Having proven time and again the long term benefits of content marketing for building website traffic, awareness and engagement with users, the practice has quickly earned larger shares of marketing budgets. The practice itself enables companies and brands to leave permanent digital footprints that cumulatively grows overtime.
As more and more companies and marketers realize the power of content marketing, over just a short period of time, brands together with their agencies have ramped up content creation at scale. From the standard monthly press release, to perhaps 10 or even 50 articles a month. Not to mention the number of graphical content and video content. Add social media into the mix and you get additional content types such as Facebook Live and YouTube Live.
The Age of Content Shock is perhaps here. Consumers can only consume a number of content in the 24 hours a day they have. As the internet get swamped by content, how can a single brand, let alone a startup appear above the noise? Content Marketing and the internet, as we all know, is a noisy place.
Have we reached a saturation point where creating an extra piece of article is no longer worth the effort? According to Mark Schaefer, Business Grow:
“Content marketing is not just about creating a great blog post or video. It is a war for attention. Keep fighting.”
Consider this scenario: When looking at your digital marketing report, you’ve discovered that content marketing (organic, referral and direct channel) is driving high quality traffic with the highest conversion rate. But at the same time, you can’t seem to increase traffic for these channels, realizing that if you can grow traffic for these channels, you’re looking at higher overall conversion rates for your business.
If you’re currently posting say 10 articles a month on your website and 10 articles as guest contributor elsewhere, the first thing you might think of doing to increase traffic is to ramp up content creation to 20 or perhaps 40 articles a month.
This is however, counterproductive.
By ramping up content volume, the writers are focused on generating more articles at the same amount of time they have, rather than focusing on content quality. Quality trumps quantity. It’s a given. At the end of the day, surviving content shock isn’t about a battle of who’s rolling out more content but who’s actually rolling out meaningful content.
Think of Google Micro-moment. Meaningful content may have meant content that is written well that has value for the audience, whether it’s to entertain, educate, inspire or persuade. However, with consumers going mobile, meaningful content today means much more than that. Content that is written will on mobile and appears in search for users on the go, while they are looking for a restaurant to meet up with their friend or a quick shoe fix-up shop nearby, should definitely not be overlooked.
It’s this type of content that marketers will want to focus on to survive content shock (aka the massive wave of content that is being generated and published by everyone!). In other words, content that helps the audience truly solve a problem, is accurate, easy to read with complete and concise information.