Quality Doesn't Have a Number - Carney
The Daily Carnage

Quality Doesn’t Have a Number

There’s a reason quality and quantity are separate things.

What Does ‘Quality Content’ Really Mean?

How many times have you heard, “just create quality content, dude, and people will love you for it?”

We’re guessing you hear it about once per day. And it is true — quality content is crucial to good marketing.

But what the heck is quality content? No one ever defines it. Everyone just talks about “creating it”. Seriously, how are you supposed to freakin’ know if your content is quality!? That’s what we’re clearing up today.

First, let’s debunk a myth. A lot of marketers say that the highest quality content is 2,000 words or more. You know the stats, longer blog posts get more shares and links, yada yada yada. But, here’s the thing…the data is actually skewed.

Take it from data-guru Steve Rayson, “The average shares for long-form content are only higher because there is so much poor quality short-form content, and this drags the average for short-form content down.”

Steve did his own study of the top 100 Mar/Tech blogs and found that 81 of the top 100 posts had less than 1,000 words.

Still not sold? Let’s look at a real examples. Take the website IFLScience. Most of their content is crazy short. Here’s one example: The Science Museum And The Natural History Museum Are Fighting On Twitter, And It’s Amazing.

That little article is only 244 words, but has almost 500,000 shares and 179 backlinks. Sure, that’s anecdotal evidence, but 500,000 shares is still strong evidence of quality.

So there’s no need to write 2,000-word articles to make them high quality. But that still doesn’t answer the question…what the heck is quality content? Let’s ask Google…

“Okay, Google. What is quality content?”

Believe it or not, Google has guidelines for high-quality content, but they’re vague:

  • Make pages for users, not search engines.
  • Don’t deceive your users.
  • Avoid tricks intended to improve search rankings (don’t do black hat SEO).
  • Make your website stand out from others in your field.

Grrrreeaattt…thanks for the help, Google.

Bad news, we’re outta room here. Read the full post for our definition of quality content. We’ve also got examples and explanations of high quality content from publications like Bloomberg, Backlinko, and more ↓

6 Tips for Writing Ad Copy at Scale

Wordstream is coming in hot with tips to better our ad copy. They’re specifically talking about Adwords, but these tips are relevant anywhere. And we def like what they have to say.

Let’s go, crew, we’re jumping right in.

1. Listen to Sherlock Holmes and do your research. Best practices are helpful but don’t stop there. Put yourself in your buyer’s shoes. Literally.

Search in a way that you imagine your target market searches for you. Understand how competitors are baiting viewers and attack! No, no we’re kidding. You just want to do it better.

Also, start with strong keyword research. WordStream provided a handy little guide.

2. Organize yo’ self. Because sometimes testing CTA’s get us too hyped and our notes look like jibberish.

WordStream recommends using a spreadsheet to stay organized. Something that looks like:
Ad Group | Live | Campaign | Headline 1| Headline 2 | Description

3. Measure success by making multiple variations within each ad group. Doing this will:

  • Give you a better understanding of your audience.
  • Broadens your reach.
  • Find out how your audience responds to emotion.

4. Have the landing page open in front of you while creating the ad. Landing page copy and ad copy needs to match. This ensures you write copy that helps meet expectations, which avoids high bounce rates, low CTR, and brief page visits.

5. Speak to consumer pain points by emphasizing the value your brand brings throughout the copy. What is it about your business that improves the lives of your customers?

Highlight your customer’s target goal by tying in your solution. It’s not “the best dang vacuum that ever existed”, it should be “the vacuum that will finally get that dog hair off the couch.”

6. Test it like its hot! Test CTAs, tone, wording, verbs, numbers in headlines, questions, capitalization of certain letters. Anything and everything.

It’s a simple game crew,

  • Write two ads
  • Run them simultaneously
  • Check which ad has more favorable metrics (CTR, Conversion Rate, etc.)
  • Remove the ad with lower performance, replace it with another

That’s all folks!

What The Flavor

Looks like Sparkling Ice tasked a spunky boy/girl duo with reaching younger demographics. According to them, it’s all about adapting the language to emojis, snaps, and hip text abbreviations like ‘WTF’.

“What the Flavor,” of course.

You should’ve seen that one coming. Really though, it’s in the title.

All we’re saying is we really hope these two are actually on Sparkling Ice’s marketing team ’cause these ads are way too relatable. From brainstorm sessions to the big pitch we are pleasantly entertained by the accuracy.

We might be a little biased since these clips describe our lives, but A+ to Sparkling Ice marketing team.

“’Build it, and they will come’ only works in the movies. Social Media is a ‘build it, nurture it, engage them, and they may come and stay.’” 

Seth Godin

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