At the beginning of this year, noted marketing thought leader Mark Schaefer of {grow} wrote a now somewhat infamous blog post titled Content Shock: Why content marketing is not a sustainable strategy. If you haven’t read it, I’d recommend taking a moment to do so. His basic theory is that we are nearing the intersection of increasing volumes of content with our limited human capacity to consume it.

In other words, as companies jump on the content marketing bandwagon in droves, pumping out blogs, e-books, reports, videos and more, it’s becoming harder and harder to get people’s attention and succeed with the strategy. Just a few years ago, if you put a blog up and plugged away at it, you were a first mover and were pretty much guaranteed to have some success and earn attention from the audiences you were trying to reach. Today it’s much harder.