Content is perhaps one of the most misunderstood features of a marketing strategy—primarily because it is one of the most heavily “check boxed” line items in a marketing operation. By this, I mean that while businesses regularly and successfully create content, much of the reasons why it fails to perform has to do with content being treated as an item of low importance. For any impassioned marketers that feel disheartened at the latter statement, understand that it wholly makes sense: Content, like SEO, is a black box into which many things are placed, with very little understanding of when, or how, it will produce a measurable return. As such, it is easy to misunderstand the role of content, as well as how it can be effectively deployed in a business operation.
In my almost ten years spent as a marketer, however, I have noticed that the greatest misunderstanding of content is what it even is, to begin with. I think that this sentiment is best illustrated by personal experience: A while back, one of my clients hired someone to oversee the marketing and branding operations for the business. After a couple of weeks of debriefing and on-ramping, I and this person ended up butting heads in a meeting because I wanted to move forward with developing the company’s blog content, and they did not.
“Well, how many visitors does it have?” The manager asked.
“Less than a thousand per month,” I responded.
“And how large is our email mailing list?” The manager inquired.
“Around 2000-2200 subscribers,” I said.
“Well working on the blog doesn’t seem like a good use of our time, I’d much rather prefer it if you worked on a newsletter.”
Never mind the fact that the blog had just been worked on for two months or even that the literal-fucking-point of content marketing is channel growth: If you cannot clearly distinguish what content is, and what it is not, you have a much bigger problem on your hands than trying to suss out which promotional channel yields the biggest return on investment.
I think it is easy to come to the same conclusions that many others do: content is everywhere and comprises all forms of visual, auditory, and written works. Furthermore, for as much as content can be anything, it can exist anywhere: whether this is on a website, a video documentary, an album recording, or a magazine.
Perhaps this vision of content is too egalitarian, however. After all, if everything was content, then that would also include mediums that the average consumer despises, such as advertisements, commercials, and paid articles. Additionally, it would include things such as newsletters that are—on most days—a hop, skip, and a jump away from being spam. If content, according to our understandings, is something that can include both paid and unpaid channels, then which type of content are we supposed to prioritize? Furthermore, what is a budget for creating content supposed to look like?
I think the problem that I have with the aforementioned conclusions surrounding content is this: while it works from the perspective of being a consumer of content, it does not work from the perspective of being a producer of it. If content can be anything and exist anywhere, then how can you wield it to a clear and precise end? I’m not saying that content is always capable of producing immediate, or even completely measurable, results—but what I am saying is that if you have content creation on your agenda, it is difficult to know what kind of content to make if your definition of it includes things that may very well not even be content, to begin with.
Despite the things that the consumer may consider to be content, it is imperative to outline a working definition of it that is not based around esoteric concepts that lack a shred of palpability. Instead, we can establish a clearer understanding of what content is versus what content isn’t by identifying the characteristics that govern the creation of it.
When we consider why brands want to create content, it is because they are hungry for a level of engagement that advertising does not intrinsically provide. While brand engagement was an elusive metric some 15 years ago, today, the clearest and easiest way of inspiring consumer engagement is by creating value for consumers that exists beyond the bounds of the product that is being sold. Bloggers, Instagrammers, and YouTubers do it every day. How is value created? By sticking to the “big three” characteristics of desirable content: entertainment value, informational value, or educational value.
Additionally, brands want to create content because it is permanent—money spent on a deliverable two years ago can still deliver value if the content within it is still relevant. This is a distinct advantage that content creation has over traditional advertising: Ads have run lengths, airing slots, and windows of viewership before they are taken down altogether and replaced. Content, inversely, lasts forever.
Though I could surely go on about the differences between content and advertising—as well as why I think content is better—I think you are beginning to see a pattern here: When it comes to reconciling brand goals with a content marketing initiative, quality content that has staying power is governed by specific characteristics.
Characteristics of Content
Permanence—Content is permanent. Short of a hosting shutdown—or the apocalypse taking place—content is primarily characterized by its staying power: An article from 1999 can be read in 2015, a video from 2015 can be pulled up in 2020, a podcast from 2017 can be accessed in 2025. Inversely, ads do not generate brand attention after a planned period of time. Nobody in 2020 is trawling their email inbox for a newsletter written in 2014.
Searchability—Searchability matters because it speaks directly to your brand’s capacity to be discovered. It is more than just discoverability, however: searchability suggests that your brand has utility beyond the products that it sells. Brands that are highly searchable tend to answer questions and solve problems on behalf of prospective users and customers. As a result, searchability is a characteristic of content that speaks not only to how content—and your brand—is discovered, but also its overall utility to the general public.
