Is your company producing content? Do you have a content marketing strategy? If you answered no, you are in the minority in 2014. 94% of B2B Small Business marketers are using content marketing*.

Every year people have less time and every year they have more content thrown at them.  Some would say that a content explosion is taking place right now. Most businesses have rushed to the content marketing strategy and there is so much content being generated it has forced us to become a nation of “info skimmers”.  Seriously, do you ever read an article or blog post word for word? The information deluge has forced us to skim the words and quickly decide whether it’s worth our time. If not, we’re on to the next thing. Sound familiar?

What does this mean in the marketing world? At first blush, many marketers feel like they need to speed up and crank out more content. If you are really drinking the content marketing Kool aid, you know that you need to produce meaningful content every day. Wow! Who can come up with all that? The short answer is no one. Because of that, an entirely new business category is born called content curation. It’s a fancy name for grabbing other people’s content, adding your own brief comment and posting that somewhere (or everywhere). It’s a great idea if the curated content is truly meaningful to your audience.

I have a contrarian point of view on all of this content madness. I say, slow down. If you rush to put something “out there” you will just fill the world with more noise. Content marketing does matter, but only if its good stuff! Here are 3 things to think about when you are trying to produce high quality, relevant content for your audience:

• Answer a question. Ask around the office, what questions do we hear repeatedly? Write something that addresses one of those questions.
• Put yourself in their seat. Think about your audience. If you serve an audience of people in high stress positions, write an article about stress relief.  Be a trusted source and let them know that you are thinking about their well-being.
• Consider your keywords. If people are typing a phrase into to google they are searching for an answer to an issue. If you can write content around that phrase, you could be the answer. Use the keywords in the headline if it works. Remember, we’re all info skimmers.

* source- 2013 B2B Small Business Content marketing Trends–North America: Content marketing Institute/Outbrain