Combine These 5 Research-Based Ingredients for Higher-Quality Content

It’s undisputed: well-crafted, high-quality content is how a brand builds an audience, trust, and loyalty today.

Great content helps you earn the attention of the people who need your product or service. Existing loyal customers are drawn to quality content, too, in large part because it builds trust and authority, creating top-of-mind awareness for your brand.

The quality of your content also correlates strongly with how favorably the content — and therefore your brand — is viewed by and served up in search engines.

If you’re convinced that creating quality content is worth the effort, the five heavily researched tips in this post can have you creating winning content in no time.

But what’s easy to describe isn’t always easy to execute, especially for brands whose staffs are already stretched thin and who often see “create quality content” as another task in a long line of blindly ambitious goals.

“Quality” isn’t a matter of judgment from web searchers and search engines

Ask 10 marketers how they define quality content and you’re likely to hear explanations that include a laundry list of buzzwords, phrases, and acronyms that few business owners have the time or the inclination to understand:

• “It all comes down to Dwell Time.”
• “The key metric is Time on Site (TOS).”
• “If your content is of high quality, it should acquire a meaningful number of links.”

None of these statements is inherently wrong, but they are all fatally flawed, largely because they amount to after-the-fact goals that place all of the emphasis on judgment by search engines and web searchers.

In other words, these are elements appraised after you design, create, and share your content.

What’s most important for business owners, however, is to have a way of knowing if your content will build authority, trust, and, hopefully, customer love before you get to this judgment by third parties.

Accurately assessing the effectiveness of your content requires a process — one that makes the creation of quality content feasible and replicable for brands of all sizes.

Developing a foolproof approach to consistently create quality content

In the last decade, I’ve written for numerous print and online newspapers, magazines, and online blogs, in addition to editing print magazines and online blogs with millions of annual readers. Over that time, I’ve been fortunate enough to help hundreds of brands with content marketing, content strategy, and SEO.

The biggest constant in every area of my work is that most brands struggle to consistently create quality content.

For a long time, I thought the culprit was a lack of talent, as most brands simply didn’t have it. Or goals, since so few are clear on what they should be. Or chasing Google and the other search engines.

But in the last three years, while working with dozens of brands and managing a large, successful marketing blog, I was able to uncover exactly what causes content creation problems, how to eliminate those issues, and what the results can be once that rock is rolled away.

I was able to develop, vet, and distill a five-step process that has led to hundreds of bloggers and brands being able to successfully create content on a consistent basis.

Here are the five ingredients I’ve found your content needs to build trust for your brand.

Ingredient #1: Accuracy

Is the information factual? Is it backed by data, research, or at the very least, capable of being corroborated by a third party? As a dyed-in-the-wool empiricist (Yeah, Hume!), one of the things that really raises my hackles about blogging is the rampant opinions expressed as fact.

Everyone is not an expert.

The good news is, you don’t have to be. Even if you are an expert, that doesn’t mean you know everything.

As famed psychologist Angela Duckworth wrote in her widely celebrated book Grit:

“If you want to know what I’d … do if I needed to know the answer to a question [I didn’t know] … I’d just call someone who actually knows.”

You should feel free to do the same.

Reach out and interview experts at non-competing brands. They’ll develop more of an awareness of your company’s work and could reciprocate the gesture in the future.

Ingredient #2: Accessibility

Can the audience for which the information is intended readily consume the content on all types of devices (e.g., mobile, desktop, tablet, phablet, etc.)?

Content often gets consumed via a smartphone or other mobile device, by people who are on-the-go.

So make sure your content is published on a site that’s:

• Mobile-friendly or responsive,
• Fast,
• Delivers a great user experience, and
• Can be viewed from anywhere and at any time.

Don’t forget to think beyond text.

By 2021, more than 75 percent of global mobile data traffic will be from video content, according to a 2016 Cisco study.. YouTube is currently the number two search engine behind its sibling Google.

Your brand should consider content types ranging from short videos to podcasts, data visuals, and other forms of interactive media.

Smart brands will greet this news with enthusiasm, realizing the rise of video is an opportunity to use their assets wisely.

It’s very likely that you have team members who’d be excited to use their talents to create a podcast or short video tutorials for your brand, especially since both require minimal equipment and can pay huge dividends in fostering authenticity and trust.

Ingredient #3: Application

How meaningful and relevant is the content to your ideal prospect? How strongly does it apply to them?

Does it meet them where they are, with clear guidance to get them where they want to go?

This is what I call the “just-for-me” aspect, which can really make your content sing. When readers/viewers walk away feeling like “This brand knows me,” they happily return.

Hit ‘em in the feels by showing visitors you understand them and their needs:

• Put together a list of questions your sales team, customer service, or other frontline folks get via phone, in-person, or through online forms.
• Pick a question you’d most like to answer, and then do a quick Google search of that question, making a note of the top results.
• Create a piece of content that answers the question better and differently than anyone else. For example, you could create and post a short YouTube video of you answering the question, then write a blog post and embed the video.
• Repeat the process with the entire list of questions, making notes of what worked and what didn’t.

Ingredient #4: Action Steps

Blogging is hard to beat for delivering quick-hitting tips that let the audience walk away and immediately take action. It’s what readers and viewers expect.

Any piece of worthwhile content should have at least one solid takeaway.

Sadly, business owners too often forget that their audiences are frequently just looking for enough information to help them make a decision.

When you create content, strive for what I call the trifecta:

1. Tell ‘em what you’re going to tell ‘em (with your headline)
2. Tell ’em how they can get it done (with a few paragraphs of text or a short video detailing the steps), and
3. Tell ‘em what you told ‘em, (with a short summary at the end.)

Over time, readers will recognize that you respect their time and their goals, leading them to see your brand as a resource for pertinent, easy-to-consume information.

Save the in-depth details for a whitepaper or case study.

Ingredient #5: Authority

For content to really resonate, it needs to be authoritative — a quality that encompasses everything from the site the content is published on to the author and the substance of the content itself.

Does it take a stand? Does it make a clear, compelling point? Is the author a credible source? Should you reasonably expect to be successful after following the advice shared in the content?

Of all the information I’ve given to business owners and seen them find success with, this one stands alone.

Before creating any content, ask yourself: How am I uniquely qualified to tackle this topic?

By pushing yourself (or the writer who creates the content) to answer those questions in advance, you create a competitive advantage based around authority.

Earning trust is well within your brand’s reach

Crafting really good content gets easier and more replicable when you have a process, or checklist, if you will, to help keep your steps in order. (Atul Gawande’s book, The Checklist Manifesto can help.)

Armed with a solid brand, a worthwhile product or service, and the courage to push the limits of your content creation, you can dominate your category faster than you can imagine using the ingredients above.