The Hidden Dangers of Content: The Corrosive Impact on Brand Perception

 The Hidden Dangers of Content: The Corrosive Impact on Brand Perception  Companies invest substantial resources in producing content to connect with audiences and drive business success. According to the Content Marketing Institute, enterprise marketers said that the top two goals content marketing has helped them achieve are creating awareness and building credibility/trust. At Knotch, we’ve seen clients use content to increase their brand sentiment by 14 percentage points, increase conversions by 3x, and decrease the time to convert by 20%.  But here’s the plot twist: Not all content is good for your brand.  A recent deep dive by Knotch into thousands of pieces of content across 12 industries revealed that a significant portion of content is actually harming brand perception. 

The Shocking Numbers

 Knotch examined performance metrics for 20,000 pieces of content from April 2022–May 2023 across industries such as banking, real estate, travel, auto and tech.  We found that a staggering 30% of content negatively impacts brand sentiment. An additional 28% has no discernible impact on audiences. In a nutshell, most content, at best, is just a brand’s equivalent of background noise. 

Call to Action: The Urgent Need for a Brand-Centric Content Strategy

 To safeguard your brand’s reputation and ensure that your content serves your brand’s best interests, brand thinking must be infused into your content strategy. The goal? Create distinctive content that not only stands out from competitors, but also provides genuine value to your audience. To provide genuine value, you need to know what your audience truly cares about. At Knotch, we’re all about helping brands discover the content that’s doing wonders for brand perception — and using it to fine-tune their content strategies. 

Beyond Engagement Metrics

 Many brands gauge content performance solely through the lens of engagement metrics. They celebrate content that garners high views, boasts impressive time on page stats, and recirculates to more content on the blog. However, a critical question often goes unanswered: how does apparently high-engaging content align with the brand’s overarching goals?  What if all that engagement is doing more harm than good for your brand? Is it still high performing if it ends up leaving audiences with negative sentiment about the brand, thereby eroding its credibility? 

The Corrosive Content Conundrum

 Through Knotch’s in-depth analysis of 20,000+ pieces of content, a subset of content appeared to be high performing from an engagement perspective. It attracted substantial views, drew impressive scroll depth and had high time on page. However, the brand sentiment associated with most of this content was lower than the industry average among engaged users. The content was indeed driving engagement, but it was simultaneously undermining the brand’s credibility. Knotch calls this “corrosive content.” 

The Anatomy of Corrosive Content

 How does content that garners high engagement end up working against a brand’s best interests? The answer often lies in unmet audience expectations.  When audiences engage with content, they are seeking answers to pressing questions. Corrosive content fails to deliver these answers, leaving audiences dissatisfied. This disconnect between audience needs and the brand’s responses creates an adverse impact on brand sentiment. Ambiguity in content is rewarded with lower brand perception. 

The 6 Catalysts to Fix Corrosive Content

 To safeguard your brand’s credibility, it’s essential to identify the components of your content strategy that are corroding it. 

1.  Clearly define your brand vision and the business outcomes that support it. A measurement framework can be a great way to document this.
2.  Ensure you have a measurement tool in place that measures brand sentiment at the individual content level. Knotch can help on this front.
3.  Map your content against your engagement and sentiment benchmarks to identify which pieces draw high engagement but fall short in terms of brand perception.
4.  Understand which “audience needs” this content fails to address and how it can be realigned with your brand’s unique perspective and expertise.
5.  Identify the characteristics of positive sentiment-driving content and apply that same criteria when revising bottom performers.
6.  Review and refine your content strategy to align with your business outcomes on a regular basis.

 Recognizing and rectifying corrosive content is the key to preserving and enhancing brand sentiment in a digital world.  Do you know what parts of your content strategy are corroding your brand credibility? Reach out to Knotch to learn how we can help.