Quality Control: Bad Content Does You No Favours

I hear it all the time: “people are hungry for content.” As the owner of a content company, I’ve probably said it more than once, myself. But let me clarify: people are hungry for good, sophisticated content. 

Calling the volume of content released on a daily basis a “glut” would be an understatement. It’s a deluge, an avalanche. A new blog post is released every 0.5 seconds – to say nothing of videos, podcasts, Tweets, Instagrams, TikToks... And most of it is garbage. There’s a mix of human and machine work at play to make sure that the good stuff gets seen. Popular content is form-agnostic: there are viral short stories and viral chickpea curry recipes in addition to viral videos and Tweets. People still want what they consume to have meaning, and meaning still means that they connect with it, and can discuss and dissect that connection with other people.

I’m not saying that your content needs to go viral to be successful – in fact, I think viral content is just as likely to be junk! But I am saying that when you make content, you should aim to make content so good that someone who sees it needs to share it with someone else. It’s in those sharing moments that you get real return on your content marketing investment. And it doesn’t hurt to employ some of the amplification strategies that makes content viral to get your good content out there.

So, if your instinct when creating content is to save money – and, with a recession looming, that instinct is totally valid – don’t do it by shortchanging the content itself. Shortchanging means anything from using tired stock imagery to shaky, DIY video work. Not only does this do nothing for the piece, it damages your brand by showing how little you’re willing to invest in yourself and your audience.

Instead, work towards building quality, evergreen content that really means something to your audience, and you’ll reap the rewards in the conversations you start.