“Content is King,” an oft-repeated mantra in the SEO world (mainly because it’s true). Content forms the basis for all of your other online marketing efforts and is the foundation any great SEO campaign is built upon. When you break it down, there are four main goals for investing the time and energy in a content marketing campaign:
- Connect with current and potential customers
- Educate your target audience
- Develop reputation as industry expert
- Grow online brand presence
Content is anything that is public and shareable including: blog posts, articles, whitepapers, videos, infographics, podcasts, interviews, website content, webinars and so forth. A good content marketing campaign will consistently produce a steady stream of valuable, interesting, quality content that is beneficial to both the brand and the reader. Most of it will be free because you don’t want to put up any barriers between your content and your target audience?
But that all begs the question, how much is too much free content? At what point are you producing so much free, useful content that you are actually cannibalizing your own target audience? It harkens back to the old adage, “Who is going to buy the cow if you’re giving the milk away for free?”
Consider one of a B2B business’s favorite forms of content, the webinar. Webinars are great tools for businesses like a tech company that wants to provide a demo of their latest software and such.
Let’s say the tech company decides to offer the webinar for free, in hopes that it will encourage more people to sign up, meaning more potential leads for the company in the long run. Someone spends anywhere from 10-20 hours creating the webinar presentation; the company then publishes a press release, writes up a promotional blog posts, send out an e-mail to their mailing list, promotes the webinar in the company newsletter, buys a few banner ads on industry site and gets an affiliate partner to help promote it. All in all the tech firm has probably put in around 40 hours of work creating and promoting their free webinar.
Let’s assume their hard work paid off and they get 372 people to pre-signup for the webinar. On the day of the webinar, 303 of those signups actually check-in. 303 attendees isn’t too shabby! The webinar lasts an hour, gets a lot of buzz on Twitter with help from the webinar hash tag and is considered to be success by everyone involved.
But here’s the kicker- of the 303 attendees who attended the webinar, only 7 bothered to fill out the lead form for more information the tech company sent out after the webinar was over. From those 7 leads, they don’t land a single new client.
Was it worth their time?
You have to remember that someone looking for free information is someone who doesn’t want to pay for your services, not now and maybe not ever. Let’s say a company routinely holds webinars; why would any potential client actually hire that company when they can just attend the free webinar and learn how to do it themselves? It may be a slow process, but it saves them a lot of money. In today’s economy, ever dollar has to be stretched as far as it can go. You couple that webinar with the company blog and newsletter and that company is giving their services and knowledge away for free.
I’m not saying that you should stop all your content marketing this instant if you want to get more clients, but it is something you should think about. How much industry knowledge are you willing to give away for free? How much does your target audience expect you to be giving away? The lines between too little, just enough and too much content are very thin. Too little content and you don’t give consumers a reason to engage with you. Too much content and you’re handing your knowledge out like candy for any and everyone to have.
There is no “right” amount of content that you should focus on creating. You have to determine what is the best amount for your business and your target audience.