Creating Valuable Content: Three Keys To Success

As part of Tippingpoint’s Online Content Marketing strategy, we’ve keyed in on defining valuable content.

For each distribution channel (YouTube.com or Flickr.com) or web platform (blog, photostream, e-zine, email newsletter), we define valuable content as the creation and distribution of relevant, high-quality, frequent content.

Let’s break these down one by one:

High-Quality Content

We believe that in order to deliver High-Quality Content to your audience you must:

• Be transparent, honest and open. We don’t believe you should create a video under a false identity and post it on YouTube in the hopes of attracting a viral marketing audience. You should be honest and open about your products and services; if there’s a problem with a product identify it yourself and be proactive about addressing it online. Remember, an online relationship, like any relationship, is built on trust.
• Meet – and exceed – your audience’s expectations. You must repeatedly elevate your content so that you are constantly exceeding your audience’s expectation for quality content. If you constantly under-deliver, your audience will find a better source for more interesting information elsewhere.
• Meet the expectations for the distribution channel. If you’re going to distribute content on a wide variety of distribution channels, you must make sure that the quality of your content meets your audience’s channel expectations. For example, posting a video on YouTube has a different connotation than posting a video on Vimeo. Make sure you know the best distribution channel for your content, define the channel’s expectations and then meet or exceed them.

Relevant Content

Remaining relevant is one of the most challenging online content marketing goals to meet. It takes a lot of effort and research to determine whether your content is relevant. You must perpetually monitor and analyze the data it generates to ensure that your content remains relevant over time. Two key ideas to keep in mind:

• Deliver both timely and evergreen insights. In order to continually be relevant to your audience you must deliver a ‘perfect’ mix of timeless (evergreen) insight and timely information. As your audience consumes this content, they understand the value of the relationship you’re building.
• Remain laser-focused on creating content for a well-defined audience. Avoid the urge to produce content that does not directly relate or impact your audience. This supposes that you have defined your audience. If you haven’t, you must clearly understand exactly who you are hoping to build a relationship with as you deliver your content. As soon as you deliver content that your audience is not interested in, you’re hampering the relationship.

Frequent Content

The last piece of the puzzle is communicating frequently enough to build a trustworthy relationship with your audience. But not too frequently. Frequency of content creation and distribution is THE key to successful online content marketing. In order to do this:

• Strike a balance across channels. You must communicate over a broad range of distribution channels in an effort to communicate very frequently with your disparate audience. This means that you can’t communicate over one channel too frequently; otherwise you’ll turn your audience off to your content.
• Be keenly aware of the too much; too little paradox. Because online content marketing is designed to build trustworthy, long-term relationships, you must be aware that if you communicate too much, you’ll lose your audience. Obviously, if you communicate too little you cannot expect to build a relationship. This means, you have to define a frequency of communication that is ‘just right.’ Too much, and you’ll become overwhelming noise. Too little, and you’ll never be a trustworthy and reliable source for information.

A Quick Example: Twitter

Twitter is well into the escalation phase of its life cycle. By definition, this means that the volume of content creation is at (or near) its peak. It also means that the collective value of the content is on its way down. Ironically, the high-value tweets get drowned out by the giant mountain of pile-on tweeters. If you are going to stand out on Twitter you must master the three key tenants of creating valuable online content.

1. High-Quality: Make sure your tweets are transparent, honest and open. Provide your followers with high-quality information through Twitter by sending them links – not just to your content – but the content of others. Don’t scream your content. Engage specific followers by answering their questions in a professional way with high-quality information.
2. Be Relevant: Provide your followers with information they are interested in learning about or reading. Make sure you know exactly who you are hoping will follow you and build your audience with care. Do not follow everyone who follows you. If they’re not relevant to you or your followers, ignore them. Twitter, by its nature, is a timely medium so tweet timely information.
3. Frequency: On Twitter, the barrier to content creation is so low that some people tweet too often, making their voice irrelevant. On Twitter you must focus on adding value to the conversation everytime you tweet, otherwise you’re just filling your followers screens with irrelevant information and hurting your reputation. Avoid this at all costs. Tweet only a few times a day. See how your audience responds and only increase your tweet frequency if your audience is engaged.

In summary, communication across multiple platforms is crucial to your long term success. Twitter is only one channel on which you can engage your audience – don’t abuse it.