By Neil Barraclough
 
We all want to be cheering about our latest content marketing campaign.

But for many, understanding how to define quality in content marketing can be a struggle.

Results and ROI can be measured, but how can you be confident of giving yourself the best possible chance of success before you’ve launched your content?

At Tecmark, we look for the following six characteristics in high-quality content marketing.
 

Unique in angle or execution

Travelbag’s ‘Experience A Day In…’ series goes up against some serious competition; for example, Google generates more than 115,000,000 results for the search term ‘Things to do in Dubai’.

Most of those results are text-based; they’re not immersive experiences that excite the audience. But where there’s large-scale similarity, there’s also opportunity.

Travelbag’s ‘A Day in Dubai’ page used video to position itself as unique in execution, and has since amassed almost 13,000 social interactions.
 

Tailored perfectly for the audience

Another piece of travel-based content, Holiday Gems’ ‘Where Should I Go On Holiday?’ interactive quiz is a perfect example of pulling early-stage researchers into a purchasing funnel.

It combines targeted, long-tail keyword research with useful, informative content to produce an effective, high-quality piece of content marketing.

Those searching ‘where should I go on holiday’ are doing so with intent, and Holiday Gems’ solution is perfectly tailored to meet the needs of that audience.
 

Elicits an emotion

The results of a Freedom of Information request in September 2013 created feelings of outrage and shock among readers, and resonated with a national mood that was increasingly untrusting of politicians.

The subject?

How often users of the Parliamentary Network servers at the House of Commons had attempted to access websites classed as pornographic.

Clearly, the Huffington Post had discovered a gem. Their story got more than 2,000 social interactions and generated inbound links from sites all over the world.

Would that success have been achieved with a story that didn’t elicit an emotion?
 

Tells a story

Two Little Fleas, an affiliate bingo site, regularly produce strong content that generates better results than the efforts of large-scale operators.

They’ve enjoyed numbers successful content projects by invoking feelings of nostalgia among their audience – in other words, by telling them the story of their childhood.

A 90s nostalgia quiz generated links from 31 external domains and led to increased brand awareness.
 

Makes people want to share

Sometimes it’s humour that can be most effective at making people share your content.

A survey for scrap merchants Dronsfields generated headlines in national newspapers such as The Metro, primarily because of the language used in the results it generated.

Getting national media coverage might not be a regular activity for a company like Dronsfields, but high quality, creative content did the trick.
 

Credible

In October 2014, our own research on smartphone usage discovered that the average user completes 221 tasks per day on their phone.

The data was gathered by One Poll, a reputable marketing research company specialising in online quantitative research and polling.

So when journalists asked for the data behind our findings, they could receive everything they wanted.
 

All of which means…

Good content marketing leads to positive effects on SEO, engaged social audiences, increased brand awareness and, directly or indirectly, new customers.

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