How to Tell if Your Content is Actually Valuable

Producing content at any time is only worthwhile if it's found to be of value for your brand. More companies are creating and distributing content than ever before, making it increasingly difficult to engage with your target audience.

This competitive marketing environment means organizations are under pressure to invest in the most appropriate areas, generating the content that is most effective. But how do you tell if it is actually valuable?

1. Standing out in a saturated content crowd

For brands, the biggest obstacle about finding out whether your content is valuable or not is getting it noticed in the first place. You could be producing articles or infographics that suit your personas perfectly, but if they're not seeing them, it's a pointless endeavor.

To rectify this, you need to discover where your audience are and how to engage with them. For most brands, this will be on one of the key social media platforms and each has its own guidelines for how to create well-performing content. Persona research is the best way to gain insight into where your audience is and how they interact with content they see. This will help guide your marketing campaign and determine what types will be most valuable in the long run.

2. Building brand consistency

Building loyalty is the best way to ensure that your content performs from one campaign to the next, but the competitive nature of marketing can make it difficult to generate any level of commitment from consumers. To create this advocacy, you need to create content that is consistent. Although you may have a hero piece and pillar pages, it's important that everything is developed to the same standard. In addition, you need to ensure that anything produced in a campaign has a consistent brand voice.

This will build loyalty among your target audience by telling them what they can expect from your organization. Whether this is infographics, blogs or eBooks, it tells consumers that they'll get content that is of value to them and will be worthwhile for them to read.

3. Measuring campaign success

Setting up KPIs to measure the success of your campaign will allow you to see what types of content your audience is engaging with most. Once you've tracked progress, you can tailor future articles to complement what has proven to be valuable with consumers. However, it's important to remember that value isn't just about CTR or ROI, as earlier stages in the marketing funnel can be just as important for guiding people through the buyer process and generating advocacy.

Of course, metrics like time on page or heat maps can show you how users are interacting with your content. Even if articles aren't encouraging viewers to convert, they may be providing value in some other way, so understanding why consumers are engaging with your top-performing content is always important.