We all remember the award winning 1989 film with Kevin Costner as Ray Kinsella, a washed up baseball player who hears an ominous voice (which later presents itself in the form of James Earl Jones) whispering to him “if you build it they will come”.  Assuming it is just his imagination, he ignores the voice and continues to move on.  When he hears it a second and even third time, Ray realizes that it is not just a coincidental wind whipping through the stalks of his prized corn, but potentially a true calling to him.  The rest of the movie focuses on Ray turning his cornfield into a baseball diamond, driving all over the Midwest, and his almost losing his farm and his family as the obvious climax.  His willingness to follow the voice for the game he loves is rewarded at the finale with droves of people coming to his remote Iowa farm to pay money to see visions of heroic baseball players who have long since left the game, and ultimately gone to the big diamond in the sky. 

If you have a field of dreams with baseball players coming out of the outfield corn stalks, and you build a stadium, “they” will definitely come.  If you have a piece of content and place it on your site, an email, or within your social media channels, there is a one in infinite chance they will come.  And, if you pay for advertising, curating, optimizing, cataloging, and building impressive campaign pages around it, they MAY come.

Content generally is written with the intent to bring potential clients to your product, service or simply to resell the content itself.  That said, a recent Google search for the term “Content Marketing” returned approximately 59.4 million results.  That is 59.4 million results on how to achieve better content marketing alone, which means there are an infinite number of actual content articles catalogued on Google trying to get prospects to a company’s products or services.  In order for content marketers to truly have effective content, there are a few key elements of the content which MUST be considered to meet the content goals.

Relevancy –

The content must be relevant to the overall product or service which the company is promoting.  Google and Bing/Yahoo’s algorithms have become dynamic enough to determine a quality score based on how closely the content is related to the rest of the company’s website or social media posts being made.  For an exaggerative example, if your content is talking about making pies out of Granny Smith Apples but your site is attempting to sell Toyota automobiles, the search engines will decrease the quality score due to the lack of relevancy.

Explanatory Titling – 

Almost all content which is promoted in a digital or print format is giving some title text that will explain to the reader what they will be reading.  While it is fun to add your own creative flare within the title to make it seem provocative, the title still needs to give some reason for the viewer to click on it in the sea of other content.  My best performing post to date was “My house is ablaze; Why Technology Should Not Drive Strategy”.  In this I was able to be a bit creative (as creative as I can be), it more importantly gave some clear expectation of what the reader would be getting from the post.

Length – 

Depending upon the subject matter, the length should remain relevant to that type of writing.  Promoting content about quantum physics may require a very lengthy piece of content with more of an “essay” type of approach.  However, a piece of content explaining how to make strawberry shortcake should be relatively short, with a more step by step approach.  Adding content to increase length may be somewhat neat when you are in a college English course writing for a professor, but most other readers will only read long enough to get the point being made.   Remember, time is a limited resource for us all.

Credibility –

As a Marketing Technologist, I can’t imagine why anyone would read a post by me on the theory of evolution.  After all, the reader is expecting to read content relevant to Marketing Technology and not about my somewhat personal opinion about evolution.  To be credible, the reader has to believe that the product or service being sold is related to the content being created.  After all, while a post by New York Life about a guaranteed process to win a chess game in 6 moves may be extremely interesting, it doesn’t lead the reader to begin thinking about life insurance.

As you think about your next piece of content being created, ask yourself this: Is this piece of content something that my potential clients really want to read or is it just a topic that I think is interesting.  So now it’s your turn, was this post something you wanted to read or just something I thought was interesting??