Digital Content Production: What’s Your End Product?

How do you define the end product of your content production? I’ve been struggling with marketers’ perception of digital content production. Here are some goals I continue to hear:

• We want to produce at least one blog post per day.
• We want to increase annual organic search volume by 15%.
• We want to increase monthly leads by 20%.
• We want to double our following online this year.

These responses are a bit frustrating because every metric is a moving metric. Each metric above has a volume, a time associated with it, and an uncontrollable dependence on variables outside the marketer’s control.

Daily blog posts equate to an end product; productivity. Increasing search volume depends on competition, search engine usage, and algorithms. Increasing leads depends upon conversion optimization, offers, competition, and other factors – the prospect. Your audience on social media indicates authority and your ability to promote the content.

These goals largely depend on variables outside of your control.

I’m not saying any of these metrics aren’t necessary. We monitor them all. But I will say that I believe content marketers are missing a BIG, HUGE, GIANT, OBVIOUS end product… and that’s developing a completed content library.

Will five blog posts per week work? That’s not dependent upon frequency; it’s dependent upon the gap in content you’ve already published and the content your audience is seeking.

What’s Your Content Library?

Building a comprehensive content library must incorporate content that not only feeds your customer’s journey to your product or service but also builds value for their challenges, supports you as an authority through third parties (testimonials, awards, social proof), and may also include content that drives the industry’s view of you as a thought leader.

Here are some questions to ask yourself when developing your library:

1. What are the topics specific to your products or services that content will build awareness of your company?
2. What are the topics specific to your competition that can clarify and differentiate you from your competitors (without disparaging them)?
3. What are the topics specific to your industry that will help you build authority and get you recognized as a thought leader?
4. Have you completed an audit of your site to identify multiple instances of content you can reduce and optimize and identify gaps in content you’ve not written about that need to?
5. Have you implemented a means of measuring the impact of content on conversions so that you can prioritize improving your current content and research and develop the remaining content? What are those KPIs?

I’m not sure how you can measure the success of a content marketing strategy without thoroughly analyzing the landscape on which you wish to command authority. It’s not helpful to understand the number of weekly posts to write unless you know how many posts you need to get through. Perhaps you need to write three times as many posts each week to command the growth you’re seeking in your industry. Maybe it’s one comprehensive article per month.

What’s Your End Product?

An analogy would be developing a production assembly line pumping out tires all day and expecting to complete building a car. Some of the questions above are about winning the race… but you don’t even have enough parts to get a running engine!

Please don’t think I’m trying to simplify this. It’s a complex process that takes much research to identify the taxonomy, optimization, and prioritization strategies necessary for a minimal viable product. It’s not impossible, but it isn’t easy. However, once you recognize the scope of the end product, you can begin taking much more deliberate action and develop some expectations of the results.

I would rewrite the questions we opened with to the following:

• How many articles do we need to build a comprehensive content library?
• When can we produce them, and what resources are necessary?
• Given our current content library, how can we achieve a 15% organic search growth?
• Which articles would be more likely to grow our leads by 20%?
• Will doubling our current following directly contribute to our lead generation?