Guess what? The only person who truly cares about the quality of your content is you.
Pretty harsh, huh? It's true, even if your content earns tens of thousands of visitors, thousands of social shares and hundreds of comments. If what you offer can solve a user's problem and/or entertain the appropriate audience, that's what makes it quality content, not a perfectly written Shakespearean masterpiece. People only go to the Internet for two reasons: to be entertained or to solve a problem. Accomplish this in front of the right audience, and they'll care about your content.
. . . But I thought it was all about content quality
Ever notice which kinds of content tend to go viral on Facebook? "Quality" is probably the last word you'd use to describe it. But it's usually entertaining in some way to some slice of Facebook's users. YouTube is the same: most of its popular videos have very low production values.
Not mentioning any specific sites (I have many in mind and you likely know of them), but there's a host of highly traveled Web properties that publish copious amounts of content that stinks; yet people still visit, share and comment. Even though it's this writer's opinion that the content stinks, others obviously find it entertaining or problem-solving.
Only 36 percent of marketers believe they use their content effectively. Is it because those marketers only publish quality content? That's not likely. What's more likely is that they create problem-solving content and promote it to the correct audience. The keyword here is audience. The other 64 percent of marketers likely don't have much of an audience to which to deliver their content in the first place.
Let's pretend. . .
Many verticals have reached the peak of what Marcus Sheridan refers to as "an industry's Content Saturation Index (CSI)." For example, if you launched a brand new digital marketing agency from scratch today, how long do you think it would take your blog to reach thousands of page views a day? A very long time, if ever. What if you produced and published only the highest quality content in the entire industry twice per day? Still, a very long time, if ever. Why? Because there are thousands of websites vying for your same audience, and they already have it. You'd have to poach them away because the digital marketing vertical has reached its peak CSI.
The point is that the quality or quantity of your content is almost meaningless in this case. You could take your highest quality A+ content, dumb it down to publish on SocialMediaToday.com, and watch the analytics run circles around its A+ counterpart. Without a significant audience, marketers should focus on content distribution and promotion strategies-not quality or quantity. Besides, with little or no audience, there's no feedback loop; so how would you know if its quality content or not?
Breaking through the noise with distribution and promotion
Most content marketers truly understand the role of owned media. However, where many of them fall short strategically is their ability to converge owned media with paid and earned media. It's paid and earned strategies that help marketers poach audience from other sites over time. This is the only way for marketers to build their audiences quickly in industries that have maxed out CSIs. Without it, blogs like the one described above would likely take many years to naturally build an audience.
. . . But I digress
Most of the folks who have read this far assume this post is saying that quality content doesn't matter. If content is full of typos, misspellings and run-on sentences, it's going to leave a poor impression of the author and brand. That's not good. If a true subject matter expert writes what they know and helps solve the appropriate person's problem, that is indeed quality content. The point is with little or no audience, adding additional layers of editing and ideation in an attempt to improve quality is a waste of effort.
It's clear that this has been the year of content marketing. Next year should be the year of content promotion. As the CSI grows across more verticals, more and more content marketers will struggle to get their content read and focusing attention on quality will get them nowhere.
Image credit: Andy Lapham