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Are marketers emphasizing content quantity over quality?
Many organizations have adopted the strategy of '3 blog posts a week' (or similar) with much attention paid to the timing and volume, and less paid to the quality of what's actually being said. This is particularly true when blog content is either handed to lower-level employees (even interns) or outsourced to third-parties.
How much of an issue is this? How can it be resolved?
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Best Answer
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- Chris Selland,
- Christopher Ryan,
- Abe Bellini
People have short--in fact, in this day and age virtually non-existent--attention spans. They are bombarded with messaging every second of every day, and are uninterested in most of it (ambivalent at best). In fact, as I mentioned in an article a while back, studies suggest that as many as 80% or more people dislike (or worse) corporate blogs:
The fact is, very few companies really have anything to say. And that's OK, but if you don't have meaningful content, you are in all likelihood wasting time and money by simply "communicating." As I often say, just because you can doesn't mean you should.
Adding excessive frequency to the formula is even worse. It's too easy for people to unsubscribe, delete, or otherwise effectively turn your company messaging off, like changing channels on a TV.
So the bottom line is, if you really think you have something to say, or something of value to offer, by all means say it (as concisely as possible). But if you are just reaching out because someone in your organization said "we need to get an email/newsletter/blog post out this week", you are wasting resources that can be better used on other forms of marketing, and risking alienating the people you're trying to pull in.
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- Michael A Brown
You are right on with your assessment. Ultimately people want good stuff i.e. content. If you put crap in, you get crap out.
If you're using the web, blogging, social media, what is your goal?
How do all these things fit into your marketing system and strategy?
Answering these questions is a good starting point.
I don't want to spend a lot of time creating content if my target audience doesn't value it, read it, and want more information from me.
That doesn't mean that some topics won't be more popular than others.
I think people are taking a short view of their goals. Everyone wants instant gratification, and that is what I believe is driving the content tactics of many companies. I think you will get traffic....in the beginning.
But will you get steady business growth?
Which do you want?
I don't want traffic for the sake of traffic. I want people that are my ideal fit clients finding me, liking what I say, and trusting me to the point of wanting to engage me to see how I can help them achieve their business growth goals.
Just my two cents:)
-AJ
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- Christopher Ryan
I think that there's this common misconception about content marketing, that content is king-- so everyone tries to create more at time and days where most people are looking for online content to read, watch.. and so on. We have forgotten that social media is not about publishing media, but it's all about building relationships that count. As such, 'Context' should be king. By creating content that adds value for your target market or customers can you only resolve that burden.
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- Art Levy
Yes. As other answers show, it isn't because marketers don't understand that quality is important. The real problem is that quantity is easy to measure but quality is not. Without an accepted measurement of content quality that the organization agrees connects to bottom line results, quality will not be a concrete topic that a business can make a measured investment in improving.
I think this response poses a really interesting question. Why isn't quality easy to measure?
If you're manufacturing Volvos, quality is measured by crashworthiness, because that's why people buy you. If you're McDonald's, quality is product consistency and speed of service. If you're Pixar, quality is some internal standard for storytelling.
My sense is that online, quality content comes down to the same question they ask you on line at the supermarket: "Did you find what you were looking for?" If there were some way to measure that, we wouldn't all be shooting in the dark so much.
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- Chris Selland
This is a really good discussion. I do think that quality can be measured, and the greatest measurement is if people come back to your blog. If your focus is not on quality and only on quantity then you have seriously compromised your message.
The other element to keep in mind is that it is quality combined with brevity! The attention span is short, so you need to get a good quality message out - and do it quickly. I think a great example of this is Seth Godin, who just gets it right!
It's possible that marketers are emphasizing content over quality, but it's important to keep in mind that QUALITY CONTENT is what's important.
In the virtual world of search engine optimization and keyword compatibility CONTENT is king and will rule like a monarchy through the digital age. Having unique and beneficial content in both your website and marketing materials is becoming ever more important as data is processed quicker and accessed more efficiently online as the Google toolbar has nearly replaced the traditional Yellow Pages phone book in your search for a service or product.
Jason McSweeney
Marketing Mastermind
http://www.dream2ink.com
A different/general take on this issue ----- I'm sure very soon all these socialmedia sites with free access are going to come up with their limits on what you can do & not.
Today, these sites are free & for anyone who's trying his luck in sales/bizdev/job hunt --- easy thing is to try to create some page hits on his profile & then try his luck contacting these guys in the backdoor...
I've known of members in business sites like LinkedIN, updating their turn to bath, cycling, passed a red robot & crap like this, which just puts you in frequent intervals in the profile pages & seen as someone who's very busy in social media (if that's what Klout is doing...).
Beyond all this, as the other learned members mentioned, content quality is KING, the serious guys are well behaved that way, it's the bystanders, who make all these unwanted noise.
Great discussion points. It appears there is no perfect answer, and your own goals will determine your strategy and tactics.
Yes, content is king (and everyone today seems to like to repeat that truism).
And, yes, that content needs to have "quality" as well as quantity. Another truism.
But very few marketers seem to agree on what constitutes "quality" content. I say that if your content doesn't DIFFERENTIATE you from the competition, then it's pointless, useless, and will have no marketing value or effect. Just more blah-blah-blah.
Al Shultz
http://www.alshultz.com
I think a good measurement for quality content is to think in terms of how many leads does it generate for you.
Then measure the percentage that convert to clients.
Now you have a measurement for quality:)
Although a lot has been said about the value and purpose of content, I am most intrigued by the concept of having some sort of metric for the quality of it all. If the goal is to produce worthwhile customer-centric content, as is clearly echoed in the sentiment of Michael and John, then I find it necessary to evaluate the quality of our own content.
The best way to do this, then, is to determine if we are enriching the lives of our stakeholders. After all, customers and clients come to all of us for only one thing - solutions. I think Art hit it home in his supermarket comparison: "Did you find what you are looking for?"
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Cool question. My sense is that even though it's been around for a while now, we're still at the early stages of the internet as a media tool.
To try to learn from history, it's kind of interesting that when TV first became available to the masses in the 50s, there was about a decade or so when all you had to do was get your name out (which, for what it's worth, is where I think we're at with web content right now).
Then, thanks to Doyle Dane Bernbach and Volkswagen, marketers started fitting themselves into their target market's mindset a little more. In other words, content started to matter in marketing. My guess is we're starting to lean that way now a little on the web, but I don't think it's any mass movement yet.
After that, once the creative revolution crashed about a decade later, market research became huge and nobody wrote anything without first testing it in focus groups, animatics, and test markets. That's not how things work on the net, which is more like a giant test market -- you put stuff out there and see if people respond.
As for the 80s & mid 90s, things changed with cable and the opportunity to narrowcast instead of broadcast. I don't know if that changed the content of what marketers said to their audience, but it did change where they said it.
Then in the late 90s, the net took off with the dot.com boom, and we were right back where we were with TV in the early 50s. You could put a sock puppet on and people would remember your name (though I can't remember them now, but I think they sold pet food.)
So what's the point of this content I'm writing right here? Basically this: I don't know if people respond more to quality content than to simply seeing a marketer's name three times a week with a bunch of words after it that nobody reads.
Like, I wonder how many readers of this post will get this far. Not that I'm giving away a $10 coupon if you do.