You hear a lot about “quality” when it comes to content marketing. The higher quality your content is, the more likely it is that Google will smile favorably upon it, and the more likely people — your audience — is going to be to find and, more importantly, interact with it. Taking stock of the quality content marketing can help you see where there’s room to improve, and where you’re already seeing results.
What Goes Into Quality Content Marketing?
When you walk into a store and see a shirt hanging on the rack that has threads hanging off of it, and maybe a small hole developing near one of the seams, you can tell at a glance that it’s just not a quality shirt.
The same is true for low-quality content. You can tell immediately when content is no good. If you’re reading a poorly written blog post, you might feel your brain turn to mush as it tries to work past the numerous misspellings and questionable use of syntax. If you’re watching a low-quality video, you have to strain to hear the people speaking or squint to make them out in the darkness.
Maybe when you look at or read poor-quality content, you get the feeling that you’ve heard or read it all before. Even worse, in some cases, bad content promises a lot, but fails to deliver.
4 Things You’ll Find in Quality Content Marketing
Quality content marketing keeps a few things front and center.
First, it’s created for people.
That usually means it has a friendly and conversational tone, whether the content is written or in video form. The person speaking on the video doesn’t randomly shout out a string of keywords, and the writer creating a blog post isn’t performing syntactical acrobatics to get an ungainly keyword in.
Second, quality content reinvents the wheel in some ways.
At this point in the game, there’s a mind-numbingly high amount of content online. More than three million Facebook posts are created and more than 500 hours of video get uploaded to YouTube each minute, according to stats from Smart Insights. Back in 2015, MarketingProfs revealed that two million blog posts are created daily.
To stand out, quality content has to be different and original in some way. That can mean getting really creative when it comes to writing blog posts, making videos, or creating infographics. The more original you are, the better your content quality.
Third, quality content does something for the reader or viewer.
It answers a question, helps to solve a problem, or teaches them something. High-quality content can even simply be entertaining, such as silly videos that make people laugh for days, or satiric blog posts.
Finally, quality content marketing has some sort of emotional resonance.
It lets a reader or viewer know that they’re in on the joke, or that they’re somehow going to be smarter when they’re finished with the content. It might tug on people’s heartstrings and make them tear up. However it makes them feel in the end, high-quality content marketing is going to have an emotional effect on the people who read or view it.
How Can You Measure Quality?
Although quality is easy to spot, can you easily measure it? In some ways, yes. There are a few things you can look at to see if the content your brand is producing is hitting the mark or not.
Analytics can help you see how people are responding to your content. Look at the number of people who’ve viewed a video. How long did they watch each video? How many people liked or commented? Not getting much traction in terms of views, comments, and likes could be a promotion issue. But it could also reflect on the quality of your content.
Five Questions to Ask for Quality Content
Measuring results of your content marketing is just part of the equation. Here are a few questions you can ask yourself, your content creators, and other members of your marketing team anytime you create something new:
- Would you share this with your peers?
- Is this entertaining, or does it solve a problem?
- Who else creates this kind of content? Is it completely original?
- Is the content factually correct, and if yes, does it have research or data to back it up?
- Does the content look good (spelling and grammar is correct, image quality is high, sound is audible)?
Five Brands Producing Quality Content Marketing
Sometimes, it helps to see examples of top-quality content marketing in action. That way you can get an idea of what works and what sets a campaign apart. Take a look at the content marketing produced by these five household name brands:
