We believe in the benefits of marketing content. Every week we publish several blog posts, at least one podcast interview, several micro podcasts, a Facebook Live video, and a resource kit. In addition, there are periodic special reports, training classes, webinars and videos. It is a lot of stuff!

But we are a marketing company and all that content is integral to our marketing program. Each piece of marketing content serves multiple purposes; fueling social media activity, improving SEO performance, and answering questions current and prospective customers have about all areas of digital marketing. We often test new content ideas on our site first, taking the best of what we learn to programs for our clients.

And of course, we send emails about the different pieces of marketing content. There is the Monday Morning Resource Kit, the Wednesday Business Notes, the Friday More than a Few Words, and the occasional training announcement. It is a lot of work for us, and a lot of clutter in your inbox.

So as 2018 was wrapping up, we evaluated everything we were creating. We developed a strategy which would allow us to simplify and streamline the process of creating high-value content. Like many business owners, I was worried about making changes. What if cutting back on the number of emails or blog posts had a negative impact on our web traffic and more important our leads?

We started with research

What were people really interested in? One of the things I love best about digital marketing is how easy it is to answer that question simply by looking at the data. As I reviewed the results I discovered several things which could be improved in our marketing content program:

1. Relevance by channel – In trying to feed all the content pipelines we often told the same story in video, podcast, blog, and email format. While it was good information, it wasn’t always the most relevant for a particular channel.
2. There is value in our archive – When I started blogging in 2008 I actually wrote every single day. In 2010, Allison Carter convinced me to cut back to 5 days a week, and earlier this year we cut back to just three days a week with no decrease in overall web traffic. Why? Because after a decade of blogging we have more than 4,000 blog posts. While some are a little dated, many are as valid today as they were when they were originally written, and many still generate organic traffic every week.
3.  Too many choices – Even our biggest fans didn’t have the appetite for 3 or 4 emails every week so they would have to make choices about which email newsletters to sign up for and which ones to skip

So what’s the plan?

1. Consolidate the newsletters. Time to say goodbye to Monday Morning Resource, Business Notes, and the MTFW Update and say hello to one slightly longer weekly email – What’s New at the ‘Peg.
2. Scale back the weekly resource kits. The original idea was to offer one tool you could put to use every week. Then we started bundling multiple resources, a video, a podcast, and a few blog posts. This year we are going back to the one resource a week format.
3. Channel-specific content. Instead of trying to put all messages everywhere, we are going to create more platform-focused content. For example, Facebook is fun and personal so the weekly videos will be more focused on informal content with an emphasis on the latest news and what’s happening at the ‘Peg. Our podcast, More than a Few Words, will feature interviews with industry experts from around the country. And our new Alexa briefing, Just a Few Words, will link to a specific blog post for more details.
4. New life for old blog posts. We are going to spend some time each week in our archive, updating and adding information to existing posts. The posts will be more complete and valuable to our readers. The expanded content will make the posts more authoritative to search engines.
5. Less is more. Updating and reposting older content will allow us to scale back on creating completely new content. We will still release at least two new posts each week. But this schedule will give us time to explore topics in more detail.

 Simplification in 2019

So that’s our plan to simplify our processes and create higher quality marketing content and resources. If you would like help evaluating and streamlining your process give us a call. We would love to chat with you.