Content quality vs. aesthetics

You might hate me for this, but here it goes…

Your prospects don’t care about you. They only care about how you can help them.

A damaging misconception lurks around out there, in content marketing and thought leadership. Here it is:

…it’s the “content needs to be professional-looking” myth; that you have to show up all tidy and polished – that everything has to *look* perfect in your marketing assets.

What’s mind blowing is that these leaders implicitly believe that as long as our content LOOKS “professional”, it’s okay to put out flimsy, shallow, self-serving crap.

Crazy, right?! But that’s exactly what half the world is doing in “content marketing”.

What happens in countless organizations is this: as long as content is polished and pretty (and maybe SEO optimized), a piece of
– badly positioned,
– wrongly messaged,
– self-promotional content
will get the green light for launching on social and in campaigns.

On the other hand, a less professional-looking, but highly useful, authentic content piece with the right positioning and message, talking about an excruciatingly relevant topic… will be held back only to never be released (!) …just because it isn’t polished and pretty enough.

Why?

The underlying belief is this: how we look is more important than what we do and say.

Of course, spoken out loud, nobody agrees to this, but it’s how most actually function in marketing.

“But if we look unprofessional, they won’t do business with us”.

Not true.

Look at the most successful thought leaders in our sphere – and the production quality of some of the content they put out.

It’s mostly mediocre sound and video-quality. Sometimes even below that.

But, what they don’t compromise on is content-quality. The most looked-up-to thought-leaders with huge followings have their pulse on their markets’ mind – they know the customers better than the customers know themselves – and go above and beyond to talk about problems and solutions that are painfully relevant to them.

And they do this consistently on an ongoing basis.

This ability, this mindset, this way of doing business, this perspective is what your content strategy should be focused on building out. 

Every other detail that gets in the way of this depth and consistent publishing, is blocking the mission of serving your market.

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