Content Prioritization: What to Write About Next (When Everything is Important)
“Prioritization is one of the most difficult tasks in a content marketing program. You’ve got stakeholders from across the business, SEO keywords, lead generation or traffic goals, and pitches from writers. What to choose?”
These are the words of content marketer Kayla Voigt.
Many—if not most—content managers would agree with that sentiment.
After all, content marketing is not just about producing content within your industry. It involves content creation and optimization that make a significant, measurable contribution to your business goals. A crucial part of being able to fulfill that responsibility is knowing how to prioritize content ideas.
Curious about how other marketers do it? We’ll cover some of their methods and tips, as well as some questions that can help you tackle your backlog of ideas.
The importance of marketing goals can’t be overstated
Every good marketer knows that specific, realistic goals are a must for the right kind of business growth. Without them, you could end up with unqualified leads. And no one wants to fight tooth and nail for every conversion.
So some marketers make it a point to set goals on a monthly basis. Meryl D'Sa-Wilson commented:
“At Global Call Forwarding, we set a content schedule every month, so we know what needs to be accomplished by the end of the month. During this process, we review content and SEO performance over the past 4-6 months and also take into account our current content goals.”
Besides such monthly goals, the same concept can apply to goals for content at each stage of the funnel. You can set an ideal performance baseline for your top content types and check content ideas against it.
For example, imagine the heights of business growth you could reach if each piece of:
TOFU content generated at least 3,000 visits to your site per quarter
MOFU content drove at least 150 product tour or demo requests per quarter
BOFU, product-focused content drove at least 9 high-ticket, subscription sales per quarter
Of course, your actual metrics and KPIs will be different depending on your business. But setting a standard for content at each stage of the funnel can help you to zero in on the highest impact ideas.
Start with the ruthless elimination of ideas
It’s at this point—after goal-setting—that some marketers might either:
Choose a content idea based on “a hunch” that a piece of content might generate some traffic, leads or sales
Waste time taking low-worth ideas through the entire content prioritization process
Both waste precious resources that could go toward creating and distributing high-value content.
For example, imagine that your keyword research revealed an industry-related medium competition keyword. It gets 11,000 searches per month. You're confident that you could rank for it and get some decent organic traffic as a result.
Yet, that may not mean that it represents a good opportunity. As you know, searchers using the query could be unlikely to ever become your customers. So a keyword like this would have no business value.
This is where your marketing goals come into play. Those are the quick qualifiers for each of your content ideas. If one doesn’t have the potential to get anywhere near your target, you can immediately shelve it and move on.
Once you have all low and no-priority ideas out of your way, you can start evaluating those with potential.
How many marketers identify high-impact content ideas
Custom scoring and point systems are popular ways for marketers to prioritize content.
Joe Barron of Cognism explained:
“We use a 3-point system to prioritise content requests.
Revenue: We prioritise first any content piece that’s going to have a direct impact on revenue.
Sales enablement: We prioritise second any content piece that’s going to help sales get deals over the line.
SEO: Since SEO tends to be a longer-term play, we prioritise this type of content last. This involves writing and publishing pillar pages based around specific keywords, then publishing supplementary blogs that link back to those pages.
Our SEO content calendars last for 6 months and culminate in eBooks combining all the blogs published during that time. The eBooks act as lead magnets for the following 6 months.”
Podcasting expert Jeremy Enns uses a Notion database to rate ideas based on five factors. These include brand alignment, market demand, and value.
I set up a database in Notion that I enter ideas into & then rate from 1-10 on the following:
— Jeremy Enns 🚢 🇨🇦 (@iamjeremyenns) August 16, 2021
1. Personal/Brand Alignment
2. Market Demand
3. Value/Upside
4. Personal Excitement
5. Time to Complete
A (somewhat arbitrary) formula then spits out a rating that helps me rank them.
Even the founder of CoSchedule, Garrett Moon, uses a scoring system to identify “10x ideas”. In other words, those that will grow a metric tenfold within a specific timeline. This system considers:
Potential
Time to complete
Value for the audience
If the idea can be well-executed
If an MVP could be created to validate the idea first
All are important factors. But, such systems are likely simplifications of the many considerations the marketers look at intuitively. What are some of those considerations and what's the most helpful way to frame them?
Questions worth asking when prioritizing content ideas
Here are some key questions that can help you test ideas from several angles to estimate their profitability.
Can we communicate our expertise in a unique way?
This is different from asking, Marketers ask themselves this all the time. Then, they proceed to go to Google and regurgitate the same old content from the SERPs.
Sure, they might have impressive expertise. But the practice of creating parasite content doesn’t make use of it.
