How much content should marketing be prepared to create to be successful at content marketing?

Could the questions we're formulating be distracting us from the real end-goal – making new tools like Web content marketing produce leads and sales?

Bob, my advice to you is to not worry about that part of the project. And to look beyond the quantitative aspects. Toward process design; at how you'll make your content produce sales and leads. "How much?" is, IMO, not the right question.

The difference between selling with content marketing /social media (and not) is asking better questions -- not a silver bullet best practice.

For instance,might the answer to selling more with content marketing be rooted in starting conversations that are worth having? Might it be more powerful to publish in ways that generate customer inquiries – questions that you can help them solve?

In my research, businesses that sell (successfully) with content marketing are reaching beyond attracting customers. Or even coercing them to prefer their brand. They're focusing on discovering and capturing demand. Sales. And they're doing it using these 3 practical success principles:

1. Always prompt behavior
2. Constantly translate customers' evolving needs
3. Selectively publish useful, relevant tools and services

Consider your current social and content marketing activities. Everything you're doing to “join the conversation.” Your tweeting, blogging, posting updates on Facebook. Are your activities talking with or “talking at” customers? Or are you interacting?

These are not the questions:

How many blog posts are needed to make the exercise effective?
How much effort must be invested in Facebook to see a return?
How can I best manage my reputation among critics and enthusiast fans?
How much Twitter ‘engagement’ is needed to realize positive effect?
How can I not “hard-sell” but still generate leads using LinkedIn?
How much content should marketing be prepared to create to be successful at content marketing?

Just some food for thought.

Lots of marketers get intimidated by the perceived challenge of creating "enough" good content to deploy a content marketing strategy or marketing automation enabled demand gen strategy. Quite frankly, I think you have hit on one of the top reasons firms are hesitant to jump into marketing automation. The metrics prove this type of strategy works, but content creation is a real key. Based on my experience here are 3 do's and 3 dont's regarding a content:

Do: Think big and start small. You don't need all the content "ready" in order to commence a content strategy. You just need the first few stages prepared to launch. Think of creating a few "tip sheets" that can be blown up into ebooks or white papers and boiled down into blog posts or tweets.

Do map out a content roadmap. I like to think of a content roadmap as a "cube" with buyer roles, buying stages, and an editorial calendar making the axes.

Do farm your best sales people for the most meaningful messages. By engaging a sales group, you can create content that really moves the needle in the funnel. (which is the goal, right?)

Don't throw content creation to a junior level marketer or writer who is disconnected from the big picture go to market messages.

Don't employ the "more is better" principal to content. Otherwise known as the show up and throw up. There is no quicker way to irrelevancy than to overwhelm a prospect with all of your new content you're so proud of but he could give a crap about.

Don't be intimidated by a the huge content creation mountain that appears in front of you. If you take a good inventory, you probably have more than you think.

Good Luck!

Matt Given
@Matt_Given

I don't think there is one answer that will fit all organizations. I think the real answer lies around the customer and how much content is needed to engage them in a relevant, relationship building type dialogue?

For some organizations this may mean several content pieces, posts per week. For others it could be much less but the development of content should map back to what the customer wants/needs, what they are able to consume and what will further the dialogue.

One key thing to remember as you point Craig, is that any blog post, webinar, sales presentation, even Twitter feeds are content and if they resonate with the buyer, companies should look to repurpose and use via a variety of medium.

Carlos Hidalgo
The Annuitas Group
@cahidalgo

Craig - yes, there is a minimum. It's hardly a scientific answer, but I'd say one piece a week is the minimum. Less than that and it's hard to create or sustain momentum. There's also the quality vs. quantity issue. More is better unless it's shoddy (defined as one or more of these - poorly written, irrelevant to the target audience, unaligned w/ your content strategy, boring, totally derivative w/ no new insight, overly long, etc.).

Ardath:
If I may... what you're getting at is "how content marketing is designed" (or not). When designed properly the always-important frequency piece becomes part of the mix -- rather than being a focal point.

In other words, the 'question behind Craig's queston' gets at the relative importance of attention.

Is attention the end game? No, lead development and sales are.

What Ardath appears to be saying is that a good, organized (well-designed) marketing strategy starts with attention but includes frequent behavioral prompts. The entire process has a start and end point. Especially content marketing programs... which are actually processes.

Brilliant, Ardath. Well stated.

And, yes, bad content can be successful. But only in the short term. Case in point: Search engine optimization that games the system without adding enough value.

There are two parts to this - nurturing content and demand generation content.

