All Content isn't king in 2024

It never was, but everyone believed the hype.

This week’s newsletter is sponsored by the Digital PR agency Search Intelligence, which uses PR methods to grow a link portfolio and North Star Inbound, which is a recommended agency for SEO and content strategy. See their case studies linked in the newsletter.

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In 1996, Bill Gates coined the phrase “Content is King.” He wrote the word in an essay explaining why Microsoft was partnering with NBC, predicting that content providers would be in the best position to monetize the nascent Internet. He wanted to put Microsoft in a position to benefit from what he perceived to be the most significant future profit potential.

Gates’s prediction on this topic was only partially correct. Yes, content producers can harness the vastness of the internet for financial gain. However, some of the web’s biggest companies, like Google, Spotify, Netflix, and Substack, earn vast sums from others’ content.

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[SPONSORED by Search Intelligence]

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✅ We made a list of all the houses and residences that are in the Netflix Bridgerton series

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✅ We targeted journalists who….Read more

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Not an excuse to churn out low-quality content

Bill Gates’ thesis was about the high-quality exclusive content produced by a media conglomerate like NBC. Unfortunately, without distinction, “content is king” has become a part of the marketing lexicon. All sorts of marketing books, conference presentations, and training encourage marketers to focus on content, the most critical component of any marketing effort.

Somehow, this idea became a call to arms to create without any bar of quality. Marketers have fallen in line, flooding the Internet with garbage that makes you dumber for reading or viewing the drivel. You wish you could turn back the clock to reclaim your wasted minutes.

The world is awash in rambling audio, shaky video, and the worst travesty of all: endless amounts of AI-written content that should never have been published.

The belief is that this content will draw people in from various channels. Once they are on the site, they will be trapped into buying, calling, filling out a lead, or whatever the KPI might be.

Does it work?

The problem is endemic across all verticals. Take a moment to search on Google for luxury hotels and read the room descriptions. You will find many examples of content that reads like someone with a keyword goal wrote it. I once read a room description for a luxury hotel that mentioned a bathtub with water coming out of a faucet. It gets even worse when you look at websites for local small businesses.

A plumber doesn’t need a city guide page. A pizza shop doesn’t need blog posts on the history of pizza. A realtor doesn’t need to replicate the entire Yelp of area restaurants.

Bad content isn’t confined to a specific marketing medium but is less prevalent on paid channels. Paid and brand marketers are smart enough to know that spending money on marketing will defeat its purpose if customers are repulsed by useless content.

Manage the expectations of content

Every day, content producers (in-house or outsourced) are given the goals that might be given to a warehouse worker packing boxes. X content must be produced daily, containing Y words and Z keywords. This prescription-type content is not a king; it is an indentured servant expected to work the magic it is not equipped to do.

Imagine if some of the most significant media stories of the last century had been written in this framework. If the TV shows of previous decades had been walk-and-talk videos, would TV watching have become a family affair? If newspapers of the past had been filled with infographics that forced you to turn page after page with force-fed advertisements, would anyone even read today? I think not.

The ultimate goal of content is to sell

Using low-quality content as a teaser is like walking into a high-end store and being shown the cheap knockoffs as an enticement to keep going deeper into the establishment, where someone might reveal something real. It wouldn’t work offline, so why do it online?

Content should be considered with the same gravitas as deploying a highly paid salesperson. Just as no business would allow themselves to be represented by a slurring, sloppy drunk, companies should put the same thought into the quality of any content they produce. Businesses are always diligent in tracking the performance of every salesperson and paying out appropriate commissions. Content should be treated similarly.

Content should never be deployed and then not measured. Unlike other marketing methods, content is inherently trackable.

A good salesperson targets their approach with a specific person in mind. Content also needs to be written with the end user in mind. If there is no added value for a user, then the content should be deemed useless. Intelligent readers will see through the veil of sentences strung together for no purpose other than to garner a click.

We need to end the idea that content is king and that writing content is an end unto itself. Content is a business tool much like any other. When content is correctly viewed as an instrument of success, setting arbitrary goals for content seems even more ridiculous. Only a fool would mandate spending a set amount on paid advertising even if it never converted, yet these objectives are commonplace around content.

Don’t waste money on bad content

The resources wasted on bad content are better spent in channels that will reach customers and generate revenue. Deployed effectively, content can have an ROI of thousands of percent over many years, but content with no purpose will never have any return. Content is a tremendously powerful tool in the hands of the right marketer. It should be wielded effectively and revered, not made to toil as an indentured servant.

If the content is the product of a website and the website's goal is for readers to consume that content, creating words for the sake of a word count or keyword goal is an utter waste of time. Even better, Product Led SEO requires thinking of the reader and why they should spend their precious time enjoying the content.

Keep the focus on the user and write content from which the user will benefit. Content isn’t royalty; the user is.

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