Here’s a content marketing idea for us: Let’s all go on a content elimination diet! Not a total fast, just a targeted cutback to see what’s really working.

One positive and very silver lining to the implosion of content marketing right now is that we finally have an opportunity to steer brands *away* from content when and where they don’t need it.

<gulp> I know. Why should we be positioning ourselves for less work at a time like this? But I think we all secretly want this for our clients because we know it could be better for their business.

Maybe its because I’m tired of creating an 8-tab editorial calendar for content execution across 14 platforms just to see millions of impressions and a handful of clicks. But really, clients (and myself) have come to expect marginal performance from their content. Any click from a thought leadership article is taken as a resounding success.

I’m certainly to blame for some of this bloat. In the early days of a new strategy, technically going from 0 to 1 click is technically infinite growth! But I can see its not scaling like it used to. And I know I’m not alone. I’ve seen the bloat and fragmentation across tons of agency performance reports. It’s starting to be everywhere.

(Also I KNOW someone is going to read that and say “Oh that just tells me you aren’t making very good content and your strategy is wrong!” yeah yeah yeah but you’ve got to admit not every brand can be the preeminent B2B SAAS company on BlueSky.)

Regardless of who’s doing what, its time for a better approach to content.

And, of course, it’s not gonna be one-size-fits-all (this is the part where you get to keep your job!)

Let’s run a test to find out what the elimination diet would look like:

For 90 days do the full gamut of your brand’s content strategy. All the posts, all the platforms, all the measurement. Large portions 🙂

Bucket your content into 2 categories:

🔶 High Intent Content (targeting consumer pain points, journey stages, conversion)

🔷 Awareness Content (thought leadership, general branding, and other top-of-funnel stuff that you might not have considered to be Awareness but which is not critical to driving conversion)

Then, for the following 90 days, cut the Awareness bucket by 70%. See what happens.

And then add content back in as necessary.

It’ll feel risky because we’ve trained ourselves to never reduce, just refine. But it’s necessary to find a new baseline.

If you are running the same content program you had in place in 2019, just across more and different platforms, it’s time to reassess your approach. You can’t eat like your 20 anymore. You can’t post like you’re 20, either.

And maybe, in a decade-old attention economy where everything is increasingly louder and faster and then louder again, Simple can be what breaks through. In an age of always-more, maybe restraint is the boldest approach.

You won’t know until you try.