You don’t need more content, you need content that does more

You know when you come back to your phone after having it off for a few hours and you have 100 notifications—because everyone wants something from you? Your mom wants to know what you want for your birthday. Your coworker needs that spreadsheet again. Your friend is asking for the recipe you offered to send.

Everybody wants something different from you… and they want it now. That’s life on the content team 24/7. Demand gen needs more content for their next campaign. Sales enablement needs a new case study. Customer success needs product content to help their clients.

Our Closing the Content Gap report found a clear pattern: Everyone in the GTM org wants more content. But if you’re a small team with limited time and resources, how do you meet the demand for this high quantity without sacrificing quality?

To help solve this dilemma—and spoiler alert, it’s not an either/or—we talked to Matthew Sciannella. Who better to speak to this challenge than someone who’s lived both the in-house and agency life? Before becoming the Director of Demand Gen at Refine Labs, he led the content function in previous roles, so he knows what content teams face and what other GTM teams need from them.

Let’s settle (or maybe just reframe) the whole content quantity-versus-quality debate once and for all—and learn to make the most of the team and time you have.

Mapping content quantity and quality

Quality and quantity aren’t mutually exclusive. But how well you achieve each one depends on your budget, team resources, and priorities. We picture them as co-existing across four quadrants:

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1. Low quality, low quantity. Clearly, no one wants this. If you’re putting out subpar content and not much of it, you’re not going to reach your audience or your content goals. Full stop.
2. Low quality, high volume. This is a lot easier to achieve than it used to be. Whether you use generative AI to recap the content at the top of the SERPs or spend marketing bucks at a content farm, you might get a lot of content but you won’t get original insights or differentiation.
3. High quality, high volume. Sure, this seems like the Holy Grail—publishing weekly (or even daily) incredible blog posts that offer value and get attention. If you somehow miraculously have an unlimited marketing budget, maybe you can achieve this. But for the rest of us, this is the ultimate challenge: making awesome content and doing it constantly.
4. High quality, low volume. Depending on your definition, you might think low volume=not enough good content. But one incredible piece of content per quarter (a research report or POV-driven expert roundup) can do way more for your brand awareness and leads than 15 bland, regurgitated blog posts. If you produce “low volume” strategically with your whole team in mind, this quadrant can be more than enough.

Tl;dr—achieving high volume and high quality is a great goal. But it’s not always feasible.

‍In the end, you might not need more content. You need to make content that does more. You can achieve great scope and coverage for your GTM org not with a scattershot approach but with strategic, multi-faceted, and research-backed pillar pieces.

One more note here: We’re not knocking AI completely. Matt says (and we agree) that AI tools can be helpful for certain stages of the process—ideation, organizing your thoughts, editing tweaks, and taking grunt work off your plate. But if you’re serious about the quality side of the equation? The more heavily you lean on AI, the further you’ll get away from great thinking and original insights. Keep the robots in their proper place.

Matt puts it this way:

That’s a mic drop if I’ve ever heard one.

The 2 key qualities of… well, quality content

Let’s back up for a second. We’ve already established that content leaders face this tug-of-war between content quantity and quality. But let’s get clear on our definition of “quality” so we actually chase it.

Based on our conversation with Matt (and Beam’s experience working with brands to create this kind of content), we’ve landed on two defining traits of high-quality content.

1. Valuable and original

Most of us know bad content when we read it. It’s boring fluff, and anyone could “write” the same thing by rehashing what the top-ranking content on the topic is already saying. Does that change the hearts and minds of your buyers? Unlikely. Yet with each new iteration of ChatGPT, this content becomes easier to produce and even more common.

You know good content when you see it, too. It offers a strong POV that makes you shake your head or pump your fist and say “Hell yeah!” It shares the insights of actual experts and their hard-won experience. It draws on original data from real people’s opinions or product behavior. And best of all, it’s content that no one else could write exactly like you or your company.

Matt, for his part, is all-in on the power of data. Here’s his take:

One good thing about the growing swaths of AI-generated hogwash? It makes original content stand out all the more. Your audience breathes a sigh of relief when they get their hands on it.

2. Cross-functional and cross-funnel

The relentless (and seemingly competing) demands of various teams in the GTM org can make it seem like you have to choose between content quality and quantity. But you don’t—because really effective content can meet the needs of multiple teams in one fell swoop.

Content marketers historically created content around the marketing funnel. They’d publish an SEO-driven “top of funnel” piece that ranks for keywords to theoretically reach problem-unaware future buyers. They’d craft a traditional bottom-of-funnel case study for folks who are ready to buy. This dichotomy doesn’t serve content makers anymore.

