To say good content is important is to state the obvious. Every creator knows the importance of producing something of quality: if you want your audience to spend their time with you, it better be worth that time. The internet is constantly moving, never faster than today, and no one has time to engage with something poorly made. But while good content sometimes feels like everything, it isn’t the only thing. Everyone has heard the phrase “content is king” but, out of context, even good content is next to meaningless.
Social media expert and entrepreneur Gary Vaynerchuk proclaims in his book Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook that “content is king, but context is God”. In the social media landscape, the secret to good marketing is finding the right mix of quantity and quality. With so many platforms to advertise on, you can no longer just create content and expect it to attract customers: content alone doesn’t do much. Context is key; to know what platform you’re posting on and who you want engaging with your content is a must. Every platform has a slightly different setup and it’s important to make note of these variables. A post formatted for Instagram won’t automatically see the same level of engagement on Twitter.
In the same essay that Vaynerchuk is referencing, Microsoft founder and philanthropist Bill Gates also declared content king — but he also stated that “if people are to be expected to put up with turning on a computer to read a screen, they must be rewarded […] they need an opportunity for personal involvement that goes far beyond that offered through the letters-to-the-editor pages of print magazines” (Gates 1996).
This is still true today; if you expect people to interact with your brand or your content, you have to make it a distinctive and rewarding experience. You can’t expect people to pay attention to you simply because you worked hard at creating content. Great content isn’t the content that makes the most sales, but rather the content that people most want to share and then return to.
Similar to the way people want authenticity in writing, customers want marketing to engage with them. The days of just telling the consumer to buy a product are gone. In the digital age, marketers now have “…to make sure our audiences are seeing content they’re actually interested in, in a way that resonates with them and at the right moment in their daily lives” (Ploe 2020). Visibility depends on user engagement and creating skillful native content has less to do with selling than with skillful storytelling – relate to your audience on a personal level and they’ll be more likely to feel the connection you’re trying to create.
The importance of context translates to nonfiction, non-digital writing in a different way. Anyone can research a subject and repeat the facts. Too much research can actually change the focus of the writing because you can convince yourself that every fact is relevant and has to be included to paint the full picture. Finding the story in non-fiction takes a masterful understanding of the context in which everything happens. In a 2006 study, Spanish researchers found that interacting with stories activates all the parts of our brain that we use when experiencing the events of the story (Hufford 2019). Context in nonfiction writing is deciding how to highlight what the reader needs to know – and what you want them to see and feel.
If you want eyes on your content, no matter what it is, you have to make sure there’s something in it for the reader. In the ocean of content that is the internet, you have to find a way to stand out. Good content is obviously important, but without the proper context, it’s nothing more than that.
Photo by Ursula Ott on Unsplash
Coward, L. (2018, March 06). How to Balance Context and Story When Writing Non-Fiction. Retrieved from https://literaryconsultancy.co.uk/2018/03/balance-context-story-writing-non-fiction/
Hufford, B. (2019, June 10). The Career-Making Importance of Storytelling in Non-Fiction. Retrieved from https://writingcooperative.com/the-career-making-importance-of-storytelling-in-non-fiction-1e9f32d814ee
Gates, B. (1996, January 01). Content is King. Retrieved from http://web.archive.org/web/20010126005200/http:/www.microsoft.com/billgates/columns/1996essay/essay960103.asp
Ploe, M. (2020, August 10). Content vs Context: If Content is King, Context is Queen in Marketing. Retrieved from https://www.brafton.com/blog/content-marketing/content-vs-context/
Vaynerchuk, G. (2013). Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook: How to Tell Your Story in a Noisy Social World. New York, NY: HarperBusiness.
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