Something paradoxical is happening in content marketing right now.

As marketers, we all know the value that well-crafted and created content plays in telling stories and communicating value and brand propositions; however, engaging with an audience with a shorter and shorter attention span is becoming increasingly challenging.  

So what to do: stay on the hamster wheel of content out, knowing that statistically, the more you publish, the less your audience will see and absorb?

The sheer volume of content produced daily is part of the challenge. About 7.5 million new blog posts are published daily, more than 500 hours of video are added to YouTube every minute, and 66,000 pictures are added to Instagram every minute.

Add to this habitual changes in how digital natives expect to consume content (skimming, scanning, etc.), and we can understand how hard it is to cut through the noise and hold the audience's attention for as long as we need to.

At this point, I’m keen to avoid lazy stereotypes that all Gen Z’s and most millennials are glued to their phones, endlessly scrolling through reels. However, marketers are out of their minds and do not pay attention to how their primary buying audiences (don’t forget that digital natives account for most B2B buyers) interact with content.

So, what should marketers do to get cut through and engage with an audience?

1. Follow the numbers.  Every platform to which you post a piece of content will give you chapter and verse about the number of impressions, dwell time, CTR, and more. More importantly, though, follow the data downstream to the website, CRM, and sales to measure how effective each piece of content is and not just how popular.
   
   Getting comfortable with content analytics will help to identify the content that resonates with the audience and has great numbers (the unicorns) from those that perhaps don’t have the cut-through you were hoping for (the turds.)
2. Stay true to your brand and values. Doing a ‘wacky’ mannequin challenge (he says aging himself) or following a Kate Middleton meme might seem like fun, but think about how this might be work if a potential buyer decides to look through your LinkedIn profile if they are engaged with a more work appropriate story.
   
   Of course, if your brand personality and tone are more towards the fun/light-hearted part of the spectrum, then this might be a great tactic to use.
3. Frictionless engagement. So, having invested potentially weeks or even months in creating a killer piece of content, the natural inclination might be to stick it behind a contact form so that users have to give up an email address to gain access. I’d strongly recommend against this.
   
   Alongside the effort to create the content, you will have worked hard to push it out to a potential audience. If you are able to hook them, the last thing you should do is instantly create a barrier, creating friction and giving them a reason not to trust you.
   
   Good quality content will and should want to keep the audience coming back for more. By making it easy for someone to download a great piece of content, you create the start of a trusting relationship, plus you will have a nicely branded piece of work on their desktop.
4. Spread the word. After investing time, energy, and possibly dollars into a great piece of content, it is important to have a thought-through strategy for how you will let your audience know about it. Think about using your social media followers and encouraging them to share and repost your content. Also, consider how you might use email to push teaser content out to prospects or customers.
   
   Finally, consider investing in boosted posts to reach a wider audience, especially if you’ve covered point 1 and created a unicorn. A relatively short, well-targeted campaign for a piece of content that should resonate with a target audience could be the best marketing dollars spent.
5. Change up the presentation. Once you have got someone to click through or download your content, you need to work hard to fall into the ‘scan it and forget it’ category. Write in short, snappy paragraphs, include plenty of visual cues and format content with bullet lists and iconography if possible.

Hopefully, as a reader, if you get to the end of this piece (and you better believe I’ll be checking my engagement data), some useful insights this piece will help when developing a content marketing strategy.