This post was originally written by Accelity owner, Jackie for Docalytics.

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Every marketer knows that content is essential to a sound marketing strategy. But when it comes to content and content marketing for your specific company, how much content is really enough? How much is too much, or not enough? How do you find that perfect happy medium, where you have enough content to engage, but you’re not overwhelming your audience?

The answers to these questions may not be simple, but they’re not overly complex, either. In the end, your decision about how much content you need should be the answer to just one question: How much content does your typical buyer actually want?

There are many factors to consider; here are a few tricks that will help you figure it out:

Create buyer personas.

When deciding on a content marketing strategy, don’t fly by the seat of your pants and expect to come out on top. You’ve got to do some digging, research your target market and demographic, and make sure you understand what makes them tick and how to engage them on an emotional level. Only after you’ve discovered this kind of information will you be able to create an accurate buyer persona.

Prepare yourself before you develop a content plan by creating a set of personas that represent your typical (or desired) prospective customer. Avoid these common mistakes:

Just guessing. Most businesses have many types of people in their target market. So where do you begin? Start with a discovery exercise: gather a team of employees and get them in a room. Who? That’s up to you. You could involve only managers or a sampling of employees from across the organization. Hand out some post-it notes and instruct each participant to write down as many prospects as they can in 15 minutes. After the exercise, group similar targets on the wall. You’ll find that some groups are much larger than others.

Creating too many personas. How many personas stood out in the above exercise? Hopefully the answer is somewhere between three and five. Creating too many personas sets you up to be confused – and you can always go back and add more later as you see fit.

During your persona exercise, you should identify how each prospect would like to be communicated with, and about how often. Once you’ve figured out what your prospects want, you can move forward by identifying a strategic plan and narrowing down how much content you’ll need to drive it.

Enter the matrix.

Coming to a decision on the right amount of content isn’t a static process. It’s ongoing and fluid, and it changes often with respect to buying cycles and industry shifts. For this reason, to get you started on the right path for marketing success, create a content marketing matrix.

I recently created a content marketing matrix for a client, and whoa – was it eye-opening. We didn’t have the exact problem that’s mentioned in the blog above (too much content for the bottom of the funnel), but we had tons of content aimed at one persona, and not much for the others.

After examining how we could repurpose content for each persona, we discovered it would actually be easy to have enough content for everyone. This is something I may not have realized without creating a content matrix.

So, now what?

After you’ve taken a shot at personas and a content matrix, it’s up to you to create the right content to fit the bill. Remember—this is the most important part—that you should continually adapt to what your buyers want and need. It’s a never-ending process.