The Great, the Good, the Bad and the Ugly of Content
How to Take Your Content from Bad to Good to Great
Finding out that your content is less than (and why) can be a daunting discovery. We as humans aren’t necessarily the most thorough when it comes to critical internal auditing. Read on to figure out how to enhance your content-production process, how to conduct a content audit, and why templates and briefs are important when transforming your content from bad (or ugly) to good — and then great.
The Bad
Much like the character Angel Eyes, bad content can be forceful. It can be intrusive and appalling. Sometimes it can be downright harmful. But bad content doesn’t start like bad content — that’s just the way it ends up. Maybe it’s because of its environment, or maybe it’s because of lack of guidance, but most definitely it’s because of the lack of strategic foresight.
You see, it can be very subjective to talk about whether one piece of content is good, bad or ugly, but the subjectivity becomes obsolete if the content reaches its intended goal. What appears to be a bad piece of content in someone’s eyes could be a great piece of content in someone else’s. That’s the definition of subjectivity. Consider email marketing as an example. Some of us receive tens to hundreds of emails per day from brands. Most of them go directly to spam or are opened but never clicked, but yet the emails keep coming. Why? Because they work. Email marketing continually has some of the highest conversion rates and ROI in digital marketing.
If you want to transform your bad content to good, you have to start somewhere. A good place to start would be to look at your content-production process. Are there barriers in place that limit the effectiveness of your content? A standard content-production process usually involves the following steps:
- Research
- Write
- Review
- Revise
- Approve
- Share/upload to CMS
- Review in “live” mode
- Publish
- Assess
- Maintain
- Repurpose into different types of content
- Publish
- Maintain
- Repeat
Are there any instances of the process that can be improved? When we’re dealing with bad content, the process that is probably lacking is the research phase. Do you have clear directions for the writer? Is there a creative brief that allows the writer to conduct effective research? Is there a consistent writing template that can be repurposed?
If you’re still having trouble with improving your content, the next step would be to conduct an internal content audit. Analyzing your owned content will help you make strategic choices and pivots that are driven by metrics. The audit allows for the unbiased look at your current content, which helps you deduce the quality of your content. Audits can be incredibly thorough and detailed. The important part is to define your preferred outcomes and merge those with your processes to make sure that you can adjust and implement your content accordingly.
The Ugly
Tuco was loud, boisterous, erratic and completely inconsistent. He lived only for himself and his whims. He turned whichever way the wind blew and faced only the direction of his nose. Frankly, Tuco wasn’t ugly on the outside, but his actions were — for the most part.
Ugly content isn’t ugly by choice. It’s ugly because of ignorance and egotism.
Ugly content is the same. It’s ugly not only because it looks bad but also because it’s self-serving. It is created with the sole objective of furthering oneself. It’s not about creating community or helping someone. It’s solely about the needs and wants of the brand. It’s ugly because it doesn’t know better.
The reason we create ugly content can be attributed to a lot of different factors. Everything from having a limited technical understanding of subject matter, resources, tools and channels used to the internal climate and knowledge base of the content producers.
In many cases, ugly content can be attributed to limited understanding of the channel used and the needs and wants of the audience. As content producers we have to be empathetic to user needs and their experience. The fact of the matter is that content marketing is still marketing, and marketing is an interruption — an interruption in the social and/or digital stream and feed of potential customers and fans.
Ugly content can be attributed to limited understanding of the channel used and the needs and wants of the audience.
Transforming ugly content is tough, but not impossible. A first step to take would be to audit the workflow and governance. Is the workflow conducive to creating better content? Are the right people touching the right instances of the content-production process? Are the content producers capable of changing the content’s current objectives and goals?
Once we’ve figured out the reason for the “me” think instead of “we” think, we can move forward and transform our ugly content into good content.
The Good
So how do we take bad or ugly content and make it good? Well, we make strategic decisions. We establish strategic processes. We implement a holistic content-strategy approach that allows for optimization of substance, structure, workflow and governance.
Blondie was a man of few words, but he always seemed to be consistent. People also seemed to listen when he talked, much like they do with good, engaging content. Good content can be unassuming and relatively nonintrusive. It just is. It doesn’t insist upon itself, but it always leaves us feeling slightly better. It’s dependable, but not always remarkable.
In order to transform good content into great content, one has to find out what content resonates with the audience. And then do more of that. It is easy to say, but knowing and honing one’s brand voice can be a difficult process, especially when one has several different content contributors.
Finding out who you are, where you’re going, and what your values are will focus the brand messaging and ultimately translate into more focused content. Once that is done, revise your style guide, update your templates with voice and tone directions, and examples, and you should be on a path from good to great in no time.
The Great
This is where my movie analogies run out. I have to deviate from the character exposition and come up with something else to further my discussion. Oh wait, I forgot the biggest player from the movie: Ennio Morricone, spaghetti western composer and maestro extraordinaire.
Ennio will go down as a visionary. An icon. Not only is he known for scoring an entire genre of movies, but his work has also managed to transcend popular culture. His work is remarkable. It’s distinctive. It’s recognizable. Don’t believe me? Here’s my proof:
You tell me you didn’t feel that. You tell me you didn’t start whistling. You tell me you didn’t go, “Wa-wah-waaaah!” I think you did.
Great content carries the same characteristics. It makes us think. It makes us not only “like” it but also share it with our trusted online communities. It makes us dream. It fuels our own creative juices and makes us long for more.
Great content ranks at the top of search-engine-results pages and at the top of your mind.
If your content is great, continue doing what you’re doing. Continue to follow your content strategy and keep enriching our lives. When your content is great, just make sure everyone will see it. Make sure you’re using the right channels for distribution. Make sure you’re giving people access to it on the platform of their choosing. Make sure you have a plan for aggregation, creation, curation and distribution of content — a plan like our thorough Content Cartography program.
After all, it would be a shame for people not to see your content. We know you’ve worked hard on it.
We hope this wasn’t interruptive. We hope it was helpful or somewhat remarkable. If you did find this to be helpful, would you mind leaving a comment? Or maybe sharing this blog on your favorite channel? Either way, thank you for reading.
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