Quality Content vs. Quantity: The Gloves Are Off

Caught in the debate between more vs. better content, marketers frequently conclude that more content is the winner.

Inbound marketers, for one, emphasize how you need to post new content across various channels every hour so that you get enough visitors, leading to higher conversion rates and SEO rankings.

The question remains, why is this focus on content marketing getting so intense?

1. Because content consumption has increased.

In a recent report, Aberdeen states that almost 58% of marketers are using at least 9 channels (emails, web, social media, direct email, in-store/ in-person, online customer communities, events and online videos) to interact with customers. In the last few years, the content sharing platform has expanded beyond imagination and the increase in the number of social media sites has increased the available per capita content.

2. Where there’s content, there’s competition.   

As the potential of content dawned on marketers, all of them descended on the internet with their own creation-content army.  With very brand acting as a publisher, consumers face an information overload. With a shelf life of a few hours to barely a few minutes for each post, you can imagine the number of posts your prospects view in a busy day.      

3. Somebody told marketers that “variety of content = better search rankings”

This belief has led to the creation of a lot of videos, GIFs, infographics and slide decks on the internet. Though it is true that popular content catches your consumer’s attention, you do have to be mindful of the kind of content you provide them.

Do you find a lot of visitors commenting on your posts, sharing or re-tweeting your posts, yet see few conversions in return?  What use is a lot of content when none of it ends in helping to close a sale? The value of your content marketing is questionable if  your content has a lot of visitors but no conversions. A reason for this could be that your content isn’t up to the quality that your consumers expect from you. Perhaps it is of good quality but lacks the necessary relevance.

How quality content works

Consumers and prospects  use the internet to gain knowledge or to get information. If your content doesn’t do either of this, something’s wrong.

The best and most successful marketers will tell you that quality content is your ONLY source for broad readership.  Even Google stresses the importance of quality content in its SEO Starter Guide.

A few key points from the Guide:

• Content should be easy-to-read. Avoid using jargon and keywords solely for search rankings. Use them only when it makes sense within the context of your document.
• Create fresh content regularly. Creating new, but still useful content ensures a steady stream of visitors to your site
• Design content keeping your readers in mind, not search engines. This piece of advice, from the Search Giant’s mouth, is enough to stress how important “utility” is when creating a new post or content.

These are just a few points that re-emphasize Google’s focus on improving the kind of content that exists on the internet. The Hummingbird algorithm, for instance, was another example of Google’s constant struggle to give the searchers the most “relevant” search results.

Repurposing content: Get the most from quality content

Repurposing content means to adapt a piece of content for use across different channels. You don’t want to repurpose every piece of content, just the most popular and relevant ones.

To do this effectively, you should

1. Use a comprehensive asset tracking tool
2. Track and measure how your content or digital assets are received by your audience
3. Repurpose the most popular ones

Let’s say you have a list post on How to curate blog posts on your blog. You can repurpose the points in this post to make a slide deck by using interesting images or graphics. Further, you can repurpose this slide deck and convert it into an infographic.

You don’t have to post every hour to get yourself noticed. Twice weekly or one post per day should suffice.

However, being consistent is key. You can use sales enablement software to manage your social media or blog posts on a regular basis.  

The bottom line: “Content is anything that adds value to the reader’s life”- Avinash Kaushik