You Ask, I Answer: How To Measure Overall Content Quality

In today's episode, Taylor asks, Is there really such a thing as updating your blog too much? Is there is twice a week really benefiting my company and me? If I'm pumping out lackluster content occasionally, is it time to cut back? In a word, yes, there is no such thing as too much great content, right? Audiences will always make time for the best stuff.

We know this because people will sit down and binge watch uh a Netflix series for like 24 hours straight, right? People will always make time for great content. People will rarely, if ever, make time for anything that isn't great content. And the challenge that we all have as marketers, of course, is we are competing for the same 24 hours as Netflixes, as politicians are, as the news cycle is. All these things are diversions in the same 24 hours of our audience.

So in order for you to cut through that on a sustained basis, and in order to build relationships of community, you absolutely have to have great content. Um mediocre content, lackluster, and good enough content is not good enough anymore. It used to be, it used to be, you know, 15 years ago when the internet was still relatively new to the consumer, um, and when search engine optimization was a little bit easier. Today, thanks to artificial intelligence and machine learning and the ability for machines to discern what content really is good and and is not good, we can't, as marketers, we cannot afford uh less than great content. So that's the short answer.

The longer answer, and the one that is a little more data driven, is to ask so what constitutes good or bad content? How do you know when your content quality is in trouble? You need to build yourself a content quality score. And the easiest way to do that is with metrics you already have. So you already have every time you share a blog post on various social channels, you have a pretty clear idea of how many people click through, how many people uh share it.

Uh you may want to take out your employees. In Google Analytics, you have a pretty good idea of traffic, but the traffic metric to keep an eye on, a close eye on, is returning visitors. The reason for that, of course, is that it's easy to get traffic in, right? You can run a whole bunch of ads, you can send out a whole bunch of emails and things like that. But if nobody comes back, then it's like, you know, the restaurant that runs a whole bunch of promotions, and everybody comes and tries the food, and they're like, yeah, okay.

And then they never come back, right? So returning visitors is a great measure for determining is our content worth coming back for, right? It's like, is the restaurant worth going back to again? Is your website, is your blog worth going back to again? So returning visitors, another one.

If you're doing an email newsletter frequently, and by frequently I mean like once a week, um, taking a look at your open rates. Again, if you're not delivering value, your open rates are gonna just slowly decline over time because people will re see the the email in their inbox and be like, oh, it's those people again, as opposed to, ooh, I can't wait to see what's new this week. Right? I can't wait to read what the the latest opinion is, or the latest point of view, or the latest new fact that will help me do my job better. So keep an eye on those sustained trends.

If you're doing email frequently, email opens. Social engagements, particularly click throughs and shares, and returning visitors on your website. Keep track of those three metrics. And you know, you can do it just in a spreadsheet and just track it over time. What's happening day to day, week to week.

One bad blog post isn't going to sink the ship. But a whole bunch of them, and you'll see that slow decline that is very, very difficult to reverse. The other thing you can do is ask people, run surveys, like, hey, do you read our blog? This is especially important for your customers, the people who are already paying your company money. Do you read our blog?

If you do read our blog, what do you like about it? And what would you like to see more of? And ask people. Because one of the things that happens with content marketing is people kind of get caught into you know loops. And it's like, uh, you know, uh there's only so many ways you can cover basket weaving, for example.

So if you can avoid those loops by asking people, what do you want to hear about? Those are those are great ways to to avoid the content quality problem. So stop doing mediocre content, stop doing lackluster content, measure your content for engagement and returning visitors, and then use the best techniques available. Use SEO tools, use predictive analytics tools, use surveys to ask people what they want. Borrow this format, even.

Um ask I answer comes almost literally from my friend Marcus Sheridan's book of a similar title, They Ask You Answer. Your customers, your audience, your communities, all have lots of questions about your industry overall or the problem that you solve, probably. If so, answer the questions. And then for at least one person out there, your content will be great content. Right, because you answered their question.

So that's one of the I think simplest antidotes that still lets you create content at scale. I do this video and audio and blog posts every single day. Because I never run out of questions because people have questions about marketing. So, what is your industry pile of questions look like? If you want to get a good sample of this, go check out the free tool answer the public.

Uh, just Google it, and uh you will see some fantastic ways to generate lots of questions that you can then go answer. So, good question, important question. Keep an eye on those numbers. I would strongly recommend putting together maybe even like a Google Data Studio dashboard of just a couple of those numbers, or heck, even just the returning visitors number, just to keep an eye on on your content quality. So, as always, please leave your comments and questions below and subscribe to the YouTube channel and the newsletter.

I'll talk to you soon. Want help solving your company's data, analytics, and digital marketing problems? Visit TrustInsights.ai today and let us know how we can help you.