In this blog, Jake Sadler at Huble Digital, helps you work out how much content you should be producing to implement a successful Inbound Marketing strategy.
It’s an age-old debate amongst marketers, should you prioritise quality or quantity of your content? And one that annoyingly has a ‘well it’s both’ answer.
But let’s suppose you're already producing high quality content; how much of it do you need to implement a really successful Inbound strategy?
In this blog we’ll take you through what types of content you should be looking to create, how many of each, what length they need to be and how and why creating such an amount will work to help your Inbound Marketing strategy succeed.
Why do I need to create content for my Inbound strategy?
Inbound Marketing only works if your customer feels not only satisfied, but so impressed, educated and trusting enough that they want to tell more people about you. To impress someone with content is to not only answer their question, but obsess about answering that question in the best way you can.
This is where having a lot of content comes in handy. For example, let’s take the topic at hand, Inbound Marketing. A singular blog on ‘What is Inbound Marketing?’ might answer the initial query but it fails to give the customer anything more than what they were looking for. In this situation, they are free to leave your site and head elsewhere.
Now add three other blogs on ‘Why is Inbound Marketing effective?’, ‘How do I start an Inbound Marketing strategy?’ and ‘Five top tips to generate leads through Inbound Marketing’ – this is when you capture the attention of the audience, make them ask further questions and start to build a connection as your go-to resource for that topic.
This is why we believe producing regular content is crucial to your Inbound Marketing campaign. You’re able to answer questions, capture the imagination and be used as a resource beyond your product offering.
So, put a number on it
Okay, so we understand that you need to create content for Inbound, and a lot of it. So, why not put a number on it?
Frankly you can’t put an absolute specific number on the amount of content you should be creating, and yes you could probably answer it with a simple “lots”. But to work it out as accurately as possible, a content strategy should set out realistic targets for pieces of content as per your available resources.
The more you write (granted its good quality) the better. Pillar pages are good places to start in terms of being able to create a lot of content but in a structured format with a purpose behind them.
Crucially, you should remember to scale content creation against what is feasible for your business. If you’re a small team with a small budget that means less content, but it doesn’t mean worse results. You can still create an appropriate amount of content for your situation.
But if you really had to state a number...
Now this is different for every company and industry, but as a stab I would state that you should be looking to create a new piece of blog content two to three times a week. This keeps your visitors engaged with lots of fresh content and should build your organic traffic over a 6-12 month period.
If you can create more than that, then brilliant - go for it. If you can't, then perhaps think about other ways you can get more of your current content, or seek other resources in the form of outsourcing content.
This just covers blogs, but we would also recommend creating eBooks, podcasts, videos and market research reports alongside this.
P.S. Check out our content marketing strategy guide for more tips and tricks!
Pillar pages & longer form content
A sure-fire way to create a host of content is to build a pillar page. Choose a problem that faces your prospects/customers as the pillar; and solve it by producing content pages that answer their questions. The content could take many formats, but written text-based content will rank better on Google for your keywords.
A pillar page allows you to create the amount of content you need for Inbound without churning pieces out for the sake of it. Our recommendation for a healthy pillar page size is around 10 to 15 pieces of content. Within this, it gives you a good scope to set the scene of the issue at hand, answer the big questions and propose future solutions. Now you’ve got content with a purpose, and a lot of it too.
Longer form content is the priority. A single one-thousand-word blog is not only higher in quality, but a lot easier to create in the long run. Why? Well instead of coming up with five different ideas each at 200 words each, you’re using only one idea but expanding on it in greater detail.
How do I create all of this content?
As discussed above, answering this question with ‘lots’ would’ve been the easy answer. The most challenging answer would be to work it out as per your resources. Do you have any in-house specialist content writers? If not, who in your company is competent at writing and regularly available to contribute? If that’s still a struggle…what’s your budget for an agency?
Something that’s worked for us here has been using our very own team to create content. We’ve tasked each member of the team to write a blog a month. Nothing too strenuous, just a few hours out of their month to put their expertise onto paper. In doing so we’ve been able to create a steady stream of content, on a variety of topics, using the resources we have available to us. It’s also useful to get people flexing their creative brain muscles once in a while too, even if they tell you they’re not the world’s greatest writer.
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