How Contentricity Is Ruining Your Content Marketing Plans

By Quinton Wall

What the hell is contentricity?

I have to admit, I was thinking the same thing when the word popped into my head yesterday afternoon. I was sitting at Philz, my local coffee shop here in the Mission District of San Francisco, working on some FY16 planning for my team.

Here at Salesforce, my team and I spent a lot of time producing content. As it turns out, probably too much time. And it’s messing up our content marketing strategy — big time!

Did I have one too many mint mojitos? Probably. But I think I’m on to something.

Contentricity: To take a content-centric approach to content marketing at the expense of marketing that content. The state in which the creation of content becomes the sole purpose of a team.

Ok, I made the word up. It fits, though.

I swirled the thought, and my coffee, around. I’d been working on some analysis of data from the past three years. During that time, my team either directly or indirectly produced over 200 pieces of content, yielding tens of thousands of social shares a year across all the major social networks. We even have a great chart to show people how good we are.

Nice job. Time to give the team a pat on the back. But I didn’t. Something was wrong.

I instinctively knew it like you know when someone is watching you from across the room and the hairs on your neck stand on end. I sat there thinking, Are we in a state of contentricity? To be honest, I think I actually said that out loud, which did cause the other patrons to look at me and make my hair stand on end. I looked down and took another sip of my mint mojito. Oh, well.

I’m not usually a super quantitative guy. I typically err on the creative side. I dug into the numbers, the line from A Few Good Men playing on repeat in my mind.

• In FY15 (Feb 2014-Jan 2015), the top 20 pieces of content accounted for 68% of our social shares.
• In the same year, the top five of those pieces accounted for a whopping 32% of all the shares!
• The highest performing piece was an e-book about the anatomy of a mobile app. Which was, interestingly enough, a gated piece of content. Typically I would have thought that fewer people would share gated content.

By the numbers, we produced 93 unique pieces of content, and just under five of these pieces were really impactful. People liked them. They shared them. A lot.

Contentricity was a big problem. We spent the majority of our time writing content, when we should have been more focused on reach. I took another sip, letting the roasted flavor sit longer on my palate. I can handle the truth.

Reach is how we can take our content and make sure that more of the right people see it.

I’m in the middle of planning our goals and measures for FY16, but reach is now my number one goal. And if you are working on content marketing, it should be yours, too!

How do you solve for reach? Here are a few strategy items from my WIP plan.

Write great content

Yes, I just said that we, as content marketers, spend too much time writing content. What I discovered was that it isn’t so much the quantity of content, but the quality. Your goal should be to write great content. As a result, it will be more likely to be shared.

Don’t be afraid to abandon content which is half-completed if you realize it’s just not going to land. About 18% of content just didn’t hit our sharing goals. We should have abandoned those pieces during writing. Better still, get your PR agency to proactively engage with outlets and find out what their audience wants.

Big Rock Content

Pablo Picasso was once quoted as saying, “Good artists copy, great artists steal.” I’m definitely not saying I’m a great artist, but I am stealing an idea from Jason Miller about Big Rock Content. We’ve had a lot of success with this strategy.

What do you do? Take your best related content and repurpose it. Combine it in an e-book, slice parts off and make infographics, webinars, or something else. Reuse your content in different ways, and put some marketing muscle behind it. Fresh, new content doesn’t always mean you have to create something from scratch.

Identify top performers

This might sound obvious, but identify your top performers and do more with them. Here at Salesforce, we built a custom app on the Salesforce1 platform that tracks all of our content, the outlets at which they are placed, how many social shares they receive, and how they’re performing.

Here’s a bit more how to track and identify top-performing content.

Outlets
Get smart about which outlets you target. Our own Salesforce blog is a high performer in overall numbers, but we place a lot of content on there. For our content and audience, shares per blog post are good, but not great. Sites like GigaOm, however, have really large number of shares in comparison to the number of articles that we run on there. It makes sense for us to do more with GigaOm and other similar outlets.

Industries
Industry trends change all the time. Stay abreast of them, and use data to analyze what’s really working for your audience. I know from looking at the data in my content app that themes around mobile strategy/apps always do the best, accounting for 31% of all shares, despite being only 23.5% of the number of content items as our most prolific topic, wearables.

Social Networks
I also suggest looking at your social network trends. For instance, LinkedIn shares typically account for double Facebook and Twitter shares combined for articles we write, but Facebook works the best for promoting Big Rock items (In FY15, 47% of our Facebook Likes came from these Big Rock items).

Just like industry trends, social network trends change all the time. Stay current. LinkedIn wasn’t always the clear winner for us when it came to shares of our content, but since they launched Pulse, the game has changed completely.

Network within your company
Not every company is as big as Salesforce, but most organizations have resources that you can leverage to amplify your reach. My strategy for FY16 is going to be heavily biased to networking with our internal blog, social media, retargeting, product marketing, and engineering teams to increase our reach as much as we can without spending all of our time writing content.

Summary

I eventually finished my coffee and my data analysis. Yes, we had a pretty successful FY15 in terms of content, but we are at risk of letting contentricity ruin our plans for FY16. I like my coffee to not taste too much coffee. And, you know what, I like my content marketing plan to not have too much content.

Quinton Wall is Director, Developer Relations at Salesforce.

Originally published at www.linkedin.com on February 11, 2015.