Informational/Educational/Entertainment Value—I think that the most valuable content comes in three categories:
Depth—In an SEO Journal article titled “How to stop wasting money on content marketing,” the article’s author, Victor Ijidola, makes an interesting observation about content creation. He says that “Every organization has made it a point to ‘educate’ their audience on a daily basis. They’re on LinkedIn, Facebook, YouTube, in the blogs, emails SMS…creating [an enormous amount] of content. Unfortunately, the supply of content they (and we all) now produce is far more than what most people can take in.”
I think that this is a fair assessment—that is, if you are only looking at content from a birds-eye view perspective. Yes, there is a saturation of content within the marketplace, and it is currently coming from everywhere. The other side of it, however, is that most corporate content out there is a complete waste of the user’s time. Sometimes, articles are self-aggrandizing fluff pieces that simply retread the organization’s recent movements. Other times, pieces that masquerade as educational content lack the level of focus, detail, or nuance to be truly educational to the consumer. Depth is the degree to which your content approaches its subject matter. Ultimately, you can’t be upset that people aren’t interacting with your work if it isn’t actually fucking saying anything.
Citability—Finally, there is citabililty, which speaks to content’s ability to be linked and referenced by other content creators. When we look at how information works, when information has been shared or has influenced the work of another, that information is cited—at least, most of the time. In the digital space, informal citations work by linking words and sentences to the information, articles, and videos that they correspond to. We see this so much in the modern content creation space that we do not think about it. But its importance portends to being an actual characteristic of content. You cannot link to a newsletter in someone’s email inbox. All the same, you cannot link to an ad placement. While linkability is basic, it is a foundational, essential function that makes content demonstrably what it is.
Organic Content
All of the aforementioned characteristics are typically observed in the creation of effective organic content, and by extension, a successful organic marketing campaign. As far as what organic content is, it generally includes the images, articles, videos, and podcasts that comprise your website’s blog posts and informational pages. This is described as such because organic content is life-cycle intensive: The efficacy and abundance of quality content compounds upon itself over the life-cycle of a website, the longer a website’s life cycle. Because the effectiveness of content tends to stem from its overall alignment with search engine queries over time, organic content leverages a target group’s query interest to increase brand awareness.
People hate paid articles and advertisements because they ask much of the consumer, while actually offering little for the consumer past the product itself. Compounding this with the fact that people see ads all the time, we live in an age where marketers have to figure out how to reach a large contingent of promotions-resilient customers. Good content is able to do this effectively, as brands and customers exist mutualistically with one another: brand awareness is not solely predicated on the basis of the product—but also how the brand itself enriches people’s lives. The brand proves its capacity to do this by releasing quality content and meeting the regular demand for information.
Promotions
When you don’t have organic content or are paying to position your content, what you have are promotions. Promotions can include advertisements, commercials, newsletters, and paid articles. Usually, promotions are product-intensive, intrusive, and identified by “salesy” verbiage that is absolute-fucking-cancer for building trust and authenticity. Thus, the line that separates organic content from promotions is this: organic content informs, educates, or entertains, while promotions pitch. If I am being completely frank, I do not believe that promotions should ever be weighed as value-transmitting content—or really content at all. At its essence, content will always aspire to give the user value, while promotions are a high-folluted way of asking for it. This is not to say that promotions are wholly ineffectual. Instead, it is to ask a question: based on this understanding of content, is your business giving value? asking for it? or not saying anything at all? I cannot answer that question for you—at least, I can’t without seeing your business. But you know if your current promotional strategy is ads-intensive or content-intensive—so you can answer that question for yourself.
Conclusion
Here’s the reality: content is not a black box of deliverables that your marketing team produces on your sales team’s behalf. It is a thoughtfully-crafted, and clearly delineated product that is characterized by distinct specifications. If there is anything that the characteristics of content should tell you, it is that the creation of it is more than just a marketing technique, or a process: it is a disposition. Before any brand can reap the rewards of engagement, they must be ideologically predisposed to making their audience’s lives better—not just selling shit. That can be a hard line to push to upper management or any garden variety of executive that stakes his or her living on doing precisely just that. To this, I would say that if selling is your prerogative, then run ads and bask in their expensive to run, poorly-worded glory. Nobody is twisting your arm and telling you to create content—that is, except for the ads campaigns and paid articles that your customers have grown accustomed to ignoring.
I’m not saying that being pre-disposed to creating value for your audience is an easy process: for many, it likely involves not just philosophical, but procedural and in some cases structural changes. Creating engaging content—whether for business, pleasure or as a hobby—also means valuing the process that accompanies creating engaging content. This doesn’t just go for you, but also your clients and your boss. If content is only just a line item, a checkbox, or a bullet point in your greater promotional mix—something buzzy to tell your boss or your board members as proof that your skills are current—just stop. It’s better to not waste any time that your customers cannot get back.
No Comments