Content Dominoes: How to quit the game and make your content work harder

You may not have heard of Content Dominoes, but the chances are you’ve played it.

It goes like this:

You create a content strategy and calendar. Your traffic increases – but your SEO ranking and email clicks aren't going up – so you produce more content. You share posts on LinkedIn, Facebook, TikTok, Instagram, and Twitter. You get more likes and clicks but how do you hold on to them? Maybe it’s time to up your email marketing…

And now you’re playing Content Dominoes.

The knock-on effect means you’re suddenly producing content for multiple channels – and struggling to keep up. So how do you stop your content from spiralling out of control?

Here’s how to stop playing dominoes and make your content work harder…

Looking for content marketing strategies and solutions? Find them at our half-day Content Marketing Masterclass. Click here to find out more.

Think like a president

Remember Obama’s campaign in 2008? Of course you do. His ‘change we can believe in’ campaign was crystal clear, driving straight to the heart of the electorate's pain points.

Great content strategies should be the same: campaign-led. So what’s the pain-point you’re trying to alleviate for your customers? What’s the question your content needs to answer? How will you grab their attention and engage them?

For example, if you’re a beauty brand you might create a campaign that focuses on helping people take better care of their skin, or if you’re Apple, your campaign might be about encouraging people to get more creative with their iPhones.

Creating one big fat campaign (rather than lots of skinny bits of standalone content), will help you:

• Reduce content ideation and creation
• Make your marketing more cohesive and targeted

When you have a campaign theme, generating content ideas becomes much easier; the central idea is already there so you’re not starting from scratch every time. It will also focus your marketing efforts, helping you to communicate your brand story and ethos.

Make your ideas great

At the risk of stating the obvious: if you want content that doesn’t domino out of control, you need a great central idea for your campaign. This will make your content go further and work harder.

One great concept can be repeated for years – and most importantly, this clear repetition will do wonders for your brand image and reach.

Just look at Apple’s ShotoniPhone campaign; it started in 2008 and it's still going strong. Or Spotify’s #wrapped – now an annual campaign. Or Coca-Cola’s Share a Coke campaign which ran for 7 years. What do they all have in common?

They made their campaigns about their audience by creating ideas that go to the heart of what their customers want – and they involved their customers in the story. That story could then be retold via multiple channels and mediums – all with the same core content.

Go evergreen

Evergreen content is exactly what it sounds like: it never gets old. That means you can use it repeatedly. And that means you don’t have to produce as much fresh content.

Here’s what it looks like:

• ‘How to’ articles/ videos
• Listicles
• Video guides/tutorials
• Best tips

For example, if you’re a supermarket brand, general recipe content (articles or videos) will always be reusable, whereas content about which vegetables are in season this month will only be relevant for that specific timeframe.

You don’t need to make all of your content evergreen, but it’s a good idea to make sure some of it is. To do this, avoid using a load of statistics, current news stories or cultural references; the idea is it should be able to exist on its own forever, without needing to be updated.

Focus on quality not quantity

You know that connection on LinkedIn who just keeps on posting and posting? Don’t be that brand.

If you’re producing three or four pieces of content a week, there’s one word that comes to mind: churn. And churn doesn’t make anyone think of high-quality, valuable content.

Producing informative, relatable content takes time and skill. If you’ve created something of value as part of a focussed campaign, let it speak for itself; you don’t need to bombard your audience.

Instead, you can reshare the same piece a few times within the first couple of weeks – why not? It’s fresh, useful, and the people who didn’t see it the first time around might see it this time. If you’re sharing on your socials, just refresh or rewrite your intro copy and voila! You're instantly getting more bang for your buck.

Play the long game

Being too reactionary is one of the prime causes of the Content Domino-effect. If you’re checking your search engine ranking or average email clicks on a daily basis, you might think your campaign is failing – even if it isn’t. And that’s when you might decide that you need to produce more content or add in more channels.

If you want to track metrics regularly, KPIs like visitors, likes, and engagement per channel, are fine to view on a daily or weekly basis – but when it comes to bigger indicators like Google ranking, or customer conversion rates, you’ll only get a clear picture at the end of your campaign. So play the long game; give your content marketing time and trust in the campaign.

Letting your content spiral is a surefire way to waste resources, overload your audience, and diminish your marketing ROI. By developing a clear, idea-led campaign with quality content, you can avoid the dreaded Domino-effect, and make your content work harder – and smarter.

Want to avoid playing Content Dominoes and make your content go further? Join us on the 1st of December for our interactive Content Marketing Masterclass. Click here to register now.