👋 Welcome to What's Good? (In Content)
Rachel here! Welcome back to What's Good? (In Content), a 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.”
What's Good? (In Content) is one of three rotating Thursday series. You can manage which ones you get here.
We are not the arbiters of “good”
Not sure what temperature this take is, but I’m just going to jump right into it:
You don’t get to decide if your content is “good.”
I recognize that’s a bold and also ironic claim coming from someone writing an entire series on what makes for good content, but I still think it’s true.
If I’m the one making the content, I don’t get to decide if it’s “good” or not: the audience does.
In the last edition, I argued that good content fulfills the aim, function, or purpose for which it was created. As the creator, you get to decide what that aim, function, or purpose is. You should have some sense of what “good” looks like for your chosen aim.
But who decides what “good” usually looks like?
I see so many companies making something that they consider “good” and then it flops. They care a lot about the thing, but no one else even gives it a passing thought. And it does absolutely nothing for the marketing strategy or impact overall.
You make something to your standards as a company, or what someone internally (often the CEO or CMO) thinks is “good,” but your audience is usually not a CEO or a CMO. Your audience is someone who likes to read pithy emails from their favorite artists and listens to punk rock on their commute in, and memorizes baseball stats, and scrolls on TikTok every night for an hour watching home organization ASMR videos.
Because no matter how strong your distribution plan, your quality standards, your research, your command of the algorithm, your audience size, your partnerships, your luck… your audience and readers are ultimately in control of if your content gets read, shared, distributed widely, remembered, referenced, used, and acted upon.
If your goal is to get a lot of visibility and traction, your content better be something worth sharing, liking, commenting on in the eyes of your audience.
If your goal is to get people to do something, like subscribe to your newsletter perhaps, you better make something worth subscribing to in the eyes of your audience.
If you want your audience to see you as helpful and insightful, then you need to make something that your audience will want to reference, share, and use in their day-to-day.
How? What’s worth subscribing to? What’s worth referencing?
Idk, man. You gotta find out from your audience.
I’ll use this newsletter as an example, because why not:
When Alex and I first came up with the idea for these columns as part of Superpath’s new media / newsletter series, we already had several things in mind as far as function:
We knew what the purpose and aim of adding on a new newsletter was for Superpath (for both Superpath and for you all as readers).
I also had an understanding that more content marketers are looking for ways to think more deeply about their work and we wanted to create a space for that to happen.
Then, I might set out what “good” would look like by combining these aims to decide what I should do, e.g.:
I might see that serial content — i.e., a limited-run, set-number series around a particular topic — tends to perform better, especially on social and in short-form formats.
Based on our intended function, I knew some email “rules” I wanted to follow, and some I wanted to break.
I also know a few things that, for me, define how I write outside of the rules: talking about content in a philosophical way > prioritizing actionable how-tos; prioritizing good questions over finding the “right” answers; my own style, etc.
From all of that, I might come to a hypothesis that an email series about “good content” would be particularly timely and relevant; especially if I could execute it and talk about it in a way that both (a) speaks to content marketers’ deeper needs, fears, and questions right now, and (b) in a way that no one else is doing.
But all of this only takes me up to a point: it’s all theory.
Theory is useful. But eventually, you have to test the theory, bring it to the real world, experiment, and see what happens.
And that — testing, hypothesizing, experimenting — is risky. When I go to Alex and say, “Hey heads up, the next edition is gonna be about Plato,” he (and I) are taking a risk. Content marketing is not rife with Platonic dialogue and discussion. Anytime you break out of convention, you’re taking a risk.
Is that risk worth it?
Only your audience decides.
And how do you know if your audience thinks your content is good? Don’t worry, they’ll usually tell you. But even if they don’t say so to your face, there will be signs. I look for things like:
Is our target audience sharing this piece(s) without me asking them to?
Is anyone commenting on our social posts about this with an “@so-and-so” comment (which tells me this speaks to real conversations that are happening offline)?
Are the social posts about this getting saved and shared?
Are open rates growing as the series continues? (i.e., people are coming back for more)
Are people DMing me or replying to share their thoughts?
And sure, it’s possible that all of this can happen without fulfilling the end goal of your content. You can get a ton of traction and views, but no conversions. (Usually, though, this is due to a mismatch between form and function. ‘Nother email, ‘nother time.)
The opposite is rarely true, though. Content that your audience dislikes, or worse, just doesn’t care about, can rarely fulfill any kind of aim and be Good.
No matter how good you think you did, if your audience doesn’t think it’s good too… they won’t do anything with it, and thus, no purpose is fulfilled, and thus: it’s not good.
We’re too used to determining what is good based on a set of rules: it’s good if it follows these quality standards, if it is this length, if it includes xyz.
But good content is about function, not form.
You get to decide the function.
But your audience gets to decide if the content fulfills that function for them (and by extension, if they are going to do the thing you want them to do).
If that makes you feel a little out of control, well… same. But it’s the truth.
And I think it leaves us in a better place, because instead of trying to control every em-dash and sentence structure, we’re able to turn our attention instead to (of course!) our audiences.
What are they watching, reading, listening to, consuming?
How, when, where, why, from who?
What makes something good for them? What are they sharing, talking about, citing, bookmarking?
Your job, if you want to create something good, isn’t to start by trying to make something good. It’s to understand your audience (and what they think is good).
Ironically: once we can admit we’re not in charge of what’s good, we’re freed up to actually make something, well… good.
- Rachel