More of the same is the most expensive thing a small business can buy

The Grand Union build, part 3 of 8. Season 1: The Diagnosis.

TL;DR

The cost of real estate content is not the cost of producing it. It is the year.

Undifferentiated work is priced identically to differentiated work. Same photographer, same hours, same writing time, same platform fees. What separates them is what remains twelve months later, and undifferentiated work leaves nothing, because nothing about it accumulated to anybody in particular.

We eventually published 118 pieces for this client, deliberately, as a test. Most of them did very little. That is not an argument against publishing. It is an argument for knowing what you are testing, because the ones that did nothing cost the same as the ones that worked.

Read next: Part 2: We did the social media · Peak Value, where more leads was the wrong goal · Part 4: You cannot outbid Zillow

Nobody bills you for the sameness

The invoice for a piece of content is the same either way.

An hour of shooting, an hour of writing, some editing, a scheduling tool. Whether the resulting post is unmistakably yours or interchangeable with four hundred others, the line item is identical. There is no surcharge for being generic and no discount for being specific.

So the cost never appears anywhere you would look for it.

The real bill arrives twelve months later

What you are actually buying with a content budget is a position at the end of the period.

Spend a year on work that could carry anybody's logo, and at the end of it you have a full archive, some engagement history, a habit, and precisely the same standing in the market you started with. Nothing compounded, because compounding requires the pieces to be adding to the same thing.

Spend the same year on real estate content that could only have come from you, and the archive is doing something. Each piece makes the next one land slightly harder, because there is a there there for it to attach to.

Same spend. Different asset. The gap is invisible monthly and enormous annually.

We did it deliberately, and we can price it

Later in this build we published 118 pieces of content across a year, on purpose, as a test.

Most of them did very little. That was the expected outcome and it was the point, because we were trying to find out which of five ideas was true and the only honest way to do that was to publish against all five and watch.

But it is worth sitting with the arithmetic. Roughly nine in ten of those pieces cost full price and returned close to nothing measurable. We accepted that because we were buying information. If you are not buying information, you are simply buying nine in ten.

The difference between a test and a treadmill

A test has a question, a period, and something you will do differently depending on the answer.

A treadmill has a calendar.

They look identical from the outside. Same volume, same channels, same weekly rhythm, same reporting. The only difference is whether anybody wrote down what would count as a result before it started, and whether anyone intends to act on it.

So the question is not how much content

It is what each piece is for, and what you will conclude if it fails.

We stopped producing entirely for a few weeks in order to answer that, which felt like going backwards and was the cheapest decision in the engagement.