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To Post or Not to Post: Here's What Kills Content Quality

The need to push content can feel urgent, and in that rush to publish, quality control can take a hit. It’s important for marketers to get content out there, but taking a quantity-over-quality approach results in filler content that rarely engages consumers.

Settle in — there’s hard work behind creating quality content.

Standards are critical, telling consumers what’s reliable and what they can expect, especially when it comes to quality levels. Marketing materials held to high standards of quality resonate with consumers and ultimately drive purchasing decisions. But if the materials are low-quality — putting down a consumer’s intelligence or making the person feel deceived — they deliver a message that turns viewers away. It helps to know exactly what damages content quality.
Companies often focus on volume in marketing, and that can cause the mistaken impression that more content equals more views, which equal more money. But that misses an important point: marketers want to get views, but they also want to retain the viewers rather than having consumers click away from a site. If content isn’t resonating or causing emotional engagement in readers, marketers can expect to see a dramatic drop-off in engagement after the first click.

Thinking too hard about whether or not the content is effective? Skip it.

The bottom line is, to get and keep viewers engaged, marketers have to produce quality content. To start, if they have any doubts or questions about whether or not a specific post is worth publishing, they simply shouldn’t publish it. Content that creates a shadow of a doubt isn’t worth it. Revision doesn’t take long, and it can have a major impact on the quality of the finished product.
Waiting an extra hour or even an extra day to publish something that needs work isn’t the end of the world. But just waiting isn’t enough. Marketers have to rework the piece in question to end up successfully publishing high-quality content.

It’s essential to engage viewers so that they click with the content.

In addition, a revision has to be good to count toward quality. It should fill in the gaps and restore structure and coherency to an existing piece of content without going overboard. Brevity is equally as valuable, and sometimes it’s much more effective to remove text rather than add it in. Content needs to be clear and concise to maintain consumer interest.
Marketers can spend all day analyzing metrics and trotting out buzzwords in their content, but if the quality isn’t there and there isn’t raw talent in the content-production channels, all that behind-the-scenes work may go unnoticed. There’s a lot of talent out there to take advantage of; marketers who can’t get high-quality work done in-house should source a freelance professional to produce it. Low-quality content isn’t worth the time, money or effort it takes to get done, and a rush to publish shouldn’t drag down standards for content that’s acceptable.

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