Content warning

If you’re doing content marketing for your brand, I want to give you a warning.

I don’t have much to say about content marketing, because it’s not a large part of my work, but now and again someone will ask me to do some and I’ll do it because I like the client so much. “Client” as in human being, not brand.

I’ve had two recent experiences that suggest plenty of brands that are paying money for content are literally throwing that money away.

I’ve been doing a little content work for a b2b brand (read: lovely human being) recently and a situation arose where they bought placements on a respected, global content network — a network which writes the articles for the media buyers.

This network has an impressive website, gives you an account manager, the whole kit and kaboodle. But when the articles came back — just a couple of little 750-word pieces, nothing major — they were pretty bad. I’m being kind here. Let me list a few of the things that were wrong with these pieces, and you can make your own judgements:

• Telling the audience what they already know (or should if they’re in a position to be interested in this product).
• Using 50 words to say what could be said in five.
• Misusing tertiary-level grammar.
• Poor structuring resulting in dead-end after dead-end in the story.
  Actually, no story.
• Archaic, overly formal expression that suggested to me, also an ESL teacher, that the work wasn’t written by a native speaker.

This last point isn’t inherently a problem. Plenty of people learn second languages well enough to write perfectly in them. But if I can tell that the writer’s non-native just by looking at the piece, maybe a network billing itself as having the best content in the world needs to be a little more exacting in its review of their work.

Having spent costly time reviewing and commenting on these articles, we asked if we could just write them in house ourselves, but the big, powerful content network said, “No no! Let us revise them for you. Feedback is great!”

So we had a meeting about these articles with said network: three people from their team, two from ours, 45 minutes. Imagine, if you will, the sunk cost of these two little articles at this point. Nonetheless, we rebriefed, and they assured us that all articles were edited multiple times before being released to clients for review.

Second round: still duds. Now we’re writing them in house. All the time we’ve collectively spent on these articles has been wasted so far.

Another incident that will horrify any person who’s responsible for the dollars they’re spending on content is as follows.

A friend, who has a Masters degree on top of a career history that spans marketing, design and business strategy, told me she’d spent an entire day writing the first draft of a web page for a client. A single page. And while acknowledging that she didn’t have the skills to write web pages efficiently—that she’s not a writer—she said to me, “I thought, geez, this copy is really expensive.”

She giggled, but I was crying inside. It sounded like she’d charged the client for all of that time. And it sounded like they’d paid.

These two horror stories leave me, as a person whose livelihood is words, aghast. There are plenty of great professional writers out there. Clearly, large content networks can’t be expected to have hired them. Even if you’re working with a boutique agency, you can’t expect to be getting bang for your buck content-wise. So what’s a poor content marketer to do?

Be stringent. Give exceptional briefs. Ask for an accounting of every dollar you spend. Find allies who work with writers and compare the value you’re getting. Understand what makes words work, and fail. And ultimately, find a writer you can trust, build a relationship (and their understanding of your brand an audience) and stick to them like glue.

In the meantime, question every single word of copy that is supposedly written for your brand, and don’t pay if it’s not good.