Conventional wisdom is wisdom for a reason -- having a decent content cadence is part of what will help build authority, get keyword strategy going, generate consistent new interest, and build brand awareness. 

But what if you can't do at least four blog posts a month, a newsletter every two weeks, a monthly podcast, and a regular video series? 

What if you don’t even have the capacity for half of that? Do you have to be able to hit a certain regular cadence before you start taking content seriously, or is there a way to do less content and still move the needle?

Every publicly-launched SaaS company nowadays is going to produce content. And while “content” “writing” and “branding” may be functions that start off ad hoc, somewhere along the line, you will need to think about how to serve public-facing content that moves the business needle in any number of areas. 

When, exactly, this point comes is a matter of some debate and is a topic for another time. But once you hit that point, you need a strategy and process. There’s no latitude in 2023: your content needs to be consistently and recognizably branded, memorable, and a driver of awareness and business.The full-throttle option at this point is to hire a couple content people to work their butts off to start a full engine with the support of the company at large. 

But Lauren! I hear you say, My company is not going to hire two content marketers right now! 

So, you have to figure out how to make it work, and that means considering a low-cadence content strategy that can add to your marketing arsenal. 

Despite the conventional content marketing playbook, it is possible to make a difference with lower-cadence content. 

You can build brand awareness. You can educate customers. You can establish authority in your space. You can get talked about on social. You can stake out your positioning in your corner of the market. You can create sticky, evergreen resources.

But while some of the broad strokes results are the same between low- and high-cadence strategies, the way you understand, strategize and measure a low-cadence strategy is fundamentally different.

🐢 No MOM growth, scale your expectations to more isolated bumps and serendipitous-seeming* future returns.

🐢 Less margin of error for a piece of content not to be great. Value has to be supercharged.

🐢 Longer runways -> less urgency -> more discipline.

🐢 Be comfortable pushing the same piece over and over -- hence 🚀 value.

🐢 This isn't going to show you a business case for what high-cadence content can do. That's an airplane. This is a hot air balloon.

And finally…

🐢This should be self-evident, but it’s going to be slower. A lot slower. Slower to produce and slower to build up.

That is, a low-cadence strategy isn't a replacement or a cheat code to get high-cadence results.

 It is a way to start incorporating content into a larger marketing and sales strategy that will give some lift without jumping into the deep end if you cannot make that leap yet.

It is being wise enough to know that you can’t fight the uphill battle of trying to make high-cadence strategy work with an absolute maximum of three posts a month, and that if you try your content will be half-baked and forgettable. 

It is taking the time that you might spend making six or eight pieces in one quarter and using that strategically to maximize your return in the long run by playing a different game.

Here are four ideas to refresh your thinking on how to take on content at the start of your company’s content journey, assuming you have some capacity for building assets but not enough capacity to pump out tons of content.

*If your content is good and resonates with your audience, no return is truly serendipitous: it’s planned for and primed. However, sometimes pieces get picked up for a second life for reasons marketers can’t explain… that’s what I’m talking about here.

A big swing, or the match to strike, is an opinionated piece of content that comments on conversations happening among your best-fit audience/persona/buyer/etc. 

It's undeniable that opinionated content can generate attention on social, especially if re-packaged well. So if you want to start to have some recognition among your audience, make something with memorable ideas. It has to be sufficiently attention-grabbing, but neither interesting nor opinionated has to mean highly controversial or finger-pointy –– although it certainly could, if that is something your brand thrives on. 

Getting attention and repackaging well means that your title, your lede and your main points (and headers) need to be as punchy and as clear as possible. We all know that a juicy headline can get people to click, so don’t be shy about pushing yourself to find the most enticing possible angle on your piece. As long as you have substantive ideas to back it up and don’t make outsized clickbait claims, there’s nothing wrong with dangling a worm. 

