Quality Content + Customer Value = Gold
Your business content will fail if it doesn’t add value. You need to know what that means.
If you’ve read about the 5 reasons good business content is gold, and you’re convinced, the natural question is how to work the alchemy. How do you turn business content into gold?
(I defined business content in the 5-reasons piece, but here it is again: in a nutshell, it’s any documentation that customers need to better understand, use, and benefit from your products. Who’s a customer? In this context, that’s anyone who should or could benefit from the content you offer.)
Whether you’re a technical writer, a software engineer, a blogger, ghost writer, communications manager, customer-support engineer, or just someone who’s been tapped to produce content for a product, you have one overarching goal: what you produce must add value.
What do we mean by value? The ultimate value of good content is to be of service to your customers. It should:
- Help them successfully accomplish the tasks they have in mind.
- Guide them in solving any problems they encounter.
- Allow them to easily find the information and uses cases they’ll need for #1 and #2.
Content that can satisfy these 3 golden rules, and do so competently and efficiently, is gold. What’s quality content and customer value in 1 word? Useful. Let’s dive a little deeper.
Know Thy Customer (or, Relevance!)
So you have some high-quality content. Does anyone care? They will if it matters to them. What exactly do you need to know about customers who are reading your content? Let’s answer that question with a question: What are your customers trying to do when they read your content?
Research that info, however you can do it: surveying customers directly, analyzing customer feedback, obtaining studies on your customer base, scouring forums where customers are likely to post, paying consultants to figure it out for you, … whatever you can afford. A deeper understanding of customer goals is a secret sauce.
Let’s take software developers as an example, because they love to use good documentation! If you have anything to offer this important segment of the workforce, then they are customers of your product and technical content. In a survey, almost 66% said that they have at least some influence on purchasing, so if you have something to offer them, make it useful.
One more time, how do you make it useful (for them)? By covering the goals/tasks/jobs-to-be-done that customers have in mind, not the tasks that you have in mind for them. (Remember golden rule #1 above?)
By the way, jobs-to-be-done is a framework for formalizing your approach to being relevant. Whether you use a framework like jobs-to-be-done or personas or something else, the point is still the same. What does your customer want to accomplish? (For all you writers, why should your reader read your writings?) Align your content with your customers’ aims, as perfectly as possible.
Quality Content Has Character
Good-quality content has certain characteristics.
- Organized — it’s easy to navigate, its purpose is clear, and the relatedness of the parts can be grasped without much effort. I know where I am, where I’ve been, and where I need to go next.
- Succinct—Brevity & Clarity are 2 muses every writer should meet. Nothing but necessary words. Never any ambiguity. Banish unnecessary duplication (but sometimes it’s necessary to over-communicate certain things).
- Correct—Writing that is accurate, free of errors, and complete. Because succinct doesn’t mean leaving out critical information in the name of Brevity & Clarity (they wouldn’t like that).
Opinions vary on how many of these characteristics exist; some will say 6, others 8, and there’s even a proposal for a whopping 20. They all have interesting things to say, and their lists overlap. The 3 I list have worked for me, but by no means am I saying that they’re unique or sufficient. Just that they’ll take you far.
How do these characteristics help? They build trust because they make your content effective at helping your customers.
And that’s golden rule #2. But of course the work is never done. Once content is whipped into tip-top shape, it must be kept that way. Stay tuned, lifecycle is going to be a future topic here.
Where it’s at: Discoverability
There’s an old saying about a bear doing something in the woods, but no one knows about it. Did it happen? Presumably, your content is more important than bear doings, and your customers need to know about it, and to find it when they need it. But, claims the CEO of a company specializing in digital-content marketing and discovery:
Nine out of ten pieces of content produced have no audience. So by extension, 90% of the resources that the brand puts into the development of content have essentially been wasted.
If people can’t find your content, does it exist? Many of the content-quality-characteristics lists (see above) also point to discoverability as a critical aspect of serving customers (think SEO), including this one titled The 5 Characteristics of Great Content, where discoverability is #4. There seems to be disagreement about the number of characteristics, but everyone agrees that content should be findable.
That’s golden rule #3. But there’s more to it than getting your content to float up in Google rankings. Because customers may already be aware of your content, having good discoverability means that they can find the needles in the haystack. Think effective local search, organization, and navigation. We’ll take a deeper dive into those in a later post.
First, Do No Harm
I really should have put this first, it may be more important than anything else because it’s about subtracting value. This is about avoidable mistakes, mistakes that go undiscovered until it’s too late, and just plain bad judgement.
Errors of omission may frustrate customers and are important to avoid (correct content is complete content), but errors of commission are often more destructive. At worst, these kinds of errors can actually harm people, such as when health content is involved. This can destroy business relationships, derail careers, and generally wreak havoc on reputations.
And reputation damage is real. A Harvard Business Review article titled “Reputation and Its Risks” had this to say.
Because so much market value comes from hard-to-assess intangible assets like brand equity and intellectual capital, organizations are especially vulnerable to anything that damages their reputations. Moreover, companies with strong positive reputations attract better talent and are perceived as providing more value in their products and services, which often allows them to charge a premium. Their customers are more loyal and buy broader ranges of products and services. Since the market believes that such companies will deliver sustained earnings and future growth, they have higher price-earnings multiples and market values and lower costs of capital.
Most companies, however, do an inadequate job of managing their reputations in general and the risks to their reputations in particular. They tend to focus their energies on handling the threats to their reputations that have already surfaced. That is not risk management; it is crisis management — a reactive approach aimed at limiting the damage.
If your content is shoddy, it’s going to cost you some reputation points, whether you’re a multi-billion-dollar business or an individual writer. But if your content is shoddy in a way that causes damage to your customers, it may destroy your reputation. In the age of social media, multiply that big hurt by a lot.
In this post we’ve touched on:
- how to know what’s valuable content
- what characterizes quality
- the importance of making valuable content easy to find
- avoiding “anti-value” mistakes
Hopefully this helps you to better understand and plan your content work. We’ll talk about having effective processes, which are critical to generating and maintaining good content, in future posts.
