A marketing team can publish three articles a week and still have a content problem. It might not be that they don’t have ideas. It may be that nobody has stopped to ask what all that content is actually supposed to do.
Take a simple how to guide. Rather than ending up as a single blog post, a team might use one or more of these methods to create a short video, a social post, an e-mail or a visual explainer. There are many platforms that can help you repurpose the content easier and, for example, make videos. One of those is Clideo. You can download their iOS app or use the website; plus they have both free and paid versions.
The larger lesson: Quality content is not all about the volume of output. It’s about creating a portfolio with a purpose to each piece.
Stop Thinking in Publishing Queues
A typical editorial calendar asks, “What are we publishing next Tuesday?”
A content portfolio asks a better question: “What does our audience need that we do not currently provide?”
This seemingly minor adjustment can reveal some interesting issues.
A SaaS business can have 40 blog posts that cover the fundamentals of project management, but they have no information that can help a potential customer to compare different solutions, to understand how it will be implemented, or even make a business case to their manager.
It’s well-stuffed with content! It just has too many of the same.
Useful content portfolio should include various types of jobs:
- Discovery: attracting people who are unfamiliar with your brand
- Education: answering questions and demonstrating expertise
- Consideration: helping people evaluate options
- Conversion: giving prospects a reason to take action
- Retention: taking care of existing customers to maximize value.
- Authority: providing original insights, research or expert perspectives
It’s not about distributing the points equally among the categories. It is to spot where your portfolio is weak.
Give Every Important Piece One Job
One of the simplest ways to tell if your content strategy is working out.
Give every important piece of content a primary job.
For example, a project management company might have:
- “What Is Project Management?” for discovery
- “How to Choose Project Management Software” for consideration
- “How to Move Your Team From Spreadsheets” for problem solving
- A customer implementation guide for retention
- An ROI calculator for conversion
They all have different functions.
Now imagine the same company has 30 slightly different articles explaining project management basics. Its publishing numbers are pretty impressive, but its portfolio does not balance.
More content has not solved the problem. It has hidden it.
Audit Before You Create
Take some time before writing your next article and review what you’ve already written.
There’s no need for a complex content intelligence platform. You can get started with a spreadsheet.
Create columns for:
- URL and title
- Topic
- Target audience
- Content format
- Funnel stage
- Organic traffic
- Conversions or assisted conversions
- Last update
Then make 4 choices.
- Keep: The content performs well and remains useful.
- Improve: Topic is good; article is outdated, lacks substantial content or poorly organized.
- Combine: Several pieces are about the same search intent and may be consolidated to make one more powerful resource.
- Kill: The material is not relevant, duplicated, outdated or is targeting the wrong audience.
Consider a marketing software company with five articles titled “Email Marketing Tips,” “10 Email Marketing Ideas,” “Email Campaign Best Practices,” “How to Improve Email Campaigns” and “Email Marketing Strategy.”
Spending some time putting another blog post together that’s titled “More Email Marketing Tips” is likely not the solution.
Combining the strongest material into one genuinely useful resource might be.
Look Beyond Keyword Research
While SEO data is good, it shouldn’t be the only source of ideas.
There are some of the best topics that are not where marketers look first when conducting content research.
Talk to sales. Read customer support tickets. Read reviews about the product. Check questions coming up during onboarding. Analyze Search Console queries. Have experts in the subject tell you what customers always get wrong.
Suppose that a cyber security firm finds that prospects are constantly asking their salespeople: “How much work will implementation create for our IT team?”
There might be very little search volume for that exact question.
It may still be one of the company’s most valuable content opportunities as it deals with a genuine purchase concern.
Content should not only chase what people search for. It should be able to address some of their issues that prevent them from moving forward.
Make Good Ideas Work Harder
You don’t always need to produce fresh content to get more out of it – you can reuse it.
Imagine that a company has made a comprehensive list of five typical errors that people make when selecting video software.
That one idea could become:
Guide → short video → LinkedIn post → email → visual checklist → sales enablement asset
It’s not just a matter of filling in a social media calendar for the sake of it. It’s about optimizing the benefit you’re getting from the initial research, expertise and effort already applied to the original piece.
The same principle works in reverse, too. A useful webinar can become an article. One customer interview can be an interview case-study and a couple of social posts. A common question answered in support can be a tutorial.
The strongest ideas should have more than one life.
Create a Content Gap List, NOT an Editorial Calendar
In the coming quarter, see if you can substitute some of your standard publishing goals with four categories:
- Protect: Update existing content that is already effective.
- Strengthen: Improve weak areas in your existing library.
- Fill: Create content for important audience or customer journey gaps.
- Experiment: Test one or two genuinely new formats or topics.
A quarterly plan may thus appear as follows:
- Refresh five high traffic articles
- Make three overlapping pieces into one.
- Create two bottom of funnel comparison guides
- Publish one customer case study
- Turn the strongest article into several additional formats
This can generate less URLs than turning out 12 new blog posts.
It could also produce considerably more value.
Measure the Portfolio, Not Your Publishing Pace
Ten articles do not necessarily make a better publication than two.
The key is whether those pieces resonate with the right audience, address the right questions, benefit the buying process, build your brand or serve your current customers.
Think of your content library as an investment portfolio. Some assets bring people in. Others educate them. Some help close the deal. Others maintain customers’ success.
Once you start thinking this way, “What should we publish next?” becomes a much more interesting question.
The goal is not to own more content.
It is to own the right content.