Good content doesn't just follow the rules

Alex here! I’m very excited to announce Superpath’s new Thursday newsletter spot, brought to you by Superpath’s very own Rachel Bicha.

Don’t worry! Eric’s Wednesday newsletters aren’t going anywhere!

But now we’ll be bringing you a Thursday newsletter as well. For the rest of the year, this Thursday spot will be a rotation between three newsletters:

Each has its own subscription. You can manage which ones you get here.

Rachel here! Welcome to What's Good? (In Content), a new, six-part Superpath series! In it, as the name suggests, I'll be exploring what it means to make content good, the quality vs. quantity debate, and (hopefully) trying to think broadly and deeply about what makes for good content, and why (or if?) it even matters. If you have questions, responses, comments, or hot takes in response, send them my way!

P.S. I took inspiration for the name for this series from an old coworker who used to say, "Hey, what's good?" every morning when I got to the office. Shoutout to Taylor: "What's good?" "Life's good, I guess."

One thing I've noticed in marketing is that we tend to spend a lot of time looking at what went wrong (doing teardowns, breakdowns, etc.) and less time looking at what makes something good. And when we do, it often turns into a list of rules, like:

There's nothing wrong with that, in fact, I think it's a great starting place. But too often, we only take it that far, and that's when it becomes a problem.

What makes content good is usually a combination of three things:

This is true, albeit in different ways, whether the "content" in question is a TV show or an email or a product listicle. A TV show has a different purpose than a product listicle, and thus "good" looks different in both of those.

For the moment, I'm going to leave aside questions like what does good look like in different content with different purposes? and who gets to decide what's good? and how good does it need to be? and good compared to what? and so on, and simply say for now: good content fulfills its aim.

But back to the three things:

Particularly in making marketing content, we tend to over-index on the first thing: following the rules. (See above.)

We only occasionally think about how to break the rules: how to subvert expectations, or do something novel, or surprising, or force a unique perspective, or whatnot. Knowing when to break the rules has always been an essential aspect of "taste" or "judgement" or whatever you'd like to call it. But whether you're following the rules or breaking them, you're generally still operating from a rules-first mindset.

Rarely do we talk about how to add in the anomalous element: the je ne sais quoi, hard to define, can't-put-your-finger-on-it but know-it-when-you-see-it, element of content.

And I think that anomalous element that we can't quite define is often the thing that makes good content good (or perhaps, great content great). The content just doesn't work without it, no matter how "technically good" it might be. And that's because:

Good content can't be boiled down to a series of rules, patterns, and conditions where if you do all these things your content will work and get seen by the right people and do the thing you want it to do.

We know this. We joke about it all the time when we rant about people telling us to "just make it go viral."

Of course, you can't just "make something go viral" by following a 6-step process, and you can't make content good that way, either.

In order for content to be good, it can't just follow the rules. Content that follows all the rules and checks all the boxes is not good. It is correct.

Of course, in some contexts, there's nothing wrong with content that is just correct: help Center articles, perhaps, product documentation. Make it correct, follow the rules, give me the answer, and let's move on.

But too often, we get stuck in making "correct" content because we assume that if we just follow all the rules, our content will be good. But good content — content that fulfills its goal, whether that's to entertain or build trust or be memorable or make a connection or build brand awareness or whatever — almost always also breaks rules and has some anomalous element, too.

I think SparkToro is an excellent example of a marketing team that really knows how to work this anomalous element.

Yes, they follow the rules: more zero-click content, do original research, have a "face" (or faces, in their case) of your brand, lead with data. distribution first, etc.

They also break a lot of rules: they don't post on their blog with any specific cadence (that I can see, at least). They often do things that don't particularly scale. They talk about search a lot, but rarely post "SEO" content on their blog. They have a small team, but they use all kinds of channels and formats rather than "focusing" on a few.

But there's something more to their marketing, too. What is it?

It's all of that, and I'd argue: not those things as "rules" that will work for everyone, in every case, but that's their version of the anomalous element. They're constantly experimenting and trying things and developing a je ne sais quoi — an "appealing quality that cannot be adequately described or expressed" — for the SparkToro brand that comes across in nearly every piece of content. It's not something you can copy 1:1 or make a defined rule from, but you still recognize it when you see it.

And all of this matters because when our content is good, it tends to get outsized ("outsized") results.

Even if we can't perfectly explain the anomalous element and how — or why — it works, we do need to talk about it and aim to incorporate it into our content. It's how we keep what's good good in marketing, and don't lose the inexplicable piece to whatever can be easily talked about and codified and organized and defined.

Because if we lose the things that actually make our marketing work, we instead spend so much time spinning our wheels and trying to scale, trying to do more, more, more to drive results, instead of just experimenting, testing, and searching for the small, anomalous elements that make a few good things really work.

Your product comparison listicle doesn't have to be (usually shouldn't be) completely off the walls or bonkers or "unhinged."

You don't need to turn your feature updates into a "The Office"-style mockumentary.

You don't need to break all the rules.

But in order for our content to work, it needs to go beyond just what can be boiled down into a rule at all.

- Rachel