Have you ever made the assumption that more content will produce better results? If you have, you’ll be upset at this very honest answer: Maybe, it depends. Research by Kapost (Cold, Hard Content Marketing Stats) tells us that only 32% of marketers say they are effectively executing enough content. The other enlightening stat is that less than half of B2B Marketers (44%) claim they have an actual “content strategy” in place (CMI). Is the problem here really more content or the ability to produce more relevant, quality content that can be measured?

The next excuse for not producing enough content is that we are just wasting our time doing so. Thanks to the Content Saturation Index, we are all led to believe our content will get lost in the mix. The Content Saturation Index is inevitable: The more content an industry/niche has produced, the harder it is for a blog to make headway and find success in that field. The truth, again, is many SMBs haven’t even made a dent in their industry's Content Saturation Index and are too quick to give up on their content marketing efforts. 

Do Some Research

Literally, research on the inside and out. Look into your past content, what’s worked, what was a total dud? How many times was the content viewed? Shared? Clicked? The most effective content usually comes from doubling down and creating an updated version of a previous article. Don’t write off your ideas for content because you don’t know enough about them, you’ve already talked about it before or you don’t feel like you’re the expert at hand. We just talked about Content Saturation and how it’s unavoidable. Use all of this content out there to your advantage! Find and use free research papers, link to other sources, mention current statistics around the topic, find tutorials, online classes and more. All of this information can help support your ideas, boost the quality of your work and build credibility in your content.

Create Visuals

One of the most important pieces of your content is the imagery and visuals used. People are constantly searching and scrolling through feeds. You only have a few seconds, at most, to make or break the impression the content makes. Regardless of where you are distributing the content, images are 60x more likely to be processed by people than text. Not only that, people only retain a shocking one-fifth of what they read on average. Creating your own custom visuals and embedding other forms of media you and others in your industry have produced can help keep your readers’ attention end-to-end. Visuals also give you the opportunity to write less and they can communicate the point you are trying to make more effectively.

Ask the Experts

Give yourself a break from having all of the say! If you aren’t the expert, why not seek one to help supplement your ideas? Thought leaders love to share opinions on their subjects of expertise and get in front of new people. Just as a thought leader practices, you should do the same. Turn your blog into an industry resource by listening to others, reading articles in your industry, attending presentations, webinars, events and pointing out the most useful information for your readers. Feature a thought leadership Q&A on your blog and always be sure to thank your contributors. If you do it right, they will even be happy to share the piece with their networks and expose your brand to new people in your industry.

Conclusions

Blogging and content marketing are nothing new and are all the buzz in today’s business trends. While the ROI of these programs may still be challenging for marketers to prove, the real value of content marketing is in the transmission of knowledge from those who have it to those who don’t. Therefore, it’s really important to make sure you are doing it right.

If a) your industry is too saturated with content for your voice to be heard b) you’ve really run out of ideas for content c) you don’t have the resources to create high enough quality of content or d) you don’t have an actual content strategy in the first place - let’s make sure we change that for 2015! Act now.