Content Marketing: How Much is Enough?

Thought Leadership.  Brand Awareness.  Market Education.  Lead Gen. Engaging Prospective Customers.  There are many excellent reasons to make the effort - not to mention covering the expense - to market your content.  By now, you’re reaching customers with your blog, Twitter feed, eNewsletter, syndicated content, Linkedin groups, Google News, all of the above, and you likely know the basics -  and have heard many success stories. 

Not so much?  Here are a few highlights of a successful content marketing strategy:

- know your audience
- explore where your customers are, and live there
- test, and test again
- respect your readers’ privacy
- educate, don’t sell
- provide value through relevancy, at the right time
- stimulate discussion; don’t preach or condescend
 
You’ve likely tried marketing software and know how to generate leads, track reader behavior, identify preferences, and lead prospects into your sales funnel.    

But what’s the right frequency to achieve your content marketing goals versus seeing your hard-won readers ignore you, or worse, unsubscribe?  

Here are a few indicators related to typical marketing content goals that will keep you ahead of the ever-changing rules.

- Increase Site Traffic: You no longer get a traffic bump from your weekly/daily/hourly updates
- Engage my readers: Nobody is rising to your bait to comment on your provocative posts
- Increase Search Engine visibility: Google is devaluing your content in search results because the same content is appearing too frequently in multiple places
- Build Brand Awareness: What was your name again?
- Generate Leads: Your eMail open rate plummets and nobody clicks to download your juicy whitepapers, view video, or opening your really cool infographics.  Your sales funnel fizzles.
- I want my content to go viral: your readers stop sharing, or worse, stop following.  (Here are a few tips from Buzzfeed)  

You get the picture.  If your content marketing isn’t working, you need to figure out why, fast.  There’s hope, though.  You just need to tap your audience data to identify behavior and preferences, and test and retest to identify what and how much works best. Simple, right?

Finally, use common sense.  There’s time for everything.