Content marketing is a strategy that stems from a business decision. In the past, agencies, when doing traditional advertising, spent most of their time thinking of an idea, because that idea had to be so good. At the moment of execution — on TV, in print, on radio, or on a billboard — the amount of money that was spent to publish it was so high that they couldn’t risk the idea being bad. So, sometimes, they spent six months, almost even a full year, thinking about the idea they would use for the next campaign. This justified all the hours that agencies charged clients.
How Content Became a Billable Hours Game
When digital advertising arrived, it was so cheap — almost free — because writing a blog post or making a social media post costs nothing compared to a billboard that can cost 40,000 pesos or 3,000 dollars a month, just one billboard, versus a post that costs zero pesos. Thus, the risk of publishing something via digital methods is very, very low, and now the time you need to spend thinking of the perfect idea is not as long. So, as a way to justify the hours — so they wouldn’t lose billable hours to clients, since this is the system agencies work with — they filled those hours with content. So, all the big brands started putting out 30, 100 posts a month.
The Engagement Formula Nobody Talks About
The problem is that big brands seem not to know that there is a formula for engagement, with which the content they produce is evaluated and by which the decision is made whether to show or hide the post — and, in general, all the brand’s content. The formula is: comments plus likes plus shares, divided by the number of followers the brand has. When this number is above 3%, your content appears to many more people — around 5% of your followers. A 3% engagement rate, just to give you an idea, is only achieved by very, very famous influencers, like MrBeast or someone like IAmSpeed. The rest of the influencers fluctuate between 1% and 3%, and that means your content will appear to fewer than 5% of your followers.
Finally, there are those with a 1% rating or lower, who are practically hidden, because they have a very poor content score. And since social media is valuable for the entertainment it provides people, very low-quality content is the content that will be hidden.
More Posts, Less Visibility
Thus, the more a brand posts low-quality content, the more they get low scores in their engagement rating, and the more their present and future content is hidden, as they are ruining their reputation more and more. So, this strategy of constantly churning out content as a way to flood the internet with a thousand opportunities to sell, actually plays against you, because it generates a reputation of content that is completely irrelevant to the audience using social media.
The Meme Trap: Entertainment vs. Conversion
On the other hand, creating entertainment content for brands using memes or jokes — although it can boost your engagement rating — the people who end up doing that engagement are not necessarily consumers. They are not consumers of the product or service itself, but rather consumers of the entertainment that you are showing.
Quality Over Quantity: The Wow Agency Approach
Thus, the perfect balance is not trying to be entertaining just for entertainment’s sake, nor just posting on-brand content that is super boring, but rather seeking a balance where what you post is relevant because it is useful, even if it is not funny or dramatic or any of these meme techniques. Instead, the content should be relevant because it is educating, solving a problem, or informing about an update that is relevant to these people. Thus, creating content ends up being a very, very efficient strategy. When our clients at The Wow Agency ask us how many posts they should produce per month, we tell them: the ones that are good. If in a year you produce one good post, just publish one good post. If in a year you have ten, publish ten. But your content is not based on the number; it is based on the quality of what you are publishing.