Content Creep: Why Being Everywhere is Screwing Up Your Growth

You haven’t heard of 'Content Creep'.

But if you work in marketing or you're a founder, you've definitely experienced it.

Let me paint you a picture.

You’re a marketer at a fledgling SaaS company. Like every company, you have a website.

You want more people to visit your website, so you start a blog. But no one knows your blog exists, so you create a Twitter account. While you’re at it, you fire up a LinkedIn account as well.

Within a few weeks you’re getting a slow but steady stream of visitors. Result! 😀

But what are you going to do with those visitors? You should probably try and grab their email address, right? So you start a weekly newsletter.

Now you’ve got a blog, a newsletter, Twitter and LinkedIn. Yeah, you’re busy, but your workload is manageable and your traffic is growing.

Then your founder notices a competitor just launched a series of webinars. “Can we do webinars?” She asks at your next stand-up.

You know you don’t have time. But you don’t want to look like you’re avoiding work, so you say sure, why not.

So now you’ve got a blog, a newsletter, Twitter, LinkedIn and bi-weekly webinars. You’re having to manage five different content calendars, as well as creating all of the imagery these channels demand.

This is it, you tell yourself. No more.

Then someone from sales pipes up and says their last job used to get nearly all of their leads from SEO. You’ve already got a blog, so why don’t you start creating content for SEO as well?

You explain that SEO is complex and you’re already struggling to keep up with everything you have to do. But the decision gets made and SEO content is added to your to-do list.

So now you have way more work than you can handle. And you don’t have the time you need to do it well.

You used to spend hours researching and writing unique and interesting blog posts. These days you’re hitting the word count as quickly as you can. Your weekly newsletter has become bi-weekly and the last one you sent had a typo in the first sentence. You’ve stopped creating content for social media and started posting links because it’s quicker.

Worst of all, your traffic and leads are drying up. You know why - it’s because your content sucks. It’s because you’re trying to do too many things at once.

THIS IS CONTENT CREEP. AND IT’S THE WORST.

If you've been in this situation, or you're in it right now, I recently wrote a piece about why Content Creep happens and how you can fix it.

You can check it out here:

https://www.futurecontent.co/our-content/content-creep

Thanks for reading and if you have any thoughts, questions or feedback, I'd love to hear 'em :)