Content fatigue: The internet has a hangover

Not again! Another content creation company emailing to offer us a stream of badly written blog posts for our website. As content creators ourselves, we're tired of this fast-food content that's clogging the internet's arteries. So I decided to bite back...

If you’re a business owner, you’ll be no stranger to ‘content creation services.’ You’ve probably received an email from at least one of them in the past month, companies whose sole purpose is to produce ongoing digital content for your site, usually in the form of blog posts.

They’re fast, highly specialised and vary wildly in terms of quality. In the world of digital content marketing, they’re the donner kebab at 3AM when better judgment gives way to needing something, anything, to plug the roaring gap in your stomach.

How not to do digital content

Blogging is also something Sookio offers, either as part of an ongoing web content strategy or as a standalone service. In short, we’re not the right people to try and sell blogs to and two minutes spent on our site can confirm this. Imagine my amusement then, when one content creator got in touch to see if we needed anything written…

I may have not been entirely professional in my correspondence…

In fact, I may have completely taken the Michael…

Throughout our ongoing, increasingly bizarre discussion, my interlocutor was friendly, engaging and clearly very good at his job. If he wasn’t more or less trying to sell ice to an Eskimo he might even have had a shot at selling some blogs… until I looked at the work his company produced.

They were poor. Too short, over-optimised, generic in tone and with no insight into the industries they were representing. Clearly a lot more effort and skill goes into the sales emails to secure clients than into the work itself, and that’s just not going to fly for very long.

Is the internet saturated?

This creates a problem for a great many brands trying to establish their presence online and it’s only set to get more challenging. Take a look at this blog post where one content creator estimates he wrote a million words per year!

The statistic that jumps out at me is the one which claims that 90% of all data ever created was created in the past two years. How much of that data, how many of this guy’s three million words were ever read, appreciated and subsequently acted on?

The Sookio approach to producing digital content begins and ends with the audience’s experience. For your customers, every moment spent online is an assault from dozens of sources trying to seize their attention. They have the desire and the tools to tune out white noise and hone in on content they actually want to look at.

This has extended to every corner of the internet. Facebook dramatically reducing the ability of brands to intrude on users’ newsfeeds is bad news for marketers, but great news for those sick of having their feeds clogged with trash content from uninspired creators.The days of drooling out content just to make your site look busy are over. The internet has gorged its fill of kebab, woke up with a headache and it’s now looking for something nutritious to soothe its aching guts.

Less content. Better content.

What you need is organic content, responsibly-sourced blogs, social media free from chemicals and pesticides. Time spent thinking about what your customers will go out of their way to read and share is never wasted time. You’re not even really chasing traffic anymore; you’re chasing engagement and, ultimately, the holy grail of going viral.

If you do decide to outsource your content creation to an agency, use one which understands that an online presence in 2015 means more than just looking busy. Sookio will always take the time to understand who your brand is talking to, what they actually want to see, and use our knowledge of the industry to keep you ahead of the curve. No donner kebabs here, we produce Heston Blumenthal content with a Jamie Oliver approach to ethical audience-building.

Just don’t try to sell me blogs or I’ll throw a Gordon Ramsay.