What is Quality Content and How to Help Your Clients Create It We all know how essential quality website content is. However, continually producing content that meets high quality standards while still meeting performance goals can become an overwhelming challenge when working with clients who haven’t yet jumped on the content marketing bandwagon. Here are three major problems that must be overcome before your clients can create content that not only captures attention, but also holds that attention and uses this engagement to convert customers. 1. An unclear definition of quality: If I had a dime for every blog post that advised firms to create quality content, I could outspend the federal government. But, if I had a dime for every post that defines quality content and clearly explains how to create it… well, I’d have trouble affording a daily cup of coffee. If we don’t understand what quality is, how can we produce it? 2. Content indifference: For the vast majority of small and midsize firms, it’s all they can do to keep up with the day-to-day work flow. Few have the luxury of on-staff writers. On top of that, many such firms are sales-driven, so coaxing a marketing story out of them can be like pulling teeth — and at times, more painful. 3. Poor content creation processes: Agencies like to complain about clients in regard to this point; but truth be told, we don’t always do a very good job of helping clients through the content production process. Our agency has been working hard on our own efforts to overcome these barriers to quality, so here I’ll share what we’ve learned, as well as a few techniques that have been helping us improve our results. What is quality content? I’m sure those of you in the CMI community have many insights on this question (and I hope you will share them in the comments section, below), but for the purposes of this post, here’s my simple, three-part definition. 1. Quality content is user-oriented and engaging: Brands like to talk about themselves, but customers mainly want to know how firms can solve their problems and make their lives easier. It’s not enough to stress benefits over features; the business must show that it has a thorough understanding of its customers’ needs by developing the ability to “write in their shoes.” Critical corollaries of this principle include content that…