9 Things to Grade on Your Content Report Card

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Issue 44 | May 28, 2021 | 9 Things to Grade on Your Content Report Card

We’re in a golden age of feedback. Your sleep report tells you that you tossed and turned too much last night. Your screen-time report shows the ebb and flow of all-consuming news cycles. Your bank app warns when you’re approaching your monthly restaurant budget, and your Peloton shows your mileage versus friends. The data megatrend has crept into just about every corner of our lives.

And for some efforts, that feedback data is super useful. It helps us pinpoint weak spots and hone strategies and next steps. A recent academic meta-analysis of feedback studies found that feedback is a powerful, positive tool for cognitive and physical efforts (but a bad tool for motivation – it can mess with intrinsic motivation).

The meta-analysis also pinpointed an important nuance: feedback is more effective the more information it contains. Broad feedback might not tell you anything useful about what to do next.

Feedback is more effective the more information it contains.

There is a feedback mechanism built into our content universe, but it might qualify as the too-broad kind. We can instantly track likes, shares, page views and other forms of engagement – but those figures only tell us what’s working and what’s not. They don’t tell us why or what to do next.

Generating Your Own Report Card
Here’s an alternate approach to creating useful feedback for your marketing team: make your own content report card. But you can’t just grade yourself – first you have to sample content from a handful of peers to figure out the grading scale. A group of three to five samples can help you peg the standards for good, better and best.

The world of marketing publications is incredibly varied, so it’s useful to pick three peers of similar AUM and market footprint. Track down a representative piece of content from each that matches the sort you usually publish. You might even look for a non-financial sample or two in other content-heavy fields – healthcare and tech firms put out a lot of white papers, for instance.

Print out your samples and grade them first, then grade your own recent work, across these 9 categories:

1. Has an intriguing and informative – but not tooooo long – title. Writing titles is an art and a science of its own, and I have seen reports that the title accounts for about 50% of an article’s success. The best ones pique interest by hinting at a benefit, a mistake, or a quick rundown on a new topic. The highest Google click-through rates go to titles of about 55 characters, which is about seven words.
2. Tackles an interesting topic. You know the difference between a topic you were forced to write about and one the audience is eager to read about. Score accordingly!
3. Has a good balance of text versus visuals. All-text is just not a successful approach for marketing content, but all-visuals is an infographic (…which is an incredibly popular content format, but not always the goal). The Golden Ratio is an excellent rule of thumb (approx. 62% to 38%). Most content fails to strike the balance.
4. Storytelling oomph of data/visuals. It’s glorious to replace 1,000 words with visual data (that’s the expression, right??), but only when it’s not a super-technical graph that’s going to demand a heavy lift from your scanning reader. Fortunately, a good header can tell the reader the point of the data presented.
5. The frequency of headers. Oh good, someone figured this out – readers get the highest comprehension benefit from having a header every 200 words or so. (The same study found that comprehension was higher with printed materials versus online materials, interestingly.)
6. Storytelling oomph of headers. Like the titles on charts and graphs, headers are one of your most powerful tools to carry your narrative through the piece whether or not your reader is deeply engaged in reading the text.
7. Design appeal. This is a matter of personal preference, but a clean and calm design with sufficient white space is an important factor in content quality.
8. Overall scannability. Scanning is far more common than reading – 79% of web users scan, and estimates on eye-tracking show that only about 20% of text is read. The most successful content works with that trend. Scannability is an overall measure that combines the gestalt of your headers, visuals and design white space.
9. Readability in terms of level, ease and enjoyment. At the very bottom of this list is the quality and meat of the writing – and that’s coming from a writer! You can make very successful content that’s kind-of-garbage writing, if you get all the other stuff right – but the writing is an important element when you’re aiming for best on the good, better, best.

Happy grading season to you and your team!

Looking for an experienced freelance financial writer to help with engaging content? Reach out and let’s talk about your project needs.