In all the articles we’ve read and written on content marketing, write good content may be both the worst and most important advice we’ve seen.
The fact that it appears in most “five content marketing secrets” articles makes it sound like just one more item on the content marketing checklist. Like it’s optional. As if you’d see it and think, “I’m sure glad you reminded me. I was going to try for mediocre today.”
Excellence isn’t optional. It’s the foundation for your entire marketing campaign. It’s your raison d’être. No one ever told a sports team to try to win. No one ever told the sales team “you should try, you know, selling things.” It’s why you do what you do.
At the same time, we’re entering a time in the content marketing industry that being good is a requirement, and too many people are just putting out mediocre, “good enough” content.
As Scott Stratten, author of UnMarketing says, “Nobody shares mediocre.” Since content marketing is about creating valuable, educational content that people want to share, your content has to be outstanding.
Get Better or Get Lost
We’ve been thinking about Mark Schaefer’s recent prediction of content shock. According to Schaefer, people consume 10 hours of content per day — online and offline. That number will hold over the next several years, but the Internet will grow 600 percent by the year 2020.
In other words, there will be six more Internets of information competing for our attention, but we won’t increase the amount of time we devote to it. So if we as marketers can’t get better, we’ll get lost in the landslide of content that’s threatening our potential customers.
If you don’t want to get lost, you need to create content that’s amazing. Rather than churning out content that doesn’t excite, impress, educate and add value, it needs to be the best it can be. It needs to be unexpected, new, unusual, ground-breaking and fantastic. That means original research, stellar writing and new platforms and models of content.
If your competition blogs, do podcasts. If they do podcasts, hold webinars. Do something they’re not, and be great at it, so when they catch up, they’re just copycats. (Of course, that’s just an example. Understanding the type of content your audience wants to consume is crucial.)
We may complain about the write good content “secret,” but that philosophy should be the underlying purpose of everything you do. If you don’t practice this, and give your content marketing the best people, time, energy and resources, it’s going to get lost, buried under everything else vying for your prospects’ attention. Make it the best it can be, share it to a network that values what you do, and get it in front of the people who need to hear it the most.
That’s how you’re going to beat the Content Shock, while everyone else is getting buried.
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