What is quality assurance in content writing?
Quality assurance may have simpler meaning and it may have a bit evolved meaning in terms of content writing.
It goes without saying that the quality of your content must be good in the sense that it should be easy to read, there should be no spelling and grammar mistakes, and the flow must be engaging. Your readers must be able to make sense of what you’re writing.
If you want content writing to be an integral part of your content marketing, then it becomes an ongoing activity. Content marketing is not a singular campaign. It is an ongoing thing.
Since it is an ongoing thing, you need to have a strategy, you need to have benchmarks, and you need to have a quality assurance mechanism. What’s that?
- When you are writing and publishing content as per your content marketing strategy, you need to ensure you publish content regularly – out of sight is literally out of mind on the streets of content marketing.
- You maintain a publishing schedule and publishing calendar.
- The voice of your content represents your brand’s voice.
- You have sourcing guidelines when you use data in your blog posts and articles.
- The titles or headlines are as per your engagement, branding and search engine optimization needs.
- Every piece of content takes your content marketing a step forward.
You may have budgetary constraints but don’t allow them to compromise on your content writing quality.
If it comes to choosing between quantity and quality, go with quality. It is fine to publish just a single blog post every month if you cannot spend more money, but make sure that that single blog post adds value to your content marketing efforts and isn’t just there to fill up random gaps or just to cover keywords.
You should document your quality assurance guidelines. This way, whenever you have a new blog post or an article, you can quickly run it through the guidelines to make sure that most of the conditions are met.
Quality also matters when you’re posting on social media. Just because you are publishing 50-100 words, it doesn’t mean that the content that you publish on LinkedIn, Twitter or Instagram is less important. They say that you should let your hair loose on social media and social networking websites. Although this is fine, every message represents your brand. So, keep that in mind.
Your content writing quality assurance must include your vision
Content writing quality assurance shouldn’t be an afterthought. It should represent your overall business and content marketing vision.
A couple of days ago I was talking to a client, and he has a very clear idea of what he wants to publish for his blogs. He doesn’t want to follow the hackneyed path. He knows how he wants to engage his audience and for that, what type of content he must publish (and I must write). This clarity should be there in your content writing quality assurance guidelines.
Should the creativity of your content writer be sacrificed at the altar of quality assurance?
Not necessarily. Remember that your content exists to engage and inform your audience. Therefore, choose a content writer with whom you can feel the synergy.
Having a clearly defined set of quality assurance guidelines doesn’t mean you don’t let your content writer do his or her own thing. In fact, an effective content writer is always quite individualistic.
Clients who have been working with me for a couple of years keep coming back to me not just for my content writing skills, but for the way I write. But, it doesn’t mean I write something that is not going to add value to their content marketing efforts write in a manner that goes contrary to their vision or quality assurance guidelines.