4 Differences Between Strong and Weak Content Marketing

Many small businesses are pushing out a lot of content for marketing, but if your strategy is based on weak content marketing — it’s not doing any good.

Content drives your business. Well, good content can anyway.

A good content marketing strategy is more important than selling your brand. In fact, a study by Pardot showed that customers had 3x more trust in a business if its content has good quality and is informative. The same study also highlighted that good content is more important than the pitch that the brand’s employees could make. This is further reiterated in a study conducted by Salesforce. It stated that 82% of the surveyed customers relied on the content for their perception and invested credibility of the brand.

Weak content on the other hand, well at best it won’t hurt your brand.

Content marketing is not a strategy silo.

Content can’t exist by itself in an organization, whipping out pieces that seem relevant to the industry trends. The cooperation of the sales team and the content team is critical to address the business-specific needs. In that context, it important to identify the differences between strong and weak content marketing strategies

We’re going to look at 4 key identifiers that differentiate strong and weak content marketing strategies to help set yours on the right track.

1. Quality Content Over Quantity

This is one of the oldest rules about content creation. Every blog that you’ll read on tips for seo content writing will include this element. Despite all that, people tend to forget applying this rule in spirit. While they do so in letter, people must understand the essence of this rule.

Generating organic traffic is not about the number of blogs on your website. Some people assume that having many blogs will lead to footfalls on all of them, thus increasing the overall traffic. The goal here is not to generate one-time traffic. It is to develop content that attracts visitors back to the website. An analysis of the social media shares of a blog showed that more than 90% of the readers would share any content if they believe it’ll benefit the people in their circle.

Social media algorithms recognize what the users prefer and show them more of it. No one wants to share content that they don’t like but have to see for a long time in the future. Creating high-quality content resonates with the readers and helps your brand reach your target audience and circles outside them as well.

2. Jargon and Language:

The attention span of readers online is very low.

Ever since Google started offering sneak-peeks of the search query, users don’t find it necessary to open a link. So, not only should google find your content to rank there in the sneak-peek, but your readers should find what they read if they skim. The first sentence of your blog will decide whether they’ll stay for the rest of the blog or not.

Because of the low-attention span, your sentences need to be as crisp as possible. Most people write long paragraphs because they want to cover an entire idea in one paragraph. That’s not required. The idea is to make them read the entire article. It is okay if your idea is covered in more than one paragraph. Just remember that topic sentences make more impact than H2s can.

Writing a 5-line paragraph is good. But you know what’s better?

Writing a 3-line paragraph. That paragraph describes a part of the idea that you want them to understand. Open a new paragraph to elaborate on that idea. That’s perfectly alright. Gone are the days where your article is considered perfect if the paragraphs are of similar lengths.

Several bloggers even let solo sentences fly.

But you know what’s more important than the technicalities of paragraph construction?

The language you use. Using semantics in this line is fancier. But does it attract readers as well as saying “the words you use have a greater impact”? Always remember that you’re not writing a report for your overworked and under-paid middle school teacher. You’re writing for an audience that does not have a dearth of choices for the same content. Things like e-mail and Internet were correct a decade ago. Even AP and The New York Times grudgingly agreed that email and internet were better. 

What’s the difference? It’s the unnecessary hyphenation and capitalization. Make your sentences as crisp as possible.

3. Importance of Research

Content writing is either well-researched and thorough or woefully generic. Before diving into this classification, we need to address how the blog is constructed. A study identified that the average bounce rate for blogs that have grammatical errors is 85% more than those that are crafted properly. This, on the other hand, does not include dangling modifiers.

The reason?

Most readers skim through. But this isn’t the article to elaborate on that.

Generic (weak) content doesn’t have value. Traffic for any blog is also driven when websites link to the blogs. Generic content is not considered an authority statement. This makes it useless for readers looking for verified information.

But, what’s worse than a woefully generic content? Content with inaccuracies. This article could be filled with the number of ‘nopes’ for inaccuracies in any piece of content. Research is at the core of any good blogpost, and inaccurate research or factual errors tarnish a website’s reputation, negatively impacting its products or services. Verifying facts does not take a long time. Adding outbound links to credible sources improves your credibility as well. If you’re worried about the diversion of traffic, just click ‘open in new tab.’

As for keyword research, you should ideally invest in tools like SEMRush or AH ref. But if you’re a new blogger, there’s an easy way to do some keyword research. Jut google the topic ideas. See what pops up. Read the articles on the first page. Read the sneak-peek that popped up and identify what lines are displayed in that sneak peek. This will give you an understanding of what, and how, you need to include in your content.

Google also offers a small box that shows ‘people also asked’ in the middle of the page. It contains a few questions. The more items you click, the more similar links open. That’s a great way to understand user intentions. After that, scroll to the bottom. You’ll find ‘people also searched for.’ That’s a goldmine of keywords.

Bottom line, always do your research well.

4. Continuous Improvement:

Your old blog posts are not there to be archived.

If you’re generating traffic and revenue, that’s great. But as trends change, user intentions change. Always revisit old blogs to see if you can make minor tweaks to the existing posts to improve the SEO. One way is to google your own article and see your ranking. Compare it with those people who are ranking higher and ask why they are doing so.

Apart from that, don’t be afraid to explore new ideas. The best content marketers explore avenues beyond their comfort zones for a campaign. For this to be successful, you need to identify when a medium is not working anymore. Experimenting with the vast array of brand-improvement tools available online is always better than sticking to one tool.