Providing Feedback on Content

As a standard part of our process, all content we produce comes with one round of “reasonable revisions”.

We’ve noticed that there is some confusion around what we mean by that, what sort of feedback is helpful and what isn’t, and more. This guide is meant to clarify that.

In order to produce reasonable revisions, we have to start with reasonable feedback. So - what does “reasonable feedback” actually mean?

What Isn’t “Reasonable Feedback”

At its core, reasonable feedback is appropriate for the stage of the content production process we’re at when you review the content.

Because the content you review as a client has already been taken from initial concept to rough draft, draft to polished content, then undergone our internal editorial review - it’s nearly ready to publish.

Your review as a client is either the last or next-to-last step before the content is published. Thus, it’s too late to change the entire focus of the content, drastically change the structure, or change what medium the content is delivered in.

Reasonable feedback doesn’t do the following:

• Change the topic
  If the piece is on-site content, you'll have (or have had) the opportunity to provide feedback when the editorial calendar is/was presented. If it’s off-site content, we’ve carefully tailored the topic to fit our target publication, their audience, and allow us to work in links to your site contextually. Furthermore, offsite content topics are cleared with the publication's editorial team before drafting. Changing it that late in the game would be shooting ourselves in the foot.
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• Change the medium
  We can’t turn an article into a video, or a whitepaper into an interactive calculator this late in the game. Again, that sort of feedback should have be provided when we present the editorial calendar.
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• Drastically change the structure
  While reordering a section or two isn’t out of the question (especially if it enhances clarity), we can’t be changing the entire informational hierarchy, completely changing the story arc of narrative elements, etc.
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• Impose new editorial standards
  We strive to produce clear, engaging content that aligns with your brand voice, and speaks directly to potential customers. Revision requests that attempt to assign new metrics, or which otherwise fall outside of the items listed below, will be considered a scope change (resulting in additional fees) and will slow down our timeline to publishing new content.

What “Reasonable Feedback” Does Look Like

So what does good feedback look like? It depends on the context.

In general, we can lump content into two different categories - the content we produce for your website (on-site content), and the content we produce for other sites to support our linkbuilding efforts (off-site content).

On-site content warrants more scrutiny than off-site, because it’s truly representative of your brand, and we often want it to rank for valuable search terms.

Off-site content, on the other hand, doesn’t warrant as much scrutiny. We’ll be tailoring both the topic and how the post is written to the target publication & their audience. Sometimes that means we produce a piece that wouldn’t work if it was published on your website - that’s okay.

Here’s what you should be looking for & providing notes on with each content type: