For new content marketers, there is value in producing and publishing some content before completing your content marketing strategy.
Some B2B businesses are so excited about launching their content marketing program that they charge forward without a strategy. Others want to get their content marketing strategy absolutely perfect before launching their program. The optimal solution lies between both extremes: producing some content before completing your content marketing strategy.
Is it better to create content while developing your strategy?
Our opinion is that it’s good to write some content while you’re creating your program. The content marketing strategy should not take more than 4 to 6 weeks to create. During that period, it’s okay to publish a couple of pieces.
However, doing much more can be counterproductive. The reason being is that the content may not perfectly align with your content marketing strategy. For example, your company sells widgets and sprockets. While building the content marketing strategy, you produce content to support both your widget and sprocket products.
However, after careful review, you determine that the content marketing program should only be focused on widgets, as your sprocket buyers do not purchase or even research your product online (e.g. like a government procurement department or a supply chain supplier). The sprocket content no longer aligns with the content marketing strategy.
As important, because you produced content for both products, the search engines now view you equally as a widget and sprocket maker. Now, your content marketing program is going to have to work harder to undo that view with the search engines. If it is only a couple of articles, it’s not a big deal. However, if you had produced a lot of sprocket content that got indexed, it will take your company longer to fix.
At the same time, producing no content while you are developing your strategy is just as bad.
What are the benefits of publishing content before completing your content marketing strategy?
If you’re a new company or have a new content marketing program, chances are search engines have not recognized your existence yet. Therefore, they aren’t indexing the pages on your website. By gradually creating content before completing your content marketing strategy, you can signal to the search engines that your site is alive and being updated regularly.
Then when your strategy is done and you’re ready to start producing consistent content in a scalable fashion, you won’t have to wait long for the search engines to crawl your newly-created content. Essentially, you’re not going to start from zero.
What content should I produce while I’m preparing my content marketing strategy?
This is a challenge for many marketers, as they don’t know what to write. What ends up happening is the executive sponsor comes up with a couple of ideas, and they produce that content. Chances are that content will be way too general or the focus keyword phrases will be too broad, resulting in little traction.
Your best bet is to pick a very narrow range of focus keyword phrases that most closely match what your company does. Then write a couple of articles around them. Using this approach, you can create content that will complement your content marketing strategy. We recommend this approach for our customers.
In summary
It’s okay to write some content before completing your content marketing strategy. However, make sure that your content is very narrowly focused on your company and ensure that you’re not producing too much content during this period.
Need help?
If you have a content marketing program or are planning one, download our e-book 100 Mistakes Businesses Make When Starting, Optimizing and Scaling Content Marketing Programs.
This e-book will walk you through the mistakes of hundreds of other companies and the challenges they faced in implementing their content marketing programs. To learn more about how Tempesta Media can help you streamline your content creation process and deliver quality content at scale, contact us today.
