3 Evergreen Tips For Creating High Quality Content

Creating high quality content is no mean feat, with most marketers struggling to churn out high quality content consistently and within an acceptable time and budget constraints. High quality may well be a subjective term, but for our reference, we define it as something of value to a specific target audience – both contextually and logically.

Here are three considerations that companies can use to churn out high quality content at scale and with consistency.

1-Content should be logically relevant

Content is logically relevant when it directly or indirectly satisfies one or more specific needs of the target audience. Consider a B2B services company in data/technology industry with a portfolio of multiple offerings such as metrics development, BI technology strategy and bespoke data integration solutions. Each offering has a distinct target audience with specific information needs. For example, the business audience for metrics development offering is likely looking for innovative measures to track performance, different types of metrics such as activity-based, efficiency/business outcome, best practices in increasing measurement rigour and so on. Senior Technology Managers interested in data integration solutions would want to know about capabilities to integrate specific tools, ways to handle large sets, real-time processing etc. Even sticking to the metrics development offering, the engagement levers for C-level Execs would involve knowing more about high-level business outcomes and is likely be significantly different from the ones for Department Heads and Mid-level Managers who are most likely interested in more operational and department level details.

The more significant point here is that to keep content logically relevant; it has to be themed around the needs for each persona/offering combination. Begin by developing a simple matrix of all the offerings and personas and then identify high-level content themes for each cell.

2-Content should be contextually meaningful

Content appeal depends upon context. The information needs for the same persona/offering combination would be different depending upon the stage in the purchase journey. Continuing with the B2B example above, outlining high-level approaches to identifying metrics would make sense for C-Level execs looking for general information about scorecards, but examples of actual metrics developed for other clients in the same vertical would make far more of an impact with prospects that are further down the purchase funnel. New technologies in account-based marketing, for example, can provide highly granular purchase intent data that can be leveraged for creating contextually relevant content.

To overlay context while creating content, start by clearly mapping the buyer cycle stages for your specific offerings. Intent data available from third-party sources can be leveraged if possible, but this is not always necessary to create quality content.

3-Content should be of tangible value

All content should have a specific purpose and value for the reader. For example, use cases help identify the need and application of a product or service offering. Best practices guides help outline the implementation of best practices and thereby project the provider’s domain authority and subject matter expertise. Industry trends help create demand for new products and services by providing prospects with a glimpse into the future. Many such content themes exist in the B2B industry and, to the extent possible, companies must use one of them to develop content with clear takeaways.

However, getting content to be logically relevant, contextually meaningful and even purposeful does not in any way lend it to be of actual value to the reader if it ends up being an incoherent rant. Structuring the content with clear and explicit takeaways helps bind together the logical need, the contextual relevance and the overall content purpose into a final product that drives engagement. That is high quality content.

Summary

There is a lot of excitement in our industry around using curated content for developing ideas for high quality content. Taking in random suggestions from curated content feeds and applying the concepts above can provide companies with compelling ideas for creating high quality content at scale and with consistency. The same concepts can also be used in manual brainstorming sessions around content planning and should be deployed consistently in any serious content marketing initiative.