Content delivers ROI in any environment

The past few years have been a rollercoaster ride for businesses worldwide. The pandemic, global supply chain issues, and geopolitical conflicts have all contributed to an uncertain economic climate. Amidst these challenges, brands have had to reallocate resources to support their core competencies, often leaving marketing departments with lower budgets and smaller teams.

Faced with these challenges, what can be done to reach audiences with programs that drive meaningful brand awareness, engagement, and loyalty? And how can you be sure that your content always speaks to your business objectives, both today and in the future? Let’s dive into four essential considerations—especially when working with limited resources.

1. Quality over quantity matters

Many marketers are doubling down on producing large amounts of owned media, but this strategy has limits. In an already crowded arena, saturating channels with “more” doesn’t help consumers. It’s important to ground content in integrity, and that means understanding how content ties to outcomes for the audience and solving customer jobs to be done. Grounding content in these questions helps define a strategy that is quality-led first and foremost. 

And just as this ‘more is more’ strategy doesn’t help consumers, it certainly doesn’t help brands either; it can dilute essential brand messaging and risk audience brand fatigue. Taking the time to assess your current content can help you see if there are existing pieces of content, channels, or series that can be revamped instead of creating entirely new items for the sake of it. Sometimes, a small tweak to keywords in a blog post or a refresh of YouTube video captions can make all the difference in attracting and retaining your audience. Like maintaining a fruit bowl, you need to remove the rotten fruit or re-purpose fruit that’s about to go bad (pie, anyone?) before adding new fruit back in.

2. Playing the long game with evergreen content

While investing in paid media can offer the allure of quick victories, it’s important to remember that these activities may not always have an enduring impact.

While there can be an immediate win in the form of initial interaction with paid campaigns, evergreen content continues to earn traffic organically over time.

What is evergreen content? Marketing expert Neil Patel says it best:

Evergreen content is content that is optimized to stay relevant and drive traffic for months or even years at a time. It doesn’t have an expiration date. It’s centred around a topic that people will be interested in for years to come. Examples of topics that might be considered evergreen include:

• how to write a will
• ways to cook chicken
• ways to generate passive income 
• how to optimize your site for SEO 
• how to build a blog

At Quietly, we’ve seen the benefits of this firsthand. A former client is still seeing returns on content published in 2017 — the content continues to deliver awareness, traffic, and growth year over year in spite of initial budget reductions that limited more campaign-centric paid media initiatives. 

Processes such as atomization can also give content multiple lives. For example, a long form research report or whitepaper can be leveraged into serialized posts for the corporate blog, thought leadership on platforms like LinkedIn or Quora, or snackable assets like social tiles and carousels for Instagram. And these new materials can also be adapted for different audiences at varying points of the marketing funnel, driving viewers back to the original assets or a particular call to action as business objectives fluctuate and grow. Moreover, regularly updating content helps ensure search engines regularly crawl and index your site. 

You spend so much time creating the content, why not let the content work for you?

3. Leveraging content for cross-functional teams

As content on your owned channels is highly measurable, the performance of every asset can be tracked, while attribution can be achieved by monitoring changes in audience engagement and conversions over time. Additionally, content can be connected to wider series and holistic editorial calendars, rather than only relating to the most recent campaigns in-market.

It can also be tied to functions beyond marketing, supporting teams across the business—for example, communications, demand generation, product marketing, and customer success. It can also play a role beyond acquisition, such as post-purchase deployment guides that can help enable new customers and drive more effective adoption. This approach not only diversifies the application and reach of content across the organization but also amplifies its impact by supporting a broader spectrum of customer experiences and business functions.

4. Expert consultation for exceptional results

The best partners go beyond strategy and execution—they help you establish, mature, and scale your content operations with confidence. They should be able to provide tactical and process recommendations that let you do more with less, and set you up with the tools and frameworks that ensure your future success. 

Perhaps most importantly, the right partner should be able to think strategically across all the operational dimensions of your team’s capabilities, as well as tactically, for things like channel-specific analytics and attribution.

The marketing landscape, like the business landscape as a whole, has never been more complex—but when done effectively, content is unique in its capacity to deliver long-term value that benefits the customer, the brand, and the bottom line.

With “doing more with less” in mind, in our next piece, we’ll explore how we at Quietly have been assessing the potential—and navigating through the clutter—of the myriad AI tools transforming how we think and work.