How to stop producing content you don’t need

Before your organization creates content, ask yourselves five important questions:

1. How do we know our audience wants/needs this?
   1a. What is the business need for it?
2. What is our (measurable) goal for creating it?
3. How do we know we need NEW content about this topic?
4. What is our capacity for creating this content? (Would we need to stop doing something else?)
5. Do we have the time and skills to maintain it?

The answers to each of these questions need to be based on measurable information.

For example, to answer Question 1, you’ll want to look at several potential things, such as:

• whether your audience has contacted customer service asking about this more than X times in the past year
• whether people have searched for this information on your website more than X times in the past year
• whether the topic has gotten covered by other sources that your audience follows more than X times in the past year

Making each bit of information establishes a clear framework for decision-making, preventing decisions based on internal politics or interests.

If you are interested in creating content decision criteria like this for your organization, I can help!