If you've scrolled through social media feeds before, there's a good chance you've ignored more than a few articles. Do you know why you did it? Was it because of a poorly-worded headline? Or maybe the piece addressed an issue you aren't familiar with? Content marketers might say “Well, you weren't the intended audience.”

I say “bollocks”. Your content may just not be good enough.

Consider this; we live in a world of content overload. There's enough bytes of information out there to rewrite the history books many times over, and 99% of it is crap – usually written by someone with a minute understanding of what's actually being said. What audiences get are echoes of past ideas -- regurgitated fluff meant to be slapped on a business blog because writers and marketers don't have the time or resources to come up with original materials. As a result, content marketing's effectiveness is waning.

This state of content marketing reminds me of the journalism industry's failings more than a decade earlier. As the competition brought by the emergence of the Internet squeezed newsrooms to work on a dime, quality suffered. Eventually, businesses went under. Looking back to this earlier crisis gives content marketers some solutions.

Back in My Day...

The journalism industry before the Internet was very similar to the early state of content marketing. Markets weren't overloaded with competition, and your most basic articles could get some play. For example, in a small town, if you're the only journalist writing about local politics, you're going to get readerss. Similarly, early content marketers could find a lot of effectiveness defining their niches and writing the routine. Within our own little communities, we had interested audiences.

The Internet rocked this journalistic assumption. Suddenly, the beat writer became just one more voice among thousands of bloggers. National news outlets now had to duke it out with millions of self-proclaimed blogger-journalists competing for space. As a result, many publications didn't survive the Internet's dawn. In the same vein, when content marketing was new, savvy writers could grab substantial market share if they could release almost anything related to their audience. But that effectiveness attracted more practitioners, and today, many content marketers are starting to see the same sort of competition journalists faced when the Internet dramatically changed their duties.

As for those articles you glanced over, they're the result of the old philosophy of content marketing that has not considered what the overload means. Slaving away at their keyboards, these content marketers fail to realize that their words aren't starting conversations – they're ending them.

Quality Vs. Niche

So what did the journalism industry do to survive? After realizing that market share had to be fought over, there were two responses. Some publications specialized. Most likely, they downsized their staffs and started writing to engage a very specific demographic. They carved out tiny niches. They set up camp, and if too many competitors tried to push them out, they found a smaller niche and staked their claim.

Forward-thinking publications turned to quality. Instead of seeing the competition as a major problem, they thought of it as a challenge. They spent more time finding new ideas and new stories – different angles of existing problems, connecting dots, telling real stories with real people, incorporating new mediums and experimenting. Sometimes, they lost the fight, but they always pushed. In the end, they realized that the best stories rose to the top of the heap. These publications grew. They gained more readers, and they survived the journalism crisis.

That's where newspapers failed. Old school newspapermen (and women) write to sell papers. The humble broadsheet, however, is just a medium. And it's a terrible one. It's inflexible. It lacks measurable data feedback, and worst of all, it's a one-sided conversation. Journalists who realized that quality content is key embraced digital media, and they started experimenting, optimizing and making sure that readers kept coming back because of high quality standards.

In regards to content marketing, businesses have to make same choice. They can either 1. Buckle down, find their niche and write to very specific problems to attract some of those long-tail audience members or 2. They can realize that content quality is the tool needed to stand out from the masses.

So What Are You Going to Choose?

Both styles can work in the right circumstances. Journalism has taught us that. Businesses, however, have to realize that content marketers are now working under different circumstances – a simple business blog isn't going to cut it – and if that business is dedicated to major growth, it's going to have to start considering some high quality work. That means true investment, higher standards and actually pushing your industry's conversation forward instead of repeating decades-old talking points.

A version of this blog was originally published on LinkedIn Pulse, which can be found here.