Content marketing has evolved to become a unique field within the marketing industry. One of the things that businesses have realized when it comes to content marketing is that quality trumps quantity. Companies have understood these developments, and as a result, have been taking more notice of what they share with their audience.

How does a business go about determining if their content is good enough to inform, educate and engage its customers? To answer this question, we consulted 16 experts from Forbes Agency Council about their own experience with content quality assessment. They share their favorite methods below.

1. Do A Little Research

One of the more proven strategies to ensure you’re creating content consumers want is by leveