Actions — including content marketing — ALWAYS speak louder than words.

Copywriters claim their clients typically fall into two categories – those seeking good content that informs and entertains customers through the cycle, and those who care only about the price of content.

A very professional and experienced writer colleague (you’d love to have her write your marketing material, if she wasn’t already booked solid) posted in our private group:

“I just talked to a company looking for blog posts. After working at [giant household name tech company] for years the marketing director understands the value of great content. Except her boss does not understand and has her sourcing posts on Fiverr for less than $100 per post. She says, “they’re not even bad and I just can’t justify your prices.”

Seriously? Companies want results from marketing content. Specifically: Return on Investment (ROI) in the form of leads and sales.

Q: What kind of company expects results from content that’s “not even bad”?

A1: A company run by those who’ve read and heard about content marketing and SEO, and think they’ll be left out if they don’t immediately cover the Internet with their own content marketing. Meaning a company that prefers quantity over quality; similar to a spammer.

A2: A company run by those who are too cheap to care about content quality or results.

Hmm… if a company doesn’t care about the quality of its content, then it doesn’t care about those reading its content, and by extension does not care about how it treats customers.

[Sarcasm on]

What?! A tech company that doesn’t care about customers? Such a thing exists? How? Where?

[Sarcasm off]

If you’ve ever changed mobile phone, Internet or television providers, you’re nodding in agreement.

To better fit a client’s budget, another experienced copywriter offered to do a project in portions, rather than doing the whole job at once. Getting half as much great content from your budget as you wanted might seem like a raw deal – at first. It illustrates however, what the late, great salesman Zig Ziglar best explained as the difference between price and cost.

If a company cares only about the initial price of content, then it does not care about the cost of delivering poor value content to both its readers and its own image.

That shortsightedness will naturally extend to poor customer care. For example, how many firms right now are concerned only about acquiring new customers each month, with zero regard for the number of existing customers who get fed up with lousy service and quit? You and I both know firms like that.

Whereas high quality content delivers value to readers and enhances the company brand, generating exponentially higher ROI eternally, because digital publishing is forever. A company that consistently posts great content cares about how it appears to customers and is more likely to care for those customers. That resulting good content will reflect more trust, which results in leads, and ultimately sales.

(Am I asserting it’s impossible to buy quality content at Fiverr prices? Of course not. There are good writers who don’t yet value themselves or their talent, and some content publishers make it their goal to find one. To them: good hunting, price shopper.

That’s not an insult; it’s merely acknowledgement that price is their number one priority. Which is perfectly OK. Perhaps one day you or I will meet them at the local dollar store or Walmart, where we’re buying commodities and price shopper is looking for the content marketing aisle.)

What was the outcome?

My colleague wrote a post (at regular price) so good the company execs realized their definition of “not even bad” was not good enough.

Which proves, fortunately, there are executive decision makers who understand the short-term price of informing and entertaining with valuable content is less than the long-term cost of posting low-price, low-quality content that turns off readers and defaces the company image.

Budgets and prices feature so predominantly in business that yes, searching for marketers who prefer not to be seen in Walmart can be tiring. Some days I wonder if they’ve adopted the camouflage techniques of the often-rumoured and never-photographed Sasquatch. Please excuse me while I return to my search for them (companies that value great content; not Sasquatch). Thank you for reading.

Share your thoughts in the comments section on LinkedIn.