When Good Content is Better Than Great Content

A lot of content marketers will tell you that your content has to be perfect. Outstanding. It really has to hit the mark.

Trouble is sometimes companies spend so long tweaking the content, talking to focus groups, trying to second think through every possible permutation that by the time something’s published it’s lost its initial momentum.

Don’t Just Climb the Mountain

Let’s say you’re launching a business blog to help drive traffic to your site and bring a less corporate feel to your online communications. You can spend a long time deciding on the right software (WordPress, Movable Type, Blogger, ExpressionEngine, etc), the right design and, the right content but going with a simple self-hosted WordPress blog using a generic premium theme with a few tweaks to brand the blog can be enough to get you going and building page rank. Saving this extra time might just help you first to post compared to your competitors.

Climbing a mountain takes monumental effort but using the chair lift will usually get you pretty high up very quickly and with less effort. In business content marketing, sometimes getting ahead before the rest of the competition is a victory in itself and give you the edge over others.

Get it Out There

Look at Crisis Management. When a crisis hits a company they don’t waste time perfecting their response. They get a YouTube video with the CEO out in two hours, or a blog post up in minutes. The production quality is low because the content is needed quickly. In this way, good content actually becomes great because it gets the job done. It addresses the concerns and issues at hand in a timely fashion.

A crisis is an example of a situation where it’s more important to respond quickly with marcom content than well-crafted, innovative cool content. When good enough will get the job done, it’s definitely time to go for it.

Another real-world example where good enough is better than great is the uploaded Scribd document a client of mine has started putting up instead of handing out product brochures at local business expos.

It’s a simple product overview with text and the company logo. The document is linked to on the company website and their Scribd url is included on their exhibition stand backdrop.

The year they stopped handing out glossy product brochures because they noticed that people were being handed so many and concentrated on just talking to people at expos about the product, they realised how much money they could save in printing costs. The people that were really interested in finding out more went to Scribd.

Takeaways

You need cool content to generate buzz and interest your audience. But sometimes good enough gets the job done. What’s more, you can usually turn your good enough into perfect should you need to later on.