
On the other hand, if your content isn’t receiving many views, you will want to look at how it is being distributed to your audience. Even if you have a robust subscriber base, it can be short-sighted to think your audience is hanging out on your website or blog waiting for your next post. Most views will come from readers who are notified of the post on social media or via email. To get the most out of your investment, make sure the planning stage for every content piece includes a distribution plan for the practitioners who manage promotional channels such as social media, on-site/in-app promotions, and email to drive potential readers, and prospects, to your content.
3. Your team is spending too much time producing new content every week.
Building up resources to establish your content library can feel like a daunting, time-consuming task. But the reality is, there are more efficient ways to distribute content that helps your customers and also improves your search results. One of the best ways to do this is to reduce, repurpose and reuse your content.
First, reduce your output by planning your monthly content around key themes and messaging goals. Depending on your team capabilities, this might mean 1 to 3 long form pieces of content each month, such as a whitepaper, video, podcast or webinar.
Next, as a part of your long-form content plan, build in related ‘snackables’ that will be lifted and condensed from the original piece. 3-5 snackables can be produced per long-form content piece. For example, you may promote and share a new white paper with a related LinkedIn slideshow highlighting key findings, as well as 2 or 3 blogs discussing one key finding in detail as it relates to a specific segment of your audience. Infographics, charts, pull quotes, polls, and social posts are other ways to repurpose the content from the original long form piece. This helps you get more value from your investment in the piece by putting it more frequently in front of the audience in different formats that best suit them.
Lastly, increase your visibility in the algorithm by regularly updating old content. One way to do this is to regularly review the performance of older content. Once high performing content begins to drop in engagement, look for ways to make updates and reshare the piece. And trends and statistics change often, many times content that performed well a year or two ago can do so again with a refreshed update based on today’s market or industry trends, and can become new again–at least to most of your audience–with minimal effort.
4. Your output is inconsistent week after week.
If you find that some weeks, you’re able to post multiple times and then you go dark for a week or more, you may be doing more harm than good. Nearly all social channels favor accounts that consistently post content that engages users. Posting content that is useful to your audience on a regular cadence will train your audience to expect and seek out new content from you. The more your audience interacts with your posts, the more visibility you’ll also get from the algorithm.
This doesn’t mean you have to churn out new content daily. Most channels will support your growth if you post something once or twice weekly, as long as it’s consistent. What’s important is to have a plan for your content scheduling, and keep it consistent. Remember, not all posts have to start from scratch. Leverage existing long-form and high-performing content that can be updated, re-cut, or repurposed to help you stay consistent. In the social sphere, long-form content can be leveraged for even more engagement opportunities like short-form social posts, graphics, polls and more.
A good way to do this is by mapping your content calendar. Leverage your long-form content for your top-level themes, then determine ways to chop down that content for social posts that redirect to these resources.
If your team struggles to find the time to stay consistent, there are several great social media automation platforms that can help you manage your content calendar and approvals process and pre-schedule your posts. Many tools also include social listening, performance analytics and trend monitoring, making it easy to review posts’ performance and anticipate what you may want to talk about next.
5. Your content budget needs optimization.
If content spending continues to feel heavy over time, you likely have a lot of waste that isn’t being addressed. A content strategy that is effectively using performance and trend data to inform what is most valuable to its audience should become more cost efficient over time. Content waste can take several forms, including:
Dated long-form content that’s never been repurposed
Old content that’s never reviewed and optimized for performance
Optimized, high-performance content that’s never updated and re-shared
An ad hoc strategy that doesn’t leverage the investments already made into high-performing content to produce more content with little effort
Content strategy that isn’t informed by SEO and industry trends
The driving force of any content strategy should be using performance data to understand which topics, content types, and channels work best for your audience. Once you have a close read of your audience, recalibrate your strategy on a monthly basis to continually optimize your content. Over time, this will result in an uptick in overall performance, increasing your content engine efficiency and lowering costs.
Like much of marketing, content is a continual learning process. Trends change, algorithms change, and consumer behaviors change. Frequently reviewing how your audience is interacting with your content will keep you ahead of the curve, and under budget.
Ask us for a quick assessment. It’s like free therapy.
If you’re considering refining your approach to content marketing and need help, we’d love to help you rewrite your marketing playbook. In under an hour, we can get to the heart of your biggest challenges and help you determine where you need to prioritize to level-up your team’s efficiency and get better results. Schedule some time to tell us about your “Ready for Anything” challenges.
About Us
Infinite Edge is a consultancy of marketing and culture experts that helps companies build trust and navigate today’s rapidly evolving market environment while providing all the marketing services you'd expect from a top-tier integrated agency. Allow us to help you transition your marketing operation from reactive to responsive and develop a roadmap to help you thrive through the coming unknown.
Dee Anna Paredes is an award-winning, results-driven marketer with more than 18 years of experience helping brands forge deep connections with customers across all channels that drive meaningful growth and ROI. She has led large-scale integrated strategy projects for clients such as Microsoft, Hilton, DaVita, and 1Password. She holds certifications in Growth-Driven Web
Digital content strategy, B2bB content marketing strategy, B2B content strategy, content marketing strategy framework
