High quality content is a completely subjective — and massively broad — subject. For one person it means funny Tic Toc videos. For someone else, it means authoritative scientific content that helps them finish their PhD.
For the purposes of this blog post, we’re going to focus on high quality content that helps small business people succeed.
To do that, it helps to look back to the origins of this whole content marketing phenomenon.
Never in history has the average Joe been afforded unrestricted access to an audience any bigger than the crowd in the corner bar. The internet, especially social media, is a giant electronic soapbox that delivers unimaginable world-wide reach.
Anyone can pontificate at will, on any subject, and potentially reach millions of people across the globe.
There’s a 16-year-old-girl who has reached 100,000,000 followers on Tic Toc.
How cool is that?
The democratization of online publishing allows anyone, anywhere, the ability to post thoughts, opinions, dance moves, photos, articles and silly cat videos. It has inexorably changed politics, journalism, medicine and pretty much every business category.
It’s a game-changing tool for small-business marketing, even if you never produce one speck of “high quality” content.
You could argue that it’s the greatest thing since the invention of the radio broadcast.
On the other hand, the internet is also producing more noise, more fake news and more worthless blather than ever before. For the most part, it’s quantity over quality.
As more and more people publish their stuff online, and as Ai becomes standard operating procedure for creators, high quality content gets harder and harder to come by.
It now takes a lot more effort — a lot more searching — to separate crap from fact.
Used to be, you had to have genuine, proven expertise in a given line of work in order to get “coverage.” Everything published in print would be considered high quality content, by today’s standards.
Plus, if you wanted to get published you had to get past the editors, and they were brutally picky.
First, you had to have some expertise. Second, you needed something unique to say… an angle all your own and a unique voice with which to say it. Therefore, publishing articles was not a particularly common element of most small-business marketing plans. And video was prohibitively expensive.
Content marketing is a different story. There are no editors screening what goes out on the internet.
It doesn’t have to be high quality content. Any dimwit can start a blog.
Content farms are selling the same articles over and over and over again for $10 a pop. Regurgitation and blatant plagiarism is now being touted as “content curation.” Just type a couple keywords into an Ai program and there you go…
You’ll get exactly the same type of low-brow content as every other business in your business category.
Corporations are hiring print and TV journalists to produce marketing content disguised as authentic news. Bloggers are now “digital influencers” peddling their soapboxes to corporate marketing managers.
I frequently get solicitations (ok, junk mail) offering “expertly written content” for this blog. For me, it’s a business proposition that just doesn’t compute.
Most of those articles are completely off-topic, as if my marketing-minded audience will suddenly be interested in a piece about overnight skin rejuvenation.
Often these unsolicited articles are obvious plugs for a product or a company. They’re rarely well written, thoroughly researched, or authored by anyone I follow/respect in the business.
Why on earth would I put content like that on the Brand Insight Blog? How could that approach to content generation possibly be good for my business?
It’s not high quality content unless it’s relevant to my blog’s subject matter. To my audience’s pain points. And to MY brand.
I also get a lot of questions from aspiring bloggers, so here’s a piece of advice…
Think about your brand first, and clicks second.
If you produce content of value — something you and your audience really care about— then the traffic will come eventually.
As Gary V. famously says, you have to give, give, give, give and expect nothing in return. There is no shortcut to success, and a genuine human voice will always play better than some anonymous article you picked up and reposted, along with a hundred others bloggers.
Also, always remember how much saturation there is. On any given subject it’s too much information from too many questionable sources. If you don’t have a unique spin on the subject, it’ll just be in one ear, and out the other.
For instance, try wading through all the online resources about social media marketing…
“Will it help my small business marketing effort? Can I build a brand around it? What’s the best social media marketing strategy? Can I generate leads on Twitter? Where’s it all going? What’s it all mean for small business marketing?”
I don’t know. It’s still evolving.
But I know this: Just because you have a blog and a few thousand friends on Facebook doesn’t make you a social media marketing guru.
There are a lot of young wannabes in that field, but few real experts who understand how the business side of it. Guru status only comes from wisdom, proven results and the perspective you can only get from years of experience.
So if you’re a brand manager, marketing director or business owner trying to figure out the social media thing, beware.
Many of those purported experts or thought leaders are just good salespeople and tech-savvy online self-promoters riding the wave. When you’re scouring the internet for insight, pay close attention to the attributions and read the “about us” section to find out who’s really doing the talking.
Many big brands are embracing the online “conversation” and are getting better at communicating on a one-to-one level. They may not be the earliest adopters, but they’re catching on and beginning to respond to consumer wishes.
If nothing else, they’re now painfully aware when people start spreading negative word-of-mouth.
But corporations don’t control the bulk of the internet conversation.
It’s the average Joe on his soapbox with a big ego and a pay-per-click budget. It’s the stay-at-home baker who wants to brag about her latest batch of cookies. It’s the teenage entrepreneur cashing in on Youtube.
Those little businesses are popping up faster than you can say, “what happened to Myspace?”
And that’s great.
Unfortunately there also are many modern snake oil salesman peddling their wares with content marketing. Despite the advances of social media, (or maybe because of the advances) there’s more phony crap out there than ever before.
The self-help industry. The diet programs. The plastic surgeons. The get-rich-quick guys. And my personal favorite, the golf swing gurus. Every Tin Cup wannabe has an instructional DVD or downloadable E-book available on the web. And they’re all “guaranteed to shave strokes off your game.”
Golf Digest wouldn’t publish any of them on a bet. The quality is no better than a canned corporate spiel. The voice is like a third-rate actor in a 4th rate play reciting lines that no one believes in a manner no one respects.
Try this blog for more golf industry marketing help.
Sometimes I long for the good old days when there were some barrier to entry on the internet. But not really. We’ll all put up with some noise in exchange for the freedom of speech that the internet provides.
And small-business marketing is better for it. If you’re strategic about it, and if you produce stuff that really is high quality content, you can make a name for yourself and your brand.
For more on small-business content marketing, try THIS post..
For affordable help with high-quality content, contact me at BN Branding.
