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Content marketing is an effective marketing strategies.
Yet…most organization’s (and personal brand’s) content marketing fails to achieve their desired outcomes.
I see three main reasons for why this happens:
One significant challenge for marketing teams is to get traction with content. Almost every business is creating content, so the competition keeps growing. This results in average content, spending too much time on content, or sunsetting content creation.
Simply put: It’s hard to create content that resonates in a world where content creation is effortless (hello, AI).
Another challenge with content is allocating the resources to it. Maybe you've had your resources cut, or you don't have enough to dedicate sufficient time to content. The result is that all resources go to the creation and none to the content distribution. This goes hand-in-hand with the first failure point, resulting in average content that no one even sees.
The final failure point for content is the struggle to retain our audience's attention (engagement). When our content blends in (average), it's hard to cultivate an audience who keeps coming back for more. With so much content, your audience has more options than ever, increasing the bar for retention.
A simple solution to these failure points and ensuring your content effectively drives business outcomes is using Macro and Micro content.
Imagine you own two dessert shops.
Shop A focuses on creating mini cakes that look exquisite and fit into your palm. They produce thousands of these to meet the daily demand. While this makes the cash register ring, it can be defeating to know you have to create that many mini cakes every single day. And you also fail to capture the demand of those who want a big ole cake.
Shop B focuses only on normal-sized cakes. When the demand for mini cakes rises, they have a simple solution: Use a patented cutter that creates mini cakes from the large cake. Rather than manually create thousands of mini cakes, they create a hundred normal cakes and then redistribute them as mini cakes—they make the rich material (big cake) and then cut it into small outputs (mini cakes).
While there are many nuances to this example, Shop A may sell their mini cakes for more because they are hand-crafted; it does illustrate how most approach content:
Rather than focus on creating a large cake (macro content) that we can cut into small cakes (micro content), we create mini cakes repeatedly (for every channel). It’s an exhausting hamster wheel, and thankfully there’s a way off. Next I will share how to construct macro content that helps you use content marketing to attain your goals.