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Crap Content – It’s Everywhere
Over the past year, the team at Essential has noticed that the quality of content marketing in the tech sector has taken a nosedive. Most content marketing is now so beige and boring that it’s hard to tell one piece of content from the next. This type of content does more harm than good and turns readers away from the companies that post it.
So, what happened?
Has AI Triggered a Dip in Content Quality?
We get why this happened, sort of. ChatGPT and other generative AI tools have come to the fore and for the overstretched and under-resourced content marketer, these seem like a lifesaver. Give an AI tool a brief and it will manufacture a piece of robot-written content in seconds. What’s not to like? Lots actually!
Firstly, robots don’t have opinions!
So there is no way they can write a true opinion piece from a spokesperson as they have no idea what’s in their heart or mind.
Secondly, robots write like, um, robots.
Great if you’re also a robot, but if you’re in B2B tech or the channel, then your target audience will be (you guessed it!) human.
Thirdly, its knowledge bank is based on two-year-old data.
AI doesn’t know the burning key issues that are keeping your target audience awake.
And therein lies the main issue. Our world is changing so fast right now that the challenges today may well be usurped by what happens in the world tomorrow.
So why on earth are so many content marketers relying on AI to write content for them that is based on two-year-old data?
Time and inexperience.
High-pressure and Time Poor
So many marketers working in the tech channel are overloaded. We see it every day across our agency. Briefs are getting thinner. Timelines are getting tighter. Forward planning seems to be a thing of the past. Burnout is becoming more common.
With all this pressure and lack of resources, tech marketers no longer seem to have time to monitor what’s happening in their sector and instead churn out content based on what they hope their audience wants. But how can they know if they aren’t tracking what the key issues are? Hint – it’s not your latest awards or your new office!
This lack of time means that poor topic choices become poorly written content (whether written by AI or rushed humans). It becomes jargon-packed content with spelling and grammatical mistakes. Content based on bland ideas or a two-year-old data set; and content that is written to tick a box and not to educate and inform an audience.
All of this makes for beige content that won’t position your company as having its finger on the pulse. It also won’t position your spokespeople as true thought leaders and certainly won’t create engagement. In short, it’s crap content.
Make Sure Good Content Marketing is Found
A lack of time or experience doesn’t only lead to an inability to identify relevant topics and write good content. It also impacts content optimisation for SEO and the promotion of content and leads to an assumption, or hope, that written content will be magically found by its target audience.
If you’ve written good content, then make sure people can find a way to read it. Too often we see content that is missing key SEO requirements such as metadata and ‘h’ tags. And, content that lacks any form of call-to-action (CTA). We often see content that even search engines think is similar or boring. When this happens it is given a low ‘uniqueness’ score.
This content becomes invisible in search and fails to deliver the job the creator wanted it to as it’s hardly likely to ever be read.
Poor Promotion
The other thing that we keep seeing day in and day out is content getting lost because of poor promotion on social. LinkedIn is full of posts that are badly written with the story hook hidden away from sight, low down on the full post view that is only visible to those who click. It is also full of posts that are supported by the same stock images as everyone else. We see too many posts that are quite frankly boring and put the reader off engaging with them.
Creating a LinkedIn post that is engaging and effective takes creative effort. Creating a supporting image that is, what we term, ‘scroll-stopping’ does too.
But tech marketers don’t have the time to be creative. So, what’s the solution?
Introducing Kick-Ass Content!
At The Essential Agency we’ve decided enough is enough! We don’t want to see any more beige, boring and impactless content in the tech sector.
If you’re struggling with a lack of time to research the key issues in your sector, aren’t sure what content you need to move your audience through the buyer’s journey, don’t have the time or knowledge to optimise it for SEO and need to increase your engagement on LinkedIn, then we should talk!
You can find out all about our Kick-Ass Content Marketing service and its methodology.
Alternatively, if you think your content marketing is okay but are looking for an independent review and some tips and tricks to move it from okay to WOW! Then take our free Content Teardown Service!