For the past decade, at least, content volume has been a valuable asset for a brand’s digital marketing strategy: Volume of content meant more potential to rank in search, more ability to flood the zone on social media, and an overall better chance of dominating competition.
However, a series of recent changes — including the emergence of AI and changes in search and social algorithms — are impacting how brands plan for, create, and distribute content. Simply put, undifferentiated volume publishing – a feat AI can easily accomplish – may no longer be a competitive advantage.
As AI content becomes more relevant, popular, and common, going head to head against that in any capacity is a mistake if you want your brand to stand out.
How to Determine Publishing Cadence and Build a Content Calendar
With these shifting dynamics, how can brand content continue to drive business outcomes across a changing digital ecosystem? We talked to C&EN BrandLab Senior Editor Jesse Harris and Chris Halling, director of communications and content at Orientation Marketing, to discuss how to create content for impact, not quantity.
1. Define Your Business Goal
What value do you expect to get out of your content? Setting goals about driving brand awareness, engagement with your experts, or conversion into a sales conversation will help you decide what kind of content — and how much of it — to eventually create.
The absence of a plan and not confronting the tough questions may mean that content teams create content just to be busy, but rarely will that align with the marketing plan and contribute to any overarching objectives.”
– Chris Halling, Orientation Marketing
By mapping specific content efforts to the sales cycle, marketers can build a plan that’s defendable and measurable.
In most cases, you have to “meet the needs of all the people who are in different stages of their buyer’s journey,” says Harris. “You are developing content simultaneously that generates awareness, but then content that maybe will help enable the sales team, too.”
2. Let Your Customers Lead You
What do your customers need, and what role does your content play in helping them reach that need? Content needs a job to do for your audience. You can unearth unmet needs by reviewing customer research, talking to your sales team, and interviewing customers.
“It is important to consider whereabout your audience is on their path to knowledge and/or [their] buying journey, and to nurture understanding,” Halling says.
Halling also cautions brands to be less self-serving when building a content strategy. Even if something isn’t directly connected to buying, it could still be valuable for your audience and drive engagement with your brand.
“It’s vital to keep in mind what’s important to your audience and build trust by providing timely insights, even if there’s no immediate gain for your organization,” Haling says. “For example, if a brand helps you interpret what new legislation means for your market, it may not yield an immediate order, but it may position you as the industry expert when that topic does arise. Lots of activity may make colleagues (and the boss!) happy, but you will probably achieve very little if your content is polarized toward only your own corporate agenda.”
3. Research What’s Happening in Your Competitive Space
Understanding how your customers are already served with content — and whether that content is resonating with them — is another important factor.
Scanning the landscape is going to be really important because essentially what you want to be able to do is offer content that is good, compelling, interesting, [and] memorable for folks at the lowest possible effort.”
– Jesse Harris, C&EN BrandLab Senior Editor
While larger competition may out-create smaller brands, it’s not a guarantee that those efforts are reaching, engaging, or convincing customers, which is why triangulating customer and competitor research is critical to ensuring your content is relevant to your audience.
4. Take Stock of Your Resources
Getting a good handle on your resources is a key consideration when you’re determining how best to serve your customers through content.
“People, and therefore resources, are the major element of any content program; the number of people you have can dictate what can be created, which in turn affects frequency,” Halling says.
Be sure to assign resources to distribution and not just content creation. Effective channel management can dictate your success just as much as content quality.
“Balancing content need with available resources is important because if you don’t have a large team to develop and promote relevant messaging, then channel selection becomes a moot point,” Halling says. “Balance comes from a strategic approach to content creation and distribution that always starts with a realistic assessment of team capacity and capabilities.”
5. Create Something Special, and Do it Regularly
As AI enters the picture, creating lots of content quickly will be done more easily. To stand out, brands need to transform insights about customer information needs, attention capacity, and the environment in which they operate into something that serves them in a different way.
“While there is, of course, some room for using AI tools to increase the output of your own content, your content always has to be substantially better than what you could do on ChatGPT,” Harris says. “Otherwise, you’re going to be going up head to head with that kind of content out there and that’s not what you want.”
You need to “have something very particular, very different, to offer,” Harris continues, and produce it regularly to establish a connection and set an expectation with the customer.
“Regular posting always results in an improvement in content-related metrics — pageviews, shares, conversions etc. — so a content calendar might be one of the most important aspects of any communications program,” Halling adds.
A Final Word on Planning
It’s easy to fall into a reactive mode as content quantity surges and marketers feel the demand for real-time content creation and distribution.
But, Halling cautions, the urge to jump in and just start creating can sacrifice more significant gains for your business down the road.
“Planning is hard because it forces us to confront known challenges and mitigate for what might be,” Haling says. “It’s tempting to just get started, and it usually isn’t tough to find the enthusiasm and enough good quality material to start a campaign. Taking a strategic approach, however, will help you optimize how you use your best material.”
