Are you creating too much irrelevant content?

Too much content

Overloading your prospective clients with meaningless information could put them off your business rather than drawing them in

In recent years, with the high adoption of smartphones and social media, it has never been easier to interact with clients. Creating regular content, whether that is through blogs, email or various social media platforms, is a great way to reach out to your client base and keep them engaged with your business.

But you can have too much of a good thing. Being seen as a leader in your sector – due to the regular, insightful content you produce – can soon turn to being seen as an annoyance if you are churning out too much irrelevant information.

So how do you know if you are producing too much content and how can you determine whether you are turning clients off rather than drawing them in?

Be SMART

Legendary business improvement consultant Dr H James Harrington is famously quoted as saying:  “If you can’t measure something, you can’t understand it. If you can’t understand it, you can’t control it. If you can’t control it, you can’t improve it.”

This quote sums up one of the cornerstones of good marketing practice, which is setting SMART objectives.

While there are several variations on the meaning of the acronym, essentially it translates to setting objectives that are:

  • Specific
  • Measurable
  • Actionable
  • Relevant
  • and within a given Timeframe.

So, for example, if you are posting two blogs a week, you should decide what you specifically want to measure to determine whether those blogs count as successful or not.  Is it purely the number of people that visit the blog web page or is it the percentage that sign up to your email newsletter?

Are visitor numbers the most relevant stat for your marketing objectives or is it the percentage of readers that contact you to find out more about your company’s services?

Once you know what specific data you want to measure, you can then analyse and compare that over a given timeframe, whether that is monthly or quarterly.

Based on the data obtained, action can be taken to either repeat success or improve performance. For example, it can help you determine which blog subjects are of most relevance and interest to your audience and which subjects turn them off.

That way you’ll soon know if you are producing too much content on a given subject.

Be relevant

A sure sign that you are bombarding clients with too much irrelevant content is if you are getting unusually high numbers unsubscribing from your email list.

One of the hot marketing trends of recent years, and a trend that will undoubtedly continue in the future, is segmentation and personalisation. Effectively this means breaking your clients down into specific categories and producing content relevant to their needs.

 

Rather than sending out a weekly email to all your clients, which is only of interest to them 25% of the time, you can send an email to a quarter of your client base on a monthly basis, which is relevant to them 100% of the time.

Digital communication has never made it easier to find out the exact subjects that are of interest your readers, so ensure that it is easy for clients to tailor their preferences.

Some may want regular weekly updates on a given subject for a three-month project they are working on. Others may want a monthly update on more wide-ranging subjects.

One of the most effective ways of finding out if you are producing too much content, is for your clients to tell you. And this will be specific to each individual; what may be too much content for one client may not be too much content for another!

Co-ordinated quality over quantity

When it comes down to it, you are only producing too much content if it is of low quality and therefore not achieving the objectives intended.

If you are producing a new blog every week and it is consistently achieving a high number of shares on social media, generating web traffic to your sight and hooking a high number of leads, then it would be foolish to suggest that you are publishing too much content.

But if you are producing content for the sake of it, which is low in quality and creating diminishing returns in lead generation, then perhaps you are churning out too much content.

Obviously resources will dictate the volume of content that you create but it does not need to affect the quality. One exceptional blog every two months will give clients and peers a much better impression of your business than four badly written efforts over the same period.

Obviously a larger organisation, with dedicated marketing and copywriting teams, has the capability to produce quality content on a regular basis. But even these types of organisations can find they are producing too much content if different departments are not co-ordinating with each other.

At best, they run the risk of repeating topics to clients and at worst, sending out contradictory information.

If you would like assistance on creating a content marketing strategy or would like to find out more about Love Letters’ copywriting services, you can contact us here.

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