WORKWEEK

Content teams can’t do it all. You can’t fulfill every ask. You can’t focus on every good tactic, or even good strategy. Content marketing requires hedging your bets, and then shifting your strategy based on what’s working and/or company needs. 

Here are three types of content your brand needs to produce:

• Thought leadership content: This includes product launch content, event content, POV or opinion content from executives or partners, proprietary research content (which can often be used as campaign content, too), etc. The goal of this content is primarily to drive impressions, traffic, and earn press. Rarely is pipeline a concern, though it never hurts. In the case of proprietary research that is also used as campaign content, lead gen is important, too. 
• Campaign content: This is content created to drive pipeline. It started by piquing the interest of your prospects, and driving leads. But it’s important those leads are high-quality, or else your pipeline numbers won’t be pretty. Assets in this type of content are typically gated––ebooks, research, webinars, interactive content like quizzes or calculators, etc. Campaign content also typically includes sales enablement material. 
• Performance content: This is content created to rank on Google or in AI and LLMs. This is typically part of a larger web strategy to support the site’s information architecture. But it’s not enough for this content to drive traffic. It also needs to convert. You’re looking for roughly a 200% increase in conversion to MQLs on performance content versus thought leadership content, for example. 

Depending on the size and maturity of your company, as well as your specific strategy, you’ll focus on some of these more than others. 

For instance, when I worked at early-stage startups, my breakdown was: 50% thought leadership content, 25% performance content, 25% campaign content. That’s because thought leadership content earned us the most traffic the fastest, built network effects, and helped tell our narrative to a market who was just hearing about us. While that was in motion, we were building an SEO moat, and working to convert leads into pipeline with regular, but less frequent, campaigns. 

At other companies, you might spend 50% of your time on performance content––especially if you have the resources to maintain the scale needed to win––and then 25% on both campaign content and thought leadership. In many cases, you can begin to combine these types of content. Afterall, good content can be reused and repurposed. Great content can be reused and repurposed again and again and again. 

Remember, though: you should always be willing to shift that distribution as needs change. And, of course, all of these assets need go-to-market support (i.e. distribution). 

The goal isn’t to do it all. It’s to do what is necessary to move the needle. Content needs to both drive traffic and drive pipeline. Few assets can do both of those things. None of those things can do it alone. You have to build a library. You have to be strategic. You have to hedge your bets.