Of course, what counts as interesting or opinionated or memorable is going to differ from company to company and audience to audience. The key here is social listening, knowing where your audience is, knowing what they're talking about, understanding how to speak to them and generating conversation. This may mean you are putting out a post without a super-long runway because you’re strategically plugging into hot-button conversations as they happen (e.g. AI right now). Or, you could follow a building conversation and take the time to weigh in on something that has been bubbling for months or years. (Again, this may depend on your space.)

Remember that your opinionated content has to be branded. Whatever you say is a reflection of the stance of your company and product. You have to be able to support your opinions through the philosophy of your software and team -- you don't want to push to make something interesting just for the sake of it.

Finally,  understand that a “big swing” doesn’t mean being wildly creative in form or trying something ridiculously outside the box. In fact, those types of experiments often do best with quick iteration and fast-moving teams that have content churning away already, which lowers the absorbed risk. You can take a big swing with a blog post that has nothing fancier than H2s and H3s in it. 

For teams with:

✅ An investment in social media marketing

✅ Very good audience research

✅ An appetite for thought leadership

✅ A goal of raising brand awareness

Good example of a big swing: Why you need to stop using PDFs from Shorthand

Eye-catching title, personality in the subtitle: A non-fiction thriller about a zombie format, a mutant virus, and the promise of beautiful content, quickly.

Great URL: the-pdf-is-in-terminal-decline

Smart, thoughtful analysis that correctly spots a problem among their target audience and offers thoughts about correcting it that are directly tied to their branding and product

Re-sharable over the long term, because it concentrates on Shorthand’s fundamental value propositions and brand values not just spicy takes

Do you have proprietary data or information to work with?  Or, do you have the resources and network to pull insights from your customers/industry? If so, investing in a longer asset based on this data can boost your brand awareness and authority, and help you drive the conversation in your industry. Yes, even when you aren’t dropping a lengthy industry report every quarter.

Why? You're giving people things they can't get elsewhere. You're telling people what to pay attention to for the next six months, or year.This, however, will only happen if you are doing more than giving a bullet point list of simple statistics. The aim here isn’t to create one of those huge “150+ stats all telecoms marketers need to know for 2024” listicles. While they may make some splash, that volume of proprietary information is difficult to get, and it isn’t actually a shaper of conversation. Rather, think about this as a vector for insights just as much as reporting the facts. If the industry is seeing certain trends, offer well-researched reasons why this might be the case. If certain problems crop up across a majority of respondents, offer well-researched ideas about how to find solutions. 

It's a risk to sink a lot of time and energy into one asset, so you need to be sure you're tapping into big questions that your sector really wants the answers to. Tackle what people are frustrated about, what they can't find, what goes through who-you-know networks, and so on. Ask your customers, find what they're talking about, keep your ear on industry conferences, etc. 

Speaking of the industry at large, distribution makes all the difference. Yes, you will need a social campaign and all the other regular bells and whistles to get eyeballs. Launching in coordination with a conference that a founder, c-suite or vp is a speaker at is great, as is exploiting other avenues –– podcasts, newsletters, paid ads, etc.

Finally, although it's tempting to keep all your secrets behind a delicious little gate so that people have to put in their email and their job title to read your asset, resist the urge! Especially resist if you are not currently seen as leading the way through research, surveys, data, and benchmark reports. Someone might shell out an email for McKinsey or Gartner, but think about how annoying gates are when you don’t even know the ebook will be good. As counter-intuitive as it is, you need to give some or all of those sweet, juicy details away for nothing. This can double as a way to drive traffic back to your site through citations.

For teams with:

✅ Access to proprietary data

✅ A good relationship with your customers

✅ An appetite for sinking several months into one asset

✅ A goal of building authority in your space

Hits right at one of the juiciest and most sensitive topics their audience of freelancers and content marketers want to know about but had been mostly hidden –– salary

Leveraged their own community and audience to collect data

Ungated, free for anyone to see, but has its own web space away from the Superpath blog to feel evergreen

Easily updated every year, good for making them a leader on this topic and having a signature branded asset

Being comprehensive takes a lot of work, and usually a lot of words. It’s a great avenue to build your branding and build trust with your audience, and to focus on adding value to specific parts of the customer journey or your marketing strategy. What aims a strategically comprehensive asset may have will vary depending on its form, so let's flesh out three ways to use this idea in practice. 