How does asking if you can communicate your expertise in a unique way prompt a different outcome? It forces you to think about how to make your expertise stand out from that of everyone else in your field.
Eric Doty shared some insight into how the Summa Linguae Technologies team does this. Eric said:
“We focus on bottom-funnel, sales-driven content that both addresses a common question or concern in the sales process and showcases our unique expertise or insights. If another company could write the same blog post as us, it's not worth writing.”
Could you address questions or concerns that aren’t addressed sufficiently by competitors? Can you tell a story or share a firsthand experience that no one else can claim? Do you have unorthodox but successful ways of doing things that would raise your profile?
Look for ways—including doing proprietary research—that you can add a new dimension or level of importance to your topic.
This will, of course, require you to be honest about whether you can go the extra mile on execution. And this step is not the end of the process. It comes in conjunction with figuring out if going that extra mile will be worth it.
How competitive is too competitive?
"Weaker" sites can rank content in competitive niches. It’s not unheard of when they create more in-depth, laser-focused content than what already exists. But you can’t count on being able to do that.
For example, “site:blog.hubspot.com inbound marketing” returns 16,100 relevant results from the HubSpot blog. This content appears in a wide range of hundreds of digital marketing-related search results.
HubSpot has covered inbound from every angle. As a result, it has established impressive authority. Most websites would be hard-pressed to dominate this market anytime soon without the resources HubSpot has.
The lesson is simple. If authorities are already dominating a subject, you’ll likely need to hold off. At least until you've developed enough topical and domain authority to challenge them. And that means searching for less competitive opportunities in the meantime.
Why are my competitors not doing or focusing on this?
Looking for content gaps to find out what your competitors aren’t doing is nothing new. But finding a gap doesn’t always mean there's a great opportunity to stand out.
Why aren't your competitors putting resources into an idea? It could be because:
They don’t have the resources to execute (but you do)
Demand (or search volume) is low relative to where people are in the buyer’s journey
It would only be high-impact for a small subset of your audience and, thus, result in a low ROI
If you’re unsure of the reason, you could put some feelers out to gauge how interested your target audience might be. Or put together an MVP to help you anticipate potential obstacles and formulate a game plan before committing fully.
In either case, set an expectation for the maximum amount of time and energy you’ll put into an MVP or the amount of interest you need to see to add it to your content roadmap.
How long will it take to produce this content in the right format?
There are two pitfalls you’ll want to avoid when thinking about the time it will take to bring a content idea to life. One of them we’ve already talked about—not considering business value. The other is not choosing the right content format.
It might be tempting to go with the one that will take the least time and energy to create. But for a single piece of content to improve your metrics many times over, the format has to be a fit for your audience.
For example, statistics on B2B content preferences show that buyers want:
Listicles as top-funnel content
Assessment tools as middle of the funnel content
Case studies as bottom-funnel content
Accurate time estimates based on ideal format are essential when ranking content ideas in order of importance.
Will this perform well on an owned property?
As mentioned, “promising” traffic potential can often turn out to be fool’s gold. So can the allure of popular distribution channels.
Brett Rudy of Charity Hop Marketing explains why:
“Contrary to what many brands do (even popular and large brands), never prioritize content on unowned properties such as social media, YouTube, and Medium.
While these platforms may generate awareness and improve purchase intent for your brand, it has zero impact on your SEO and actually drives traffic to another site. Thus, you’re actually creating competition for yourself!”
This doesn’t mean you should avoid such platforms altogether. But owned properties should be the priority.
At this stage, most would ask, “Can I produce this content on an owned property?” In most cases, it’s easy to answer “yes.” Yet, a better gauge of priority is whether a content idea will perform at the level you expect on an owned property.
It’s not solely about where you publish. The more you publish, the more topical authority you'll gain and the more reach you'll have. In turn, content published to your owned properties will have greater potential. So you need to plan for both current and future performance.
Would content dependencies cripple this content?
A piece of content is only as good as the content supporting it.
So, when brainstorming a content idea, you need to think about its support system. Depending on your content strategy, this could include related posts, eBooks, webinars, and so on.
Do you have existing content that would help this piece achieve its overarching goal? If so, is it strong enough to do so now or would you need to spend time and resources to improve it?
If upgrades (or new content) would be necessary, weigh the cost against the expected ROI from both the cluster and individual pieces of content.
And besides estimating the necessary investment, also ask:
Should the marketing team create at least some related content before shifting focus to this idea?
To get the best results across the topic cluster, would each piece of supporting content be high-impact in its own right?
How do you prioritize content ideas?
There are many content prioritization frameworks out there that can become templates for your own. Whether they come in the form of scoring systems or not, though, the most successful all focus on business value.
Not to mention opportunities for true differentiation and the investment required to both create and support each idea.
