Quality Content or 'QUANTent'? Why Marketers Should Be More Picky

We deal with a flood of QUANTent every day

We all know that content needs to be inspiring, relevant, authentic and – well – good. But as the amount of content out there increases and increases, we end up with information overload and quite frankly, as Velocity Partners calls it “a deluge of content marketing crap”.

The Weidert Group, in their blog on how to build an inbound marketing team, talk about the importance of having a team with the capacity to create a large quantity of quality content; stuff like “compelling, energetic and informative blogs, profiles on social media, hard-hitting web and landing page content, and advanced content in multiple forms (video scripts, webinar outlines, e-books, etc.)”.

But with the content avalanche bearing down on all of us, it’s not enough just to produce lots of content. It has to be valuable, 100% of the time. It has to be quality content, not QUANTent.

What is QUANTent?

QUANTent is content that is produced for the sake of having content: to fill the gaps in a calendar, for example.

There are several risks, with QUANTent.

• Content starts to sound ‘all the same’
• It’s not properly edited, or is rushed through in other ways
• It doesn’t have that nugget of greatness that quality content does
• It is produced to meet the calendar’s needs (or the content monster’s needs) rather than the needs of the reader
• It’s boring.

For example, think of a blog that goes out every day. The demand for constant content can become a monster that needs feeding. The risk is that, due to the pressure for demand, the quality of content may suffer.

That’s just not good enough.

Just having sheer volumes of QUANTity content makes people bored, or worse - inclined to disconnect, or  or worse still - it makes them distrust your content, your key messages and, ultimately, your brand.

So what should marketers do?

It's so easy to turn off, unsubscribe, choose to no longer follow someone, or just stop listening. Marketers have to earn the right to keep people engaged. This means we should:

1. Create I-RATE content. Content that is
• Interesting
• Relevant
• Appropriate
• Timely and
• Entertaining/Educational.
2. Be authentic, engaging and succinct.
3. Stay relevant to what the audience demands and expects and
4. Share stuff that individual content creators are proud of!

That way, when consumers manage the QUANTent they’re exposed to by eliminating noise, your messages won’t be eliminated and will hopefully, become part of the Sweet Spot that consumers then go on to share and expand with their friends and colleagues – so that they, too, can choose whether to pay attention to it, or ignore it.