☀ Hone in on exactly what sales needs and deliver. A lot of content strategy focuses on outward-facing pieces, but think about tools for sales to use directly, not just how to create an MQL. This can make a huge difference in your pipeline and customer journey if done correctly.

Cross-functional pieces can take back and forth to do right, which can mean sending quite a few reminder emails to people who don’t think of collaborating on content at the top of their to-do lists.  But that "lag time" doesn't matter as much for low-cadence teams. If you can keep a slow but steady momentum working a little every week, you may actually find this type of piece less stressful to produce than high-cadence teams.

🌲 Identify the cornerstones of your brand and product, and use the next year to focus on completing four evergreen pieces that cover your positioning, things that would be pinned at the top of your “Resources” page. In other words: stop wasting time and energy on scattered posts in favor of thoughtful pieces that you can keep pointing people to years down the line.

The hardest part here is choosing what to talk about. For that, you really need to look at what problems your product is trying to solve, how your product helps users conceptualize their world and their work, and the big things discussed in your pitches, sales calls and conversations with customers. 

Which means you'll need to be a fly on the wall in those conversations. Do your due diligence and get into the meat of what people are actually asking about and what your company actually needs to provide. Don’t make an assumption before you get into the planning phase –– do background research first.

🧠 Answer a question your customers have in a single comprehensive asset. Like your evergreen pieces, this requires that you get input and expertise from across your company, from your customers, from benchmark reports and from outside research. This can go further to establish your company as an expert in your space than the equivalent words split up over different topics and is easier to do a deep dive on than a multi-piece topic cluster.

This likely shouldn't be focused on your product and specific features; it should be about building trust and empathy with your customers by giving them information on their niche and how you(r product space) solve(s) their problems. This is a piece that might need to be refreshed every few years to be truly evergreen but, if done right, would be worth re-investing down the line.

Finally, don’t be limited to blog posts or PDF formats here. You can think about these as assets that deserve their own place on your website. Take advantage of the longer timeline you have before hitting publish as a slower-working team to partner with web developers to make these stand out.

For teams with:

✅ Clarity on exactly what your customers are questioning

✅ A strong partnership with your sales colleagues

✅ The latitude to develop content that isn’t on a blog

✅ A goal of solidifying trust within your buyer journey

Good example of a comprehensive asset: Navattic’s State of the Interactive Product Demo

Grew from actual questions from customers and prospects to help leads on their decision-making journey

Builds a fundamental use case for Navattic’s product through serious data reporting, not by pushing their particular product features up front

Gives pragmatic, well-researched advice which establishes trust with potential customers

Lives on its own separate page, not integrated into the blog, for ease of access by first-time web visitors

Rather than a slow drip of four separate newsletters or blog posts, think about a rollup of materials that together constitute a finished idea. Keep people thinking about you not because of shiny new posts, but because they're returning to valuable resources. As with being strategically comprehensive, this idea covers a variety of use cases, which all have their particulars, pros and cons. Here are a few to get you thinking:

📒 Try a 'mini-course'. If one of your focuses is educating your audience, a crash course can be a great way to engage your readers and give them something valuable that they'll remember. The key to this, as always, is really honing in on what your audience is talking about, what they need to know to succeed at their jobs this year, and how you can help them think about that better.

This doesn't have to be fancy, but do use the opportunity to play to the strengths of your team –– you could combine videos and summary text, or launch each of the four parts of your course as an audio episode with a transcript and worksheets. Make sure that the value proposition is very clear, why would someone you want to speak to click?

💡 Start a ‘keyword hub' for something that matters to your company and your audience. While keyword ranking isn't a top priority for low-cadence teams, good keyword research can absolutely still inform your content. Creating a content cluster off of keyword + audience research is a great way to get into your audience's head and provide them food for thought even without focusing on search results and relying more on other methods of distribution. Consider launching all at once as a new “resources” corner of your website.

