You May Not Need As Much Content as You Think

In a survey of life science marketers last year, 70% of those using marketing automation said they struggled to create enough content.There can be many reasons for this including lack of personnel, budget, and of course, time.Marketing automation runs on content to a large degree. But you don't create content to feed your marketing automation tool. You create it to educate your customers and persuade them to buy.You are in charge.Marketing automation doesn't build awareness, generate leads and convert prospects to customers.  That's what you do. The purpose of marketing automation is simply to make that process easier for you.Let's step back a bit and consider what you are trying to do. Maybe you don't need to create as much content as you think.How much content do you need?If you feel like you aren't able to create enough content, can you tell me exactly what content you are missing? What difference would it make if you had it?If you can't answer both of those questions specifically, your problem isn't creating content. It's not having a clear plan about what you are trying to achieve and the content you need to make that happen.Imagine defining your marketing goal and then knowing exactly what content you needed to achieve that goal. Not only that, but imagine that as soon as your plan was done, you'd have an outline in hand for every piece of content so that subject matter experts and other content creators would know exactly what to produce.That sounds too good to be true, doesn't it? But wait, there's more! Because prospects can find you through many different media, you'll need to re-purpose much of that content for other formats or channels.The same plan will also tell you how you can re-purpose any piece of content before you create it. Creating a webinar? This plan will show you the outline and 5 blog posts you can use to promote it!It's not difficult.Making a life science content marketing plan like this might sound like a lot of work. But it's nothing compared to the effort you're putting in to creating content now to achieve uncertain results. Best of all, once you have it, the plan itself can be re-purposed over and over again (with small adjustments) for variations or newer versions of the same type of product.photo credit: jurvetson via photopin ccTopics: Content Marketing