While you may believe that quality content wins out over quantity, there are valid arguments that having more is better. Customer expectations for brands are soaring, so your inbound marketing strategy should include having a massive amount of content on hand that will engage customers seamlessly and quickly at any stage of their journey.
Simply put, content velocity is the measure of how much content a brand puts out over a particular period. If you want to know how you are performing against your competitors, you would choose a period (month, quarter, etc.) and measure your content (posts and word count) against what they produced.
It’s true you should always aim to create the highest-quality content to build brand awareness and engage your visitors. But, how often you post content and the length of your posts is vital for other reasons.
First, you need to be outperforming your competitors. If you are posting twice monthly, Competitor A is posting 4x per month, and Competitor B is posting once per month, you are somewhere in the middle. That’s probably not “good enough” in some industries.
Sure, the user is getting a ton of content on a particular subject matter, but most of it is coming from Competitor A. Wouldn’t you rather have those leads clicking on your links and approaching you for new business instead of someone else?
Another obvious reason that content velocity matters is the search engines. The more content you post, the more pages on your site the search engines will crawl and index. This can help improve your search engine rankings significantly over time.
Finally, customers expect more from brands than ever before. They want their experiences to be fluid, rapid, and personalized, meaning you need to have the content they want to see when they want to see it.
According to a study by McKinsey, many companies are under pressure to create content assets faster, and 76% cite personalization as the catalyst driving the need for more digital assets. Accenture reports that 91% of consumers are more likely to shop with brands that provide personalized experiences.
If you want to measure yourself against your competitors or just set a benchmark for your current performance, calculating content velocity can be fairly simple. You can also complicate the heck out of it if you wish.
Starting with the simple approach, you can use an online tool like SEMrush to filter all of the blog pages on a particular website. Then, you can put that list into another tool like Screaming Frog that will extract the publish dates.
Doing this for all of your competitors for about a six-month window, you can get a sense of how frequently they are posting content. A deeper dive can give you insight into the average word count of each post, or the total words posted per month.
If you want to get a broader picture of your competitor’s content marketing efforts, you can take things a step further.
Pull the authors of all of the posts for your competitor’s website to see how many people they have on their content writing team. You can also search on the company’s LinkedIn page for staff with the terms “SEO,” “copywriter,” and “content” in their titles.
All of these metrics will simply give you an idea of what your competitors are doing and the resources that they are devoting to content velocity. It’s up to you whether you wish to replicate this or find a way to leverage your own resources to create more content that will elevate your results.
If you’ve measured content velocity against your competitors and aren’t satisfied with the results, you’ll want to create a digital marketing strategy to address the issue. Specifically, you should be creating as much personalized content as possible so that you can reach consumers at different stages of their journey.
Here are a few tips for creating more content at scale.
Nothing meaningful happens without a plan. For content personalization to work, you need to think ahead to create topic clusters. For example, you should have pillar pages that address a broader topic, like mortgages, and then topic clusters that are more narrowly focused pages, such as fixed-rate mortgages, VA mortgages, etc. All of this information needs to go onto a central Content Calendar to keep your team on track.
It’s going to take more time to produce each piece of content if your team is reinventing the wheel each time. Create a central repository for digital assets.
Everyone - marketers, IT admins, designers, and even outside agencies - can find the latest logo items, videos, and images to use in your content for consistency. For example, Hyatt has roughly 70,000 images stored in a central repository, where content creators can create a branded look on the fly.
There’s nothing wrong with re-using some content to get more fuel from resources you already have. Some consumers hate video, and others love it. The same holds true for blog posts, presentations, and podcasts. You can repurpose existing content, increase your velocity, and broaden the audience you reach at the same time.
Creating more and more specific types of content can be challenging for any business, but it’s something you should consider as part of your inbound marketing strategy going forward. At Connection Model, we deliver results-driven digital marketing solutions to clients and welcome a conversation about how we can help you achieve your goals.
Contact us today to learn how we can help increase your visibility and engagement online.