Effective, high-quality content todaystarts with a rock-solid cross-functional strategy and ends with powerful deliverables that support everyone from demand gen and product marketing to sales, offering value to customers at any stage of their journey. That kind of content is a heavy lift, but it helps everyone in your organization do their job.

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4 examples of quality content that covers all the bases

Consistent, high-quality content (by the definitions we just shared) is hard to find. But it does exist. Let’s get inspired with a few of Matt’s and Beam’s favorite examples of brands and individuals publishing strong, strategic, and cross-functional content—and doing it over and over again.

1. Cognism

The crew at Cognism could teach a repurposing masterclass. Much of their roster of ebooks bring new life to their feature articles. Not only are these ebooks reclaiming the stereotype of gated, useless ebooks by compiling original SME insights they’ve already collected, but they create a new format for distribution.

Sales can share this content in prospect conversations, CS can share them as a valuable resource for customers, and demand gen can use them as a CTA for campaigns. Everyone wins. This is a stellar strategy for upping your quantity while keeping the value of your content high.

2. Rand Fishkin

Unless you’ve been living under a marketing rock, you know that Rand Fishkin is one of the all-time greats. The SEO pioneer turned audience research renegade (AKA CEO of SparkToro) often produces insightful 5-minute whiteboards on topics like search, AI, and marketing channels. “I probably see a post or blog from Rand every 30 to 60 days. But his content is so good and well-formulated that I always find it valuable,” Matt says.

The SparkToro team consists of three people total. So the content that Rand (and marketing VP Amanda Natividad) publishes has to be cross-functional and support roles that don’t even have a person filling them. While Rand’s videos and SparkToro’s blog content often mention the product, they’re never hitting you over the head with their solution. “It’s no pressure. He’s never telling you to use SparkToro. He’s telling you that you can solve this problem this way if you want. Either way, this is interesting, isn’t it?’” Rand’s content works because he’s not just selling but exploring curiosity and answering questions marketers actually have—and doing all the jobs.

3. Mutiny

Case studies can be hit or miss. You need them to make your solution look good. But an overly polished story and too-good-to-be-true metrics might make your reader question how much is real. Mutiny threw out the rule book on case studies when they started building an entire library of micro playbooks. These tell stories about what customers have accomplished, how they did it, and what you’d need to emulate their success.

Best of all, they’re not just veiled ads hocking Mutiny. They’re actually helpful, tactical, and impossible to replicate. And they’re a goldmine for the entire GTM org to share with the audiences that have the same problems.

4. Common Room

Matt points to Common Room as an example of a leading brand that’s used customer data to build its content strategy, and it shows in their robust library of value-driven content. They’re not just making the most of the insights gathered from the Go-To-Market Mavericks podcast or sharing tactical product-based prompts and playbooks. (All of which are strategic resources for content’s cross-functional colleagues to use.) They look at data from their customers and their own team to inform how to position the value of their product across their content and team’s social—check out Head of Marketing Peter White’s presence on LinkedIn to see how this is done.

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How you can do it too: 6 tips to make content that goes the distance

We’ve seen what damn good content that supports multiple teams looks like. So how do you figure out the right pace and keep it up? Here are some of Matt’s best tips for making more valuable, cross-functional content—and more of it.

1. Start with key questions of curiosity

Like all the best things in marketing, building a cadence of high-impact content starts with your customers. Review what you know about your audience—from surveys and interviews, their interactions with your product or platforms, social listening, and anywhere else they tell you who they are and what they care about. Then, start asking questions to find the most important themes and threads to follow.

Look for anomalies and inconsistencies. When a trend is too strong to ignore, do more research on that topic. Talk to your sales team about the a-ha moments in their demos or what strikes a chord with your audience.

As patterns emerge, Matt explains, you should ask yourself what those clues might look aggregated across all of your current clients or ICP. These explorations can help you identify strategic, multifaceted content projects that deserve your time and attention and that will meet your colleagues’ needs. “Use the key insights you uncover, and pull the thread. Start small, and then work your way up to heavy-lift, valuable content,” he explains.

2. Work with ops to lock in on cadence

When you’re reframing the balance between content volume and quality, ops is one of your best allies to set expectations about attribution, content flow, and ROI. “When people first get into your content flow, they are probably as far away from being a customer as they can be while still knowing who you are,” Matt explains.

