All this snow in Pittsburgh has us feeling some type of way… and it’s cold ‘n’ bitter! (Jordyn’s just saying that because someone hit her car last night in the snowstorm.)
Well, that’s why we’re getting a little harsh for a sec with today’s Read. Technically, it’s Content Marketing Institute that’s getting real. Sourcing a variety of marketing and creative professionals, they round up 27 reasons why content can be really weak. We’re not gonna go through ’em all, but we’ll hit you with 10 of our favorites (or, rather, not-so-favorites).
- Same ol’ same ol’ content — AKA, blog posts that just sum up what you can find through Google searches. That’s lame.
- Product name everywhere — The more mentions of your brand or your product in a piece of content, the weaker that content is. Plus, it just sounds plain sales-y and grubby.
- No voice — You can’t convert without getting your readers excited, and you can’t get your readers excited without enthusiasm and a personable, authentic tone.
- Content that’s written exclusively as a “check-off task” — You can almost always tell when you come across a post that’s written to grab organic traffic from some keyword. Also lame.
- Camel-like content — Eh?? “When everyone puts their two cents into ideas for shaping the content, it often becomes watered down. There is an old saying, ‘A camel is a horse designed by a committee.’” See also: too many cooks in the kitchen.
- Negativity — If you’re attacking other players in your market, constantly putting down your competition, and creating conflict to get attention, you’re gonna have a bad time… and you should feel bad!
- Unfulfilled premise (and promise) — Damn, if you’re content doesn’t deliver any of the info promised in the title, what are you even doing?
- Hard-to-read structure and “exciting” punctuation — Keep that passive voice in check make sure to vary sentence length. Be wary of overusing exclamation points and emoticons. They’re fun but they make your content come off younger than you want.
- Unfriendly mobile and meta — Mobile thinking should be a no-brainer. And yet, people still publish content with huge blocks of text that are difficult to scan. Also keep in mind search engines skip over content with missing meta descriptions.
- TL; DR (Too long, didn’t read) content — Hmmm… this one is striking a chord.
Check the rest below. Over & out.
