How do you know if your content marketing is any good? Well, if you’re using the term “content marketing” to describe what you’re publishing, it’s a good sign it probably stinks.

If the generic “content” is the best you can muster, you are not providing important, relevant, and usable information to your customers and prospects. Further, because you’re too cheap to do it right, said “content” is probably provided by a content marketing firm that employs a bunch of people who have no interest in what you have to sell, other than it provides a paycheck in exchange for their dreck.

You are also not doing any wonders for your brand when your customers (who know what they are talking about, remember) associate shallow pablum with your company.

The weird old trick that actually works

Publish information that your current customers would pay for out of their own pocket. It’s both that simple and that hard.

In other words, the information you publish should look like a real publication you’d find on a newsstand. Professionally written on deadline, driven by an editorial calendar and fueled by commercial intent on the part of the writer. That intent being that the journalist doesn’t eat if the target audience isn’t compelled to buy the publication.

That means really understanding your customers and investing the time and money to create high quality articles, blog posts and videos. Not paying some content marketing firm $200 a post for some hack to bang out 300 words with the buzzwords you fed them.

Your prospective customers–who do know their stuff–aren’t fooled by “content marketing.”