Demand gen and marketing ops can help you understand your content baselines. What’s the typical time horizon from an initial touchpoint to becoming a good-fit inbound lead? What kind of information or content formats do they engage with before they’re likely to buy? How are you gauging the role content plays in a buying decision?

These answers can help you make the case for how purposeful content serves both your audience and your internal teams better than churning out low-quality pieces. Ops can help you lock in on attribution and how to separate the right-fit traffic from the “never gonna buy from us” traffic.

Better content is a long game. Your ops team helps you determine how long the game actually is and, from there, what content you need to fill in the gaps.

3. Build content pillars on customer data

When everyone from the CEO to sales enablement constantly suggests and requests content, most of us shift into frantic order-taker mode. That’s a recipe for regressing into the false quantity-or-quality dichotomy. Remember, we’re aiming for fewer pieces with higher impact here.

Instead of trying to catch content requests as they fall from the sky, go back to those curiosity questions and customer data. Use the themes and insights you uncover there to build strategic content pillars that drive everything you do—the major quarterly projects and the smaller, more frequent pieces.

If this feels overwhelming alongside everything else you’re already juggling, start small. Decide on a key topic using the first-party product data you already have—report on that in the heaviest-lift output you can. And grow from there. “It’s like anything in life. Do something in a small instance first. The v1 of your quality content won’t look like v5. Commit yourself to the hard work of doing it once, which makes the second and third times that much easier.”

When an ad hoc request comes in, you’ll have ready-made priorities you can share with your team to either:

• Let them know you’re already working on something that will help them
• Share your (data-backed) content priorities and why their request might need to wait
• Convince them that they need something different than what they’re asking for

4. Partner with and educate the teams asking for content

Naturally, if “good content” means “content that meets the needs of all the GTM teams,” those teams should be a part of production.

Matt has a background in both content and demand gen, and he advocates for a strong partnership between those two teams. “If content is working on a pillar piece, there’s no reason why demand gen shouldn’t be able to dissect and ingest the information and help content design based on what they need for ads and emails,” he explains.

Cultivate allies on other teams, especially those that will use content every day and spend time talking to your customers. Talk to sales about the objections they encounter most often—then go back to product data or survey your ICP about what they’d need from a solution. Ask CS for not just great case study candidates but unique use cases for your product to pull out practical tips and approaches you can use as answers to the problems your research uncovers.

Once you have a newly minted content piece in hand, resist the urge to just send a link and say, “it’s live!” à la Bo Burnham:

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Instead, be ready to educate your colleagues about how and why a new content type or format is a win for them and how it meets their needs. Get as detailed as possible about what they should say and when they should share it. Great content is content the people around you will use.

5. Steer clear of transactional

Bingeable B2B content (it’s a thing!) doesn’t ask readers if they’re ready to buy every 30 seconds. “Making content transactional is the reason why content largely gets ignored,” Matt says. 

Measurement and attribution is one of the longest-standing debates in the content world, and we’re not going to solve it today. (Although Lauren Lang has some great thoughts on this topic.) But Matt argues that content should, as much as possible, be siphoned off from financial analysis. It’s hard enough to make great content without trying to micro-analyze every dollar that comes from it—and having to slap a “buy our product” CTA on everything you publish. Great content equips other teams to do their jobs well. It tees up CS for retention, sales for stellar discovery calls, and demand gen for high-performing campaigns. Let’s zero in on those success metrics. 

6. Know your constraints and work within them

We started by talking about the challenges of balancing how much content you produce with how good that content is. At the end of the day, no matter how much customer data (or budget) you have, you can’t produce unlimited content. You have to make the best content you can with the team and resources at your fingertips.

Matt admits companies that champion content as a core part of the business might be able to master high volume and high quality—but most don’t invest in content at that level. Instead, they have one or two people focused on content with the support of an agency and maybe some freelancers. He says that expectation-setting is asking yourself, “If I have a limited amount of bandwidth to do a limited amount of things, what can we focus on with the capacity we have available?” A great target to aim for might be one major project a quarter (like a heavy-lift research report or expert-driven guide) with additional weekly and monthly deliverables.

Start by assessing the mediums the content lead or team feel that they have economies of scale on. Compare that to the information you have on your audience—the first-party data, strong POVs, social listening, and surveys you can aggregate and turn into something insightful for the right audience.

“Figure out what your content people are capable of doing and what they’re most comfortable doing—then leverage that as much as you can to get momentum,” Matt says. It’s never easy, but it really is that simple.