You need a lot of content. We’re talking an order of magnitude in the league of Law & Order and The Simpsons. But before you guzzle a gallon of coffee and tie a bandana around your forehead Karate Kid style… stop.
There is such a thing as too much content. And if you’re creating content for the sake of it (without a clear business need, or to simply create something new), you’ve taken a wrong turn.
The Content Paradox: Not Enough or Too Much?
It’s a fine line between not having enough content and having too much content.
On the one hand, you need enough content to satisfy various use cases. Consider Forrester’s finding that a person on average consumes 11.4 pieces of content before buying.
In practice, I’ve seen firsthand how that number can grow when your business sells more complicated or expensive products that have long sales cycles. Then factor in the need to create content for different personas, buyer journey stages, product lines, times of year, and consumption preferences—not to mention the need to keep all that content fresh—and it’s enough to make your head spin.
On the other hand, having too much content creates challenges. When you have too much content, it becomes difficult to manage—i.e., ensure it remains relevant and on-brand and gets used properly within campaigns. And if content doesn’t get used properly, then buyers will typically end up requiring more content than they already do throughout the purchase process. (Those challenges aside, a 2018 study by Content Marketing Institute and LinkedIn found that as much as 80% of Marketing’s content goes unused by Sales, which means a lot of wasted effort.)
So where is the line between not enough and too much content? When you begin creating content for the sake of creating more content.