• by Tanya Gazdik , Staff Writer, March 26, 2015

“Content is the panacea, but we’re not actually very good at it,” Allen Gannett, CEO and founder of TrackMaven told Content Marketing Insider Summit attendees this morning during a presentation.

According to a recent study from TrackMaven, a growing majority of professional marketing content fails to have an impact. The marketing research firm found that while the content output per brand has increased 78 percent from the start of 2013 to the end of 2014, content engagement actually decreased 60 percent. That raises the obvious question: is more content necessarily better?

 “We are publishing more and more content than ever before, and there’s less and less engagement,” Gannett says.

Brands publishing the least amount of content are actually getting more engagement. It’s quality, not quantify. Some of the top engaging brands -- Gawker, NFL, Apple, the Brady Report – publish much less than you might expect.

Timing is key, Gannett says.“We have to start posting when people are listening,” he says. Marketers aren’t publishing on weekends, but that’s when customers are actually listening (not the days we are at the office.)

It’s the same with time of day. Marketers are publishing 9-5, but consumers are busy working themselves and aren’t paying attention until evening.

“One of the big mistakes we’re making as marketers is being convenient for ourselves,” he says.

It’s also important to create engaging content and to use data as a weapon.

There are two types of data, ROI metrics (things that tell us attribute revenue to a marketing source. Leading metrics, on the other hand, measure initial customer engagement with content.