Demand Generation Content
Here you are trying to put out something timely and arresting in the hope that people in the market will wish to research further. Here frequency and relevance are the keys. People are in this stage of the buying process for only a short time, before they decide they've done their research and must close the window and evaluate what they already have. Thus there must always be something current on every method people in your field are likely to use to find out information. Pieces should be half a page at most, with key elevator pitch pieces on one of the company's three key themes (more than three and you don't have your market in focus). They should show that you identify with the problem a suspect is facing and have some answers. Solutions are wrong at this stage.

Segmentation is also key here. People prick up their ears when they recognise familiar territory - people they know, companies like them etc. That can mean more content to cover lots of niches, but it will lead to a much higher conversion of interest to intent.

The aim should be to get people to engage with you and wish to know more. Thus pieces are only a taster - like items in a shop window to entice you inside.

Nurturing
These are often seen as long form materials - white papers, case studies, e-books etc. Many marketing automation providers think this is a job for email but nurturing of buyers can be done via social media and can be effective even if the prospect hasn't divulged their email address.

There are four major uses for B2B nurturing content
1. To help the recipient with their buying decision.
2. To help them in evangelise and persuade others in their organisation.
3. To keep you front of mind in the buying decision.
4. To counteract items and ideas put out by competitors.

The first is limited - there are only a few key points buyers need to decide on and too much information can mean key points being lost. Better to have three good pieces than a dozen bad ones. Relevance is more important than number in case studies too.

Evangelising depends on the number and types of people involved. A clever company will already be sending key influencers material on a regular basis. Any decision will have operational, financial, strategic and teamwork implications and a piece couched in each of these terms is essential as a minimum.

Keeping in front of mind is often a "short, regular, single idea" keep in touch type of communication and many companies mistakenly use long materials such as white papers for this purpose. That is more likely to build resentment than engagement.

Obviously the last item depends on competitor activity. Key factors should be covered in the initial materials and it is only catch-up pieces which are required.

All of these pieces should show that you have a solution for the problem your customer is researching and that it is robust, fully thought through, cost effective and proven to be the best answer for companies in their field.

One other thing here - there should be an end game in focus. Too many companies send out general interest articles without a call to further action. With every contact you should be looking to gain intelligence on buying intent, buying parameters and people involved in the buying decision. You should also be looking to move people closer to a final decision - a meeting, a webinar or a trial/demo, for example.

Separate in your mind keep in touch pieces from prospect engagement ones. Prospects are in the market for only a limited period, so these pieces can be reused to a new batch of prospects. You should be looking to turn over your data on at least a six month cycle, either through gaining knowledge of the prospect buying plan or ruling them out. This sort of content work should be separate from the informing influencers and keep in touch with customers stuff which should be ongoing.

We've been working at this for about a year now and are attempting to average 2 new content pieces per week. One of the keys we have found is repurposing our material so that our blog becomes a core resource for our lead nurturing followup pieces etc. This takes some of the pressure off in our small marketing group to keep the dialogue going.

Our topic area, Office Document Strategies, is not something that a lot of people get overly excited about and we have to broaden our work to keep interest going. Its kind of like plumbing or furnaces, nobody cares until there is a leak or no heat, then you get excited.

Integrating all of the pieces of the marketing plan is critical to moving forward.

I definitely seem to be winning in the thumbs-down race. But that’s OK, because I’m still right.

You just cannot hope to compete on search engine traffic, or hold the attention of your readers, with one blog post a week. I don’t care how good the content is.

As for quality, I agree all the way. Quality and relevance, always.

That said, quality does not always win. It should, but it doesn’t. If it did, there would be no content mills. Yahoo! wouldn’t publish thousands of backfill-content pages at its lower levels every week. Answers.com, eHow.com and other mass-content sites wouldn’t do so well.

Google and the other major search engines are not nearly as good at discerning quality as we like to think, inbound links notwithstanding.

We can talk about quality and relevance all we like. Sure sounds good, and educated, and expert, and well-meaning.

But volume still wins.

Jeff, hi

My point was about volume. But you’re right about frequency (which drives volume). Google loves frequency. In fact, they have an algorithm for that – Frequency Deserves Freshness.

Not only does frequency result in your site being indexed more often, but Google will actually raise your page in the results listing if it is “fresh”. Why? Because readers like freshness, they like to find what’s new. Doesn’t always make sense to give priority to what’s new, but that’s what people do.

Nick

If I may humbly add another perspective to the many outstanding answers here, I'd submit that there are two key factors to keep in mind.

First, for each medium or type of content, keep in mind the "decay rate." The higher (faster) the decay rate, the more content that is needed. For example, tweets have a high decay rate (short shelf life), so you need a lot of them, perhaps 4-5 per hour during the peak times that your followers are active. On the other hand, content like infographics and white papers have a much slower decay rate, so you can produce far fewer of them.

