You don't need more content, you need better content

More is better. That’s what we’ve been conditioned to believe. Whether it’s more money, super-sized meals, bigger houses, the lesson we’ve been taught is that more is always better. While there are times that’s true, when it comes to your content that belief could be damaging your business. 

We need to prioritise quality and that means doing less, but doing it a whole lot better.

Content overwhelm

Every day we’re exposed to between 4,000-10,000 ads. That’s every single day. And that’s just ads, we haven’t even gotten to organic social posts, blogs, articles, news sites, videos, reels. Our brains can’t cope. Our attention spans are decreasing and we’ve stopped processing what we see - we’re at saturation point. 

When we continue to churn out content, all we’re doing is adding to that mass of content. The more content we create, the less time we spend on each piece, which means that the content we’re putting out there decreases in quality over time. 

Your content might be good, but is it great? There’s real pressure to keep up with everyone else by being everywhere all the time. You see your competitor sending a weekly email so you do the same. They post on 3 social channels so you post on 4. Over time we’re adding more content to our baseline without realising. Luckily, I’m a dab hand at auditing your content and channels to stop the spread. If that sounds like something you could use some help with, drop me a message.

FOMO

I worry that if I don’t post on LinkedIn every day I’ll be forgotten. Even when I go on holiday I’ll schedule my “normal” content level….just in case. But the truth is I could disappear from that platform for a week and nobody would notice. 

Social media has programmed us with the ultimate FOMO. We’ve become slaves to the algorithm, convinced that we have to keep posting, keep creating more content and maintain a perfect schedule of content. 

But it’s time to challenge that feeling. Challenge the little voice in your head that’s telling you to be everywhere, the whole time.

How much content can you produce?

There’s a word missing from that heading, and that’s well. It should read ‘How much content can you produce well’ because that’s the crux of the issue. Yes, you might be producing a certain level of content right now, but how good is it? Is it high-quality? Is it an accurate reflection of how you want your business to be perceived?

Bad content comes with a cost. It’s not just your time, though that should be factored in, it’s the opportunity cost.

If your website isn’t up to scratch, chances are you’ll have a high bounce rate - that’s a missed opportunity.
If your social posts contain errors or are rushed, chances are someone will scroll past - that’s a missed opportunity.  

If your blog is actually a 300-word news article about your company away day, chances are it won’t be clicked on - that’s a missed opportunity. 

It’s not enough to publish anything, just for the sake of publishing it. You need to be getting the quality right and sometimes the way to do that is to produce better content, not more of it.

What is “better” content?

This is the elephant in the room. Better content is content that ties back to your business goals, to your values, to your messaging and is highly relevant to your audience. It’s not a post you’ve knocked up in 1 minute with a stock Canva image. 

It might involve a graphic or a video, and if it does that’s bespoke to the piece of content. 

Better content has a job to do, it’s part of a strategy, not the first thing that comes to mind. 

The key to “better” content? Prioritising

With limited resources you can’t be everywhere all the time at the level you want to be. That means you need to focus your attention. Easier said than done, I understand. 

Start by identifying the platforms or medium which provide you with the highest return. That might be lead generation, it might be reach - whatever your key content KPI is - focus on that. Looking at the data you’ll begin to see patterns, some content types will show high engagement while others might be gathering dust. Those patterns immediately show you where you need to put your effort. 

We always start with the high engagement pieces first. That’s where our effort is focused, because then we can repurpose that across other platforms. By creating better, higher-quality content for those priority areas we should see an increase in the return we get from them. Then we can use that higher-quality content to repurpose across our lower priority channels. 

It all comes back to working smarter, not harder. We’re focusing on the quality of our content and in the process we aren’t making more original content, instead we’re making the most of what we have.

That sounds simple, and maybe it is, but it’s also so easy to get caught up on the content treadmill we’re all running on. Pressure comes from externally, from the top and also from ourselves that we should be able to create something for everything. 

Give yourself a break. Content creation is a full time job, and chances are it’s not your full-time role. Be smarter about how you go about planning and writing your content. Focus on the big-hitters, the high-value, the pieces which are meant to bring in leads and engagement. Then repurpose those across your lower priority channels. 

I promise you that more isn’t better (unless we’re talking about chocolate) and I also promise you that if you need to take a break, no-one will notice. 

Create better content and in the process you’ll reduce how much new content you’ll need to write.

Need help working out your priority channels? My content audit not only does that but looks at what you’re missing and what you should be talking about.