A lot of site owners and marketers, especially B2B marketers, have a hard time developing a consistent content marketing strategy. Many feel that they have nothing to say or that their audience isn’t interested in hearing from them—this is not the case! Your target audience, regardless of industry, is looking for more information. They want best practice tips and guidelines, product reviews and demos, industry trends and more. Every business exists to solve a problem (otherwise they don’t stay in business for very long!) and your content shows potential customers that your brand is the best solution. That being said, stop worrying about what you’re going to say and start publishing!
While it’s important to publish quality, relevant content, many site owners get so bogged down in their writing that no content actually ends up going live. They agonize over every word choice (and word count) for so long that it stalls their content marketing strategy. In my opinion, there is nothing worse than launching a company blog and then not routinely updating it. A company blog should be updated at least once a week (more frequently if you have the manpower and time) because it gives the search engines more content to index, it gives your visitors more information to digest and helps build your online brand’s authority. If you aren’t producing content, you aren’t reaping any of those benefits!
For site owners that are struggling to get their content “ready” for publication, my advice is not to aim for perfection. If the content is 80% of the way there (meaning it’s on point and relevant to your target audience) then run with it. This is especially important if you are a new company or are in demand generation mode. At this stage in your SEO campaign, you need to be pushing out as much content as possible if you want to help your website effectively compete in the SERPs. You may have created a new lexicon around your brand and products, but that doesn’t mean that users’ search behavior is automatically going to change to reflect that. If you want people to use your new keywords you have to introduce them to your target audience and start making them part of the industry jargon. A few blog posts here and there isn’t going to cut it—you need to publish as much content as you can so as many people as possible can find it.
It’s pretty much understood by everyone that content is the key to online success, and if you’re late to the content marketing game then you have a lot of catching up to do—your competition might have hundreds (if not thousands) of pieces of content working in their favor. All of those pages can be indexed and ranked by the search engines, becoming entry points for your target audience. If you aren’t publishing content then you’ll never be able to compete with the sheer volume of information your competition has created and is leveraging for their SEO.
