With every company being in the content business, there is a lot of money and effort being spent making content. But just making any content isn’t good enough. To drive results, we have to make good content. As we’ve been working with clients, we’re often asked what makes good content. So here is what we believe separates “good content” from “content.”
Good content is…
Discoverable
Good content is designed to be found.
The first quality of good content is that it’s discoverable. After all, if no one ever sees the content we create then nothing else really matters. Discoverable means different things in different channels and it’s important to have a plan for getting your content discovered.
Makes people stop
Good content stops the scroll.
Getting into someone’s feed or onto the SERP is the first challenge, but if people scroll right past, again, it doesn’t matter how great your content is. What are you doing with your content to stop the scroll? What are you doing to get people to click your listing on the SERP? How are you hooking the users and getting that first bit of engagement from them with your content?
Holds Attention
Good content leads people deeper.
We’ve gotten found, and we’ve gotten people to stop. The next step is equally as hard as the first two. How do we hold attention long enough for them to get the message? How will we guide people into the content and encourage them to read more, watch longer, or listen to the end? We’re not expecting 100%, but typically 3-5 seconds isn’t enough. What’s the plan for getting people past the hook into the message?
Branded
Good content helps our audience know what our brand is all about.
This fourth quality is what separates click-bait from great content. Click-bait passes the first two tests and might hold attention for a while depending on how it’s written. But if the message is generic or something that is irrelevant to our brand’s positioning in market, all that work getting discovered and hooking people and holding attention was for naught. Even if the content was valuable in an academic sense, or interesting in a human interest way, if it doesn’t build brand it’s not worth our time as content marketers. And if you’ve gotten this far, I assume you are a content marketer, not just a content publisher.
