One of my favourite presentations of all time is this one: Crap. The Content Marketing Deluge
It’s my favourite because it succinctly and eloquently gives business owners a violent collar-shaking. Every business is scrambling to be a publisher, every marketing firm is lauding the benefits of a content-first focus. And yet, the content that is being produced is, well… crappy.
There are a lot of reasons for this, but in brief, here’s what I think are the 3 biggest:
- There’s a serious lack of skilled content creators. (Which is why I’m not exactly worried about my job security.)
- Statistical tunnel vision is encouraging terrible behaviour. For example, people read stats from Hubspot that say websites with over 30 landing pages convert X% more than those with less than 10, or that companies who blog 50 times a month bring in X% more leads and X% more traffic. They blindly take these stats at face value and run off to produce content – as much content as humanly possible. But at 50 posts a month, how do you scale quality? How do you make sure that content is actually WORTH anything to anybody?
- Most businesses don’t actually value content. Oh, sure – it’s their whole world, the crux their strategy hangs on – but most will look to spend as little as possible and produce as much as possible. That model isn’t exactly conducive to quality, but it’s the foundation that websites like oDesk are built on.
I think that “Content Deluge” presentation throws the spotlight on a bull that is charging full-speed at the online marketing world: Consumers are going to raise their barriers again when they get sick of consuming sub-standard drivel produced by over-eager businesses.
If you want to win the content game, invest in the remarkable.
Don’t just be an efficient content producer – be an excellent one.