For emails, you'll need to test with your audience, but don't overdo it. One per week may get you a solid response rate, while two per week seems excessive and "spammy" to your readers and actually reduces your response rate. Blog posts -- at least one per week, more are better (up to a point).

The second factor is quality. For many types of content (white papers, blog posts, video), higher quality translates into longer shelf life / slower decay rate. The higher the quality of a piece of content (and your promotion of it), the longer it retain value and the less content of that type you'll need to produce.

I agree with all the above about quality but can add some insight into the breaking news output of some some major UK newspapers. As we already had a good reputation the more content the better worked well.

Best practice was to publish the stub of an article as soon as possible and then adding the initial outline. With every major development start a new article and rewrite.

The lack of a single point for inbound links was secondary to the volume of angles covered by multiple articles and the channels that this fed (eg Google News).

Don't forget Marchex and the entire domaining industry, Nick. You're spot on. I call the entire thing the digital ignorance economy.

Content marketing is not just about SEO. It is also about converting eyeballs into dollars through impressing them with what they read. It is also about spreading an idea company-wide. In B2B, quality is definitely more important than quantity.

Hey, Peter...
I disagree. And I do so based on experience. I've had a front row seat to the multi-billion dollar industries that all feed into Google -- domaining, content farming, etc. etc. We cannot argue with all that money or momentum. But what we can argue -- successfully -- is that just like we don't flip homes anymore we won't be seeing these industries in the near future either. That or they'll morph (as is content farming at the moment).

For now the sad truth is that the algorithms reward frequency. As Nick very wisely points out.

This article from CMI may shed some light on content for people v content for SEO:

Warning! SEO Copy Bubble Bursting
By KATIE MCCASKEY | Published: JANUARY 17, 2011

Warning! The SEO web writing bubble is about to burst.

Yes, just like the housing bubble, the student loan bubble, the bubble in your champagne bath. Why?

Bubbles burst when the fuel tank dries up, or when there are not enough excessively optimistic or ignorant fools to keep it inflated. In the case of SEO — where self-proclaimed experts and hucksters rein supreme — excessively optimistic or even foolish marketers rush to learn this week’s “best practices,” use the “correct” SEO software or worse, resort to “tricks” to game the system to get more page views.

The biggest sign that the bubble is bursting is already here: content marketing.

Content marketing employs original, valuable and niche-specific information. This kind of content is more valuable to people and search engines alike.

To create original, valuable and niche-specific content, you need:

a content strategy founded on engaging copy
a regular infusion of new and valuable information in multiple media and in a narrow niche, and
copy that inspires a specific action or other form of participation.
Do legitimate SEO web writing techniques exist?

Yes.

Do you need a basic understanding of them?

Yes.

But never forget this: There’s no use in employing SEO traffic techniques if the content is weak. Think of the frustration you’ve experienced searching for a particular topic to discover a “robo RSS” site that is filled with keywords but offers no useful or new information.

Here are a few SEO writing techniques to use once you’ve nailed the above.

Keyword placement
Narrow your keywords or phrases. Add them in your headline, your meta data, and in the majority – but not all – of your paragraphs. Placing keywords and phrases early in the sentence and early in the copy will help. Be careful, though, as too many of the same keywords repeated will hurt you in the search results. So, find other ways of saying the same thing. Think of your reader first, not the search engine.

Careful tagging
Remember to tag your photos. Build a tagging hierarchy that has fewer root categories and more descriptive tags per post.

Inbound, outbound and cross-bound links
Ultimately, you want a lot of people linking to and sharing your content (inbound links). How? Be generous with your willingness to link to others exploring similar topics first (outbound links). Reference similar, helpful content on your site with cross-bound links.

Regular publication
You’ll win search engines and people if you deliver content on a regular schedule and consistent basis. Yes, you’re busy. So is everyone else. That’s why you win if you’re the person who is consistent. If you can’t manage the content, hire an SEO web writer who can. Here is my best tip: Expect to pay for quality content. Cheap “content mill” writing may win in the search engines over the short term, but won’t win the loyalty of your audience.

Great copywriting combined with search engine optimization will give you a massive push forward toward sales, readership or engagement. Just remember: The “SEO” bubble is about to burst. Search results can be tinkered, but your audience can’t be fooled. They want quality.

The search engines are wising up, and so are the people embracing content marketing.

Full article here: http://www.contentmarketinginstitute.com/2011/01/content-marketing-seo/

2-5 new pages of content a week? You’re kidding me.

Simple answer – the more the better.

10 new pages a week is better than 5.

50 is better than 10.

100 is better than 50.

500 is better than 100.

And so on.

Yes, make them relevant and useful. Yes, mix up the content types.

Beyond that, volume wins. It wins with the search engines, and wins with social media.

Simple, simple rule...volume wins.