Defining Valuable Content

This morning I read Mitch Joel’s article about creating fresh content and decided it would be worth spending some time discussing the definition of valuable content.

In his opening paragraph Mitch says:

“There is no way around it. One of the only ways to really get ahead in executing a compelling and engaging online social media program is to constantly and consistently produce fresh content.”

And Mitch is absolutely right. However, frequency is only one of the key tenants in creating valuable content.

The Goal of Valuable Content

In our world, the goal of creating content is to build relationships. Relationships influence buying decisions, and buying decisions drive revenue. In today’s online world you must create valuable content that is designed to foster a long-term relationship with your audience.

Relationships are built over time – both online and in the real world. Relationships are secured by trust and they must be honest and open to be considered valuable. The most influential people are the most trusted in a specific area of experise. If you provide a product or service in a particular market you must possess a level of credibility, knowledge and understanding of your market. This provides you with a perfect opportunity to share your knowledge, build trust with your audience, and eventually influence buying decisions and drive revenue.

The Three Key Content Creation Tenants

If you’re going to create content for a very well-defined audience you must create valuable content. So what is valuable content?

First, let’s assume you’ve defined a very narrow and targeted audience for your content.

Now, valuable content is found at the intersection of High-Quality, Relevant and Frequent:

Valuable Content Defined

Relevant

Creating relevant content for your audience is crucial to your relationship-building goal. If you’ve defined too broad an audience for your content, you cannot hope to consistently deliver relevant content to the majority of your audience. The more narrowly you focus your content, the more valuable the relationship with your audience.

There are two main objectives when you’re creating relevant content:

1. Deliver both timely and evergreen insight. A perfect mix of evergreen insight (meaning it will remain relevant for the foreseeable future) and timely (meaning newsworthy) content is crucial to maintaining a relationship with your audience. If your content’s too evergreen there’s no urgency to engage with your content. If it’s too timely, too often, you add little long-term impact.
2. Remain laser-focused. As you’re creating content for your audience, make sure you remain laser-focused on their content needs. Don’t deviate or try to broaden your scope. For example, if you create content about great coffee, don’t try and deliver content about the iPhone app you downloaded. As soon as you deviate from your core competency you lose credibility and dilute your online brand.

High-Quality

Anytime I discuss the creation of high-quality content with a client, they get concerned. I define high-quality content not as a factor of the production quality (necessarily), but by these three key points.

1. Transparent, honest and open. High-quality content is always transparent, honest and open. That means that you must interact with your audience and you shouldn’t ‘seed’ content under assumed identities with the hope it will ‘go viral.’ Honest content builds trustworthy relationships. Feel free to disagree with your audience, but always respect their opinion.
2. Meet and exceed your audience’s expectations. In order to deliver high-quality content, you must constantly push your team to develop content that exceeds the expectations of your audience. You can do this by focusing on generating content that is ‘better’ than others in your market. Make sure it looks good, sounds good, and delivers valuable insight. If you continually exceed their expectations, you’re guaranteed to build a solid relationship.
3. Meet the expectations for your distribution channel. This is tricky, but the concept is sound. A blog post has a very different expectation from a white paper or an e-book. A YouTube video has a different expectation from a Vimeo video. Make sure you distribute your content widely enough on various platforms so that your content meets the expectations for each channel. There’s nothing worse than downloading a whitepaper that reads like a blog post. That’s how you destroy credibility.

Frequent

This is where Mitch focused his post – fresh content = frequently distributed content:

“The Long Tail. By having a steady flow of fresh content, over time you will build up a never-ending supply of traffic with links and other cool stuff that will help your ranking in the search engines.”

Mitch is absolutely right. Steady traffic is indicative of strong relationships. There are two main things to keep in mind when you’re working on creating frequently distributed content:

1. Strike a balance across distribution channels. If I emailed you content every day, you’d get pretty sick of me. However, if I email you once a month, add a new video to vimeo once a week, write a new blog post twice a week, publish my podcast once every two weeks; now I’m inviting you to interact with my content in different ways, more frequently. Just make sure your content is not repetitive – otherwise, I’m likely to ignore everything.
2. Be aware of the Too Much / Too Little paradox. When you’re creating content for any single distribution channel, make sure you don’t overwhelm your audience. Make sure you monitor how frequent is too frequent. Meanwhile, you have to make sure you’re building a relationship and not communicating too infrequently.

Takeaway Message

Create content. Create lots of content. But make sure whatever you do, you create Valuable content.

My Question to You

How do you define valuable content? What kind of metrics do you use to measure the value of your content to your audience?

About the author

Andrew Davis -

In 2002, Andrew founded Tippingpoint Labs with journalist James Cosco. Since then, he's spent countless hours exploring the online universe and building a methodological approach to developing digital strategies that drive revenue or reduce costs.

Andrew's always asking big questions and analyzing data to understand markets, online forces and even business models. Andrew's research has resulted in the creation of innovative online metrics including Online Brand Value and Category Brand Value, eye-opening graphical representations of website evolution through the New Media Life Cycle and even using online data to predict offline revenue.

When he's not surfing the web, Andrew's traveling the globe speaking to a wide-variety of audiences about everything from social media to the future of print. Andrew is a frequent contributor to the Tippingpoint Labs website and has been creating valuable content since the early 1990s for The Jim Henson Company, CNN, The Today Show and MTV.

He's contributed to a book of short stories, called The Way Things Were and produced and co-wrote Roadside Ambition a documentary film about one small town with two huge balls.

"In a world where content is consumed as rapidly as it's created, companies need to develop a sound strategy to creating valuable online experiences that can, and should, be leveraged enterprise-wide. There is a content solution to every business challenge."