How do you find the weak links in your content marketing?

Imagine you could see your entire content strategy laid out in front of you. All your channels, ICPs, personas, content assets, and hundreds of other details crammed into one massive diagram.

At first glance, it would probably look like a jumbled mess. You’d know the weak links are in there, but where would you even start to look?

Here’s what not to do: Randomly hack away at the parts of your content strategy that seem most straightforward or easiest to wrap your head around.

As in “create more ebooks” or “post on LinkedIn every day” or “increase our PPC spend.”

All that frantic activity may make you look more productive. But looking productive isn’t always the same thing as actually being productive.

So what can you do instead?

Focus on finding the Leverage Points. “…interventions where a little bit of effort yields disproportionate returns. Of the universe of things you could do to improve a situation, the Leverage Points are the things you should do.”
(Dan Heath, Reset: How to Change What’s Not Working)

A Leverage Point in content marketing could be:

• A fuzzy definition of your ideal customer
• A content production schedule that overwhelms your team with too many tasks
• Lack of internal alignment about your company’s core value props and differentiators

Focusing on fixing these types of Leverage Points will give you a much higher return on your effort than simply doing “more” of what’s already not working.

How do you find the Leverage Points in your own content marketing?

Start by asking yourself:

• What are the difficult strategic decisions we’ve put off making?
• Is our entire team (including senior leadership) aligned on our positioning, messaging, and content strategies?
• What are the 80% of activities that are bringing in 20% or less of the results?