What makes content "great"?
A few months ago, I was on a call with a product marketer discussing an article my team had produced and that he had some issues with. During the conversation, we both waxed eloquent about our commitment to making great content, but it quickly became clear that we had radically different definitions of “great.”
No one wants to put bad content into market. But as my experience shows (and this was just one of many similar conversations), different people have different ideas about what success looks like. So different teams make content-related decisions, believing they’re on the same page with their colleagues, only to discover too late that each team had different expectations.
The solution is of course to establish a common set of criteria against which content can be judged. In other words, to define “great.”
When greatness matters.
A common definition of great content requires a common view of content. To be honest, I’m going to gloss over this a bit because it needs its own article (stay tuned!), but at its most basic, content is seen in one of two ways—as a tactic or as a product.
If content is a tactic, then its value is secondary and serves mainly to further business goals. If content is a product, then it has intrinsic value to the audience, which exists independently of business goals. I’ve written about this distinction elsewhere but here’s a quick example.
Suppose you’re building a classic lead generation landing page where you offer a piece of content in exchange for your customer’s information. If you think optimizing the form to get the most leads is the most important part of that transaction, then you probably see content as a tactic. Whether the customer is satisfied with the content doesn’t matter so long as they fill out the form.
If, however, you care whether or not your customer is satisfied with the content you’re giving them in exchange for their information and so focus on building and promoting a piece of content they will actually use, your content is a product. This is obviously a gross simplification, but hopefully you get the point.
(As a side note, in the content-as-product model, optimizing the form is still important, but you’re optimizing it to help the customer get the content they want, not simply to attract more leads.)
Understanding the distinction between these two perspectives is crucial for defining greatness. Because if you’re treating content as a tactic, greatness quickly becomes irrelevant. If customer satisfaction doesn’t matter, content becomes interchangeable and quality is just a nice to have.
(Note, getting people to adopt the content-as-product mindset is pretty easy. Getting organizations to do it is not. Again, I’m glossing.)
Greatness defined.
Once we’ve established that greatness has something to do with customer satisfaction, we need to define the impact we want our content have. In other words, what features should our content have to create satisfaction? Hypothetically, one could identify any number of audience-oriented goals but in my experience, there are three that are absolutely essential.
Great content is engaging, useful, and transformative. On the surface, at least two of these may seem obvious, but let’s take a closer look.
Content is engaging when it not only captures your audience’s attention but keeps that attention actively focused. As clickbait sites have so amply demonstrated, capturing attention is not that hard. Really keeping it is. While many content creators have focused on snackable content in an attempt to counteract our so-called attention span, this feels like a brute force approach to engagement. Hoping that people have the willpower to endure your content is not a good business plan. (Also, the whole idea of shortening attention spans is based on made-up science, so there’s that.)
The most notable feature of engaging content is not that people stuck with it but that they got to the end without a bad taste in their mouth. In essence, engagement is all about getting your audience’s attention with some kind of intriguing promise, and then delivering on that promise. If you’ve done it right, you’ve created a positive emotional reaction, setting you up for the next engagement.
Content is useful when it solves some specific audience need. There are a wide variety of possible needs. Marketers like to focus on problem/solution-based ones, but learning is a need. Entertainment is a need. Searching for brand validity is a need as is understanding how something works. Every time someone interacts with a piece of your content, they are expecting it to fill some need. If that need is not filled, it’s not useful.
The key to utility is a deep, ongoing understanding of your audience. Their needs change from one customer to the next, at each stage of the customer journey, from one channel to another, from one time of day to another, and so on. Understanding these nuances allows you to not only address the right need with the right customer at the right time, but to do it in a way that requires the least effort from the audience.
Transformative content changes the audience in some meaningful way, whether on a big scale or a small one. The most obvious (and the easiest to measure) is changing behavior—getting someone to buy something or click on something when they might not otherwise have done so. But the most powerful transformations are those that change the way someone thinks—inspiring a new way of doing something, challenging someone’s existing mental model in a productive way, or helping someone establish a more efficient workflow.
Transformative content is by far the hardest to create. As we’ll see below, most people are not looking to be changed by corporate content so it requires another level of audience empathy. Instead of understanding a customer need, you need to understand what permission you have in any given circumstance to provoke a new thought, reinforce a new behavior, or inspire them with a challenging POV. You need a different kind of insight, one that understands their state of mind—not just their desires—in any or all of the various situations described above.
Thinking about features.
As I’ve developed this way of building content, I’ve extensively studied product development ideas in search of principles from that robust industry that apply as well to a content-as-product model. Not surprisingly, there’s significant overlap, but one theory that’s influenced my everyday work is the Kano Model.
Developed in 1984, the Kano Model is a product development theory that focuses on customer satisfaction and loyalty, both key features of a content-as-product strategy. The model outlines five categories of product features and describes their impact on customer satisfaction depending on how well they meet customer expectations. I’m only going to talk about three of the categories here; the other two are sort of control categories:
Basic features—These are features everyone expects and so they don’t get you any bonus points. Having them doesn’t increase customer satisfaction, but not having them creates dissatisfaction.
Performance features—These are the competitive features, the ones people are looking for and generally make decisions around. If the feature is done well, it creates greater satisfaction. If it’s done poorly, it leads to dissatisfaction.
Excitement features—These are new, innovative features that no one’s looking for but when done well, significantly increase customer satisfaction. But because no one expects them, if they’re not there, no one cares.
The Kano Model.
These same ideas apply to content. The three criteria I’ve described — engaging, useful, and transformative — are not a single scale of quality, moving from engagement to transformation. Instead, they are sets of features within your content that work together to meet audience expectations and create audience satisfaction.
Like basic features in the Kano model, engagement is table stakes. If you successfully include features in your content that make it engaging, your audience will consume your content. If you don’t, they won’t.
Your efforts to make your content useful are the performance features. This is what people are looking for and will generally be what they judge your content on. If you successfully identified what they need and then solved that need with your content, they’ll be satisfied.
Like I said before, most people are not looking to be transformed by business content. But like excitement features, if executed well, transformative features create significantly higher satisfaction and loyalty. Note, however, that in some kinds of content, if transformative features are done badly, they often become what the Kano Model refers to as “reverse” features, i.e., features that cause dissatisfaction when present and satisfaction when gone.
Content big and small.
At this point, most people are nodding sagely, but every time I’ve presented this model—engaging, useful, and transformative content—I get the same question. Surely I don’t think every single piece of content should be transformative. Is UI on a website transformative? Preview text in an email? And on and on.
The short answer is yes, but there are a couple of ways to get to that.
The first is to acknowledge that in today’s world, no piece of content stands in isolation. Each element is part of a larger content ecosystem. In other words, when we say “content is a product,” we’re talking about Content (with a big C), as in holistically the entire content experience. In this way of seeing it, every individual element—UI, preview text, articles, headlines, etc.—contribute to the overall audience satisfaction, even if each of those elements doesn’t include every feature of greatness.
This is totally true, and I genuinely believe it. But I also think that content creators shouldn’t let themselves off the hook in aiming for all the features of great content in every single execution. Imagine what your content would look like if you asked yourself every time if it has the features necessary to be engaging, useful, and transformative.
Transformative, useful, engaging.
The reality is that creating great content—like developing any great product—takes a lot of work. It takes planning and strategy and the freedom for creative execution. But most importantly, it takes alignment across all groups involved and a process that prioritizes value to the customer as a way to meet business goals.
While none of this is easy, when it comes together, you can make content that creates real customer satisfaction and loyalty. And that’s pretty great.