How to be a great content marketer in 2024

Everyone is being asked to “do more with less.” While the lack of resources may be frustrating, it’s also an opportunity to simplify your content program.

In 2018, I wrote about the different types of “waste” in content marketing. Content budgets are smaller today because they were bloated previously. And most of that money didn’t produce better content or more customers. Overproduction of content (which is just one type of waste) creates all kinds of issues:

• Lots of new content makes it easier for readers to tune you out.
• Sites with lots of content require maintenance (refreshing, pruning, fixing broken links, technical SEO issues, etc.)
• An emphasis on net new content almost always reduces time spent building distribution channels.
• Most content doesn’t perform well, sowing seeds of doubt in upper management that ultimately require more advocacy.

The chance to do less is actually a blessing (with the caveat that “less” often means layoffs, which is very tough on the individuals affected).  Instead of maintaining a wide-ranging content strategy, I recommend that most teams be thinking about how to get the best information to readers as quickly as possible.

It sounds obvious, but it’s hard because it means you have to let go of something. You have to commit to your plan and say “no” to the rest. It also means you need to ease your reliance on algorithms to deliver your content because it’s an inefficient mechanism to reach people quickly. SEO will continue to be useful, but it’s a game that’s never, ever put the reader first.

Take a quick look at Equal’s Wrap Text blog and you’ll see a company talking to its customers, not creating content for them. Posts like Building and taking a horizontal product to market is hard are written in the first person, based on real experience. You can’t outsource this kind of thing, which means it doesn’t feel like content. It’s more like blogging than content marketing and readers love it.

Faced with the same constraints as every other VC-backed SaaS company, Equals stripped down the content program and just wrote. How many companies could actually pull this off? Maybe more would if they saw how little it costs and how much people like it.

Engineer and writer Dan Luu wrote this on his blog:

I've been comparing notes with people who run corporate engineering blogs and one thing that I think is curious is that it's pretty common for my personal blog to get more traffic than the entire corp eng blog for a company with a nine to ten figure valuation and it's not uncommon for my blog to get an order of magnitude more traffic.

More budget and more people do make your life easier when the work is complicated. But more money and more people almost never result in better content. (On a related note, this is why influencers are becoming so powerful in B2B—they don’t have the constraints of process, approvals, collaboration, etc. so they can reach people faster than your company.)

Money can buy better content, but simplicity (and speed) are always going to be the most effective way to reach people. And as a wonderful side effect, if you do this, it’s a near-guarantee that you’ll find more creative fulfillment in your work since you can focus the craft and the readers rather than the meetings, the backlog, etc.