Your marketing department is a content machine.

You're publishing daily blog posts, cranking out new white papers every month, and creating clever and engaging content for your social media channels. But no matter how much content you produce, your content isn't impacting traffic, increasing engagement, or converting new leads. What gives?!

For many marketers, this is a problem they face everyday. No matter how they promote or position their content, the engagement just isn't there. So how do they fix it?

The answer lies in a simple economic principle: utility. 

Economists use the term utility to describe the pleasure or satisfaction that a consumer obtains from his or her consumption of goods and services. Other things equal, consumers will always choose the option with the most utility. This is true of products, services—  and yes, your content.

The trouble with much of the content flooding the internet today is that it lacks real utility for it's intended audience. Too many brands are more concerned with the quantity of their content than the quality.

As the marketplace becomes more crowded with content, inferior material is weeded out as consumers focus their attention on the pieces of content that add value to their daily lives. The time it takes for readers to consume content is a finite resource, and they are becoming more and more selective with where they spend it. It's economics!

So how can you make sure your content is the best option in your marketplace? Let’s take a look:

Treat Content Like a Product

The way marketers think about their content is flawed. Too many marketers treat content no differently than any other marketing asset (like banner ads, for example), and this view is handicapping their marketing. Content is capable of so much more: inspiring new ideas, solving complex problems, and bettering the lives of readers. It’s time for marketers to start realizing the potential of their content and approaching each individual piece of content as a product. 

What problem is your content designed to solve? How will your audience use it? Will it continue to provide value? These are questions that need to be answered for any product launch and answering them for your content will align your marketing with the problems your audience is looking to solve, providing serious utility and helping to build a relationship with your brand.

Have a Strategy

The way in which content is distributed is just as important to providing utility as the topic. Technology has given marketers the ability to tailor their message by context, delivering the right message, to the right people, at the right time. What's more, consumers are providing more personal data than ever before with the expectation that their marketing experiences will be more tailored and useful, and they expect brands to deliver.

There are a number of social monitoring tools at a marketer's disposal to help tailor their messages. Marketing automation tools also allow you to develop nurturing campaigns designed to provide information to prospects slowly over time. Messages are sent based on predefined time periods or a user action to ensure that content is provided only when it's needed.

You cannot force your content onto the masses anymore. You need to provide highly personalized and relevant experiences to your audience if you have any hope of providing real value and developing relationships. 

Avoid Diminishing Marginal Utility

The law of diminishing marginal utility states that the marginal utility that one receives from consuming successive units of the same good or service will eventually decrease as the number of units consumed increases. Basically, you can have too much of a good thing.

Don't overload your audience with content. Take time to experiment and measure what your distribution channels can handle. Each industry and business will have their own sweet spot for volume and frequency of published content, and you will only be able to find it through trial and error.

Be smart about the way you are utilizing content. Don’t just create one deliverable like a white paper and promote it to every social channel you can think of. You can split that deliverable into a slide deck for slideshare, an infographic for your social channels, and several articles for your blog. This give you more bandwidth for your content and optimizes your content’s format for each channel.

So if you notice that your content just isn’t performing, no matter how you tweak, promote, or position, it might be time to take a closer look at the content itself and take steps to provide real utility to your audience. Your readers will thank you and you will see the marketplace adjust as consumers become more willing to trade their time and information for what you have to offer.