What is Good Content? And How Do you Create It?
You might hear the phrase "content is king." And this is true to a degree. But don't mistake this for needing to produce large amounts of bad content. Because it's also true that bad content is toxic, Junk, Garbage, [insert your preferred adjective here].
So I urge you to focus more on producing great content vs a lot of bad content!
But to do that you need to know what good content is. So what is good content, and what are the factors that make it “good” content, great content, fabulous, amazing content, etc.?
But first let's define what content actually is.
What is content?
Our broad definition of content is any creative work that is created for the purposes of accomplishing a marketing goal.
Such goals can include promoting your business, raising awareness, generating leads, educating, inspiring or engaging an audience, etc.
It could be marketing your business or your personal brand. Even if you post something on social media you are still "marketing" yourself, whether you intend to or not.
The types of content are endless. Some examples of popular types of content include:
What is content marketing?
Now you know what content is. But how is this "content" used. Content is, of course, a big part of content marketing.
We define content marketing as the following:
the strategic and intentional act of creating and distributing high-quality content through the appropriate channels and in the appropriate frequency to a defined target audience to achieve your marketing goals.
You can tell from my definition that content marketing is not creating random content for anyone, and randomly distributing it to everyone, everywhere.
It is the opposite. Content marketing is a very strategic process.
Content itself needs to be carefully and purposefully created to cover specific topics for a specific target audience which consumes it on specific channels.
What is good content?
It’s hard to define what good content is. Whether something is good or bad is subjective. It depends on an individual’s opinion.
But good content can be defined broadly. It has certain characteristics and accomplishes a certain goal.
So in our mind, good, great, amazing (add your favorite adjective here) content can be defined as:
high-quality?content that is?relevant?to the target audience and?provides them with (a lot of) value.
There are critical factors that should be met when creating good content.
What Are the Critical Factors That Produce Good Content
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Saying something is high quality and produces value doesn’t give you enough information. We know this. So let’s break our definition down further below by giving four actual factors that will determine whether your content is good or not.
Just so you are aware these factors are true for basically any type of content. So whether you are writing a blog post, creating an infographic or making a video these should hold true. Let’s jump into them.
1. Relevant content: it covers a topic that your target audience actually cares about
This one is super important. Our definition of good content says the content has to be “relevant to the target audience” and “provides them with value.”
In turn, your audience needs to care about the topic your content covers. If they don’t care about the content then it is not relevant. And if they don’t care about the content it will not provide them with any value.
This is where keyword research comes into play. You need to do high-quality keyword research to understand what search terms your target audience is searching for and what questions they are asking. You also have to understand the intent of the keywords and queries to ensure you are targeting the right terms.
If you need help with?keyword research services?let us know. Or check out our articles on?how to do keyword research?yourself.
2. Quality content: your content is high quality
Here’s the thing, you can be a keyword research master, but if your content isn’t high quality then it will not be successful.
For instance, if you are writing a blog post make sure your grammar and spelling are top-notch and you get to the point instead of rambling on.
If you are creating graphics, such as social post images, infographics and more then make sure to use a paid or even a free graphic creation tool. These are made to help you produce high-quality and polished graphics. Paid graphic design tools such as those from Affinity or Adobe are great, but you can also find free tools such as Canva.
A note on video content. In terms of video when I say high quality I don’t mean expensive, professionally produced, and polished productions. There is a misconception that video always needs to be produced by a professional film crew using expensive cameras. This is true for certain companies creating certain types of videos for certain purposes. However, great, high-quality content can also be produced using the camera on your mobile phone or computer. This is especially true for smaller companies and social media video content.
If in doubt do not shy away from hiring someone to help you produce high-quality content. It may save you time and money vs. spending hours to produce sub-par results. A lot of firms, such as ours, offer straight-forward?content marketing packages?with set prices.
3. Effective content: the content answers your audience’s questions or speaks directly to their interests
This is a pretty straight-forward one. Work hard to directly answer your target audience’s questions and be laser-focused on their interests.
Your target audience has questions they are searching for answers to and topics that they are interested in.
Say for example a prospect sees your content. It has a title or image (or something) that speaks exactly to a question they have or a topic they are interested in. If you are lucky enough they will click on, view, and consume the content.
But what happens if your content is off-topic, not to the point or even clickbait? When this is the case the prospect will stop consuming it and potentially get frustrated because it doesn’t provide them with any value. Content that does not touch on the topic of interest specifically (or enough) is not high quality. It also provides zero value to them because it doesn’t answer their question and is seen as a waste of time.
So make sure your content speaks directly to your target audience, answers their questions and stays on topic.
4. Valuable content: your content provides a high level of value to your target audience
High-quality content that covers a topic your audience cares about and actually provides relevant, useful information is content that adds a lot of value. In addition to this your content may offer your audience:
What are your thoughts? In your mind what is good content? What are some other components that help produce great content? Let us know your thoughts in the comments!
Do you need help producing content?
I am obsessed about good content. Because of this I strive to produce content that gets results, plain and simple. Find out more about my agency's?content marketing services?or fill out our form to?schedule a time to chat.