Plus, on-page optimization is low-lift if the ideas are there. If you start with a good keyword strategy while you're still low-cadence, you can use this as a strong base to increase organic search efforts down the line. It never hurts to think ahead, especially as "good" search content needs to be, well, just good content. And a smartly positioned core hub will be a strong link builder for years going forward.

🎁Create a bundle: a guide, templates, a series of expert interviews, or whatever resonates with your audience and content goals. We tend to think of how we can drip content out over time, but this is about creating a solid, knowledgeable resource people will return to. By framing something as an in-depth, static resource instead of four linked blog posts, you change the way people interact with that content. Context plays a huge role in people's perceptions of value, use that to your advantage.

For teams with:

✅ A content drive that doesn’t start and end with a blog

✅ Strong expertise outside of content writing –– SEO, audio, video, design, etc.

✅ A product whose offering and brand positioning includes an emphasis on design, visuals, video, etc. beyond the written word

✅ A goal of practically educating your audience 

Puts together 25 templates that would be much less valuable if dripped out one by one over time in disparate posts, and would be too long to stick in one landing page

Lasered in on Peak Freelance’s ideal audience

Provides value to that audience by targeting areas of anxiety and weakness for inexperienced freelancers: high-risk client conversations (e.g. onboarding, pricing)

Acts as a taster of the type of expertise and value you get from Peak Freelance’s membership subscription

How do you think about working on a low-cadence strategy with a team that probably doesn’t have a dedicated content marketing specialist, but does have content experience plus a ton of projects on their plate spanning everything from paid ads to web copy to branding to sales email drips?

If you’re going for a longer content piece, get granular on due dates. Keep things ticking along from phase to phase and don’t get stuck trying to move from one thing to the next. Do your research, interviews, and audience listening on a deadline just like you have a deadline for an outline, rough draft and final draft. Often, in shorter pieces or faster-moving content teams these elements don’t get their own deadlines because there isn’t as much work to be done, and pre-writing elements are rolled into the outline or draft timeline. This should not be the case with longer or more slowly-produced assets.

There’s always something that can fill the two or three hours a week you or the members of your team will need to set aside to work on this content. It can be tempting to say that a project that isn’t going live until the end of the quarter can take a back seat when a shiny, polished piece feels impossible to envision from the bits you are assembling. But attempting to cram the creation process of an asset that should take a month, three months, or more into the couple weeks before the deadline will create an emergency that burns out your team, doesn’t result in a good asset and ultimately leaves everyone behind on other projects.

Making interesting, thoughtful content that adds to an overall marketing strategy isn’t easy, and if you don’t have content processes in place, get serious about starting your team with best practices. Whatever gaps may exist –– no brand guide for written content, under-developed audience personas, no formal editing or proofreading checks / tools –– solve them before you start on any serious investment in content. It may push things a little down the line in the short term, but it will benefit you enormously in the long run. Even if you have content experience on your team, the best workflows and consistent outputs don’t appear from thin air.

As I said at the beginning, low-cadence content is probably not going to give all the same signals as high-cadence content that it’s working. And that’s okay, because the point of low-cadence content isn’t to replicate the strategy or results of fast-moving content teams. “Low-cadence content” as a concept doesn’t have one set of golden metrics; it doesn’t make sense to measure content that’s designed to be shared and re-shared on social media in the same way a template bundle might be measured.

So be smart about how you’re defining KPIs. And remember that these are supposed to take a relatively small amount of total hours spread over a reasonable period, so the return you need from them to add to your overall marketing strategy is much less aggressive than the return needed for full-scale content operations. (Although this doesn’t mean you shouldn’t expect and plan for results.) The main caution here is scale reporting and metrics wisdom for high-cadence approaches accordingly, and with a grain of salt.

Lauren Christiansen is a freelance B2B content specialist, among other things. Learn more about her work. Connect with her on LinkedIn.