3 steps to better content (and better content marketing)

August 22, 2016: If you’re a content marketer – on the brand side or at an agency —  a new study from Australia-based Dejan Marketing may have you reaching for your spellchecker. According to the study – based on an open-ended survey of 1,000 web users, “content properties” count a lot in establishing the trustworthiness of any given piece of content – in fact, they count more than any particular item of content’s publisher, author, or other associated credentials.

So what are these content properties that count so much?

1. Spelling and grammar
2. Quality of writing
3. Presence (or absence) of clear answers in the text
4. Headline quality
5. Usefulness
6. Factuality

Dejan’s study shouldn’t be surprising to experienced content marketers. While it’s true that anybody with a word processor and a WordPress site can consider themselves a content marketer, the skills and resources required to consistently produce commercial-grade content are actually very difficult to procure and sustain.

Even Google’s very helpful content guidelines on site content don’t offer much meaningful guidance about creating high-quality content. These guidelines do a very good job of informing the content marketer about what not to do (e.g. content should never be spammy, scraped, stuffed, spun, etc.), but very little information on the positive elements that actually make content “high-quality.”

How to make your content better

Every content marketer is different and there’s no magic wand that can be waved that can transform fair or middling content into “high-quality” content. But there are some rules that you can employ to ensure you’re cranking out the best content you’re capable of. Here are some steps we’d recommend you consider:

1. Always have a second set of eyes on your content. Especially in small or one-person shops, it’s often the case that the same person responsible for creating content – from ideation to final draft – is the same one responsible for publishing it. While this is a highly efficient strategy, it’s also prone to the kind of syntactical/grammatical errors likely to turn readers off. Do yourself a favor and try to institutionalize a copy-flow system in which the copy is read by someone other than the content originator. While having a full-time copy editor on staff is rarely an option at a SMB, it’s very helpful to have a second set of eyes on anything you publish.

2. Slow down. While social media and search algorithms tend to incentivize the large scale production of content, remember that quality always trumps quality. Just because your competition has ramped up its blog to daily publication doesn’t mean you need to. Don’t fall victim to SEO sirens who claim that you must “say everything everywhere.” Understand your target audience and speak to it when – and only when – you have something of value to publish.

3. Don’t be a slave to your metrics. The mere fact that you put a lot of time and effort into a given piece of content and – at the end of a week – it’s only gotten 50 to 100 viewers to it (or less) shouldn’t automatically be interpreted as signifying your content isn’t high-quality. Especially in the B2B world, content has a lengthy “long tail half life” and search engines often take considerable time spidering and indexing it. Six months from now, however, provided this content has value, it may wind up tipping the scales in your direction. Avoid the temptation to judge content designed for long-term influence by short-term metrics. Remember: the content marketing game isn’t about short term hits: it’s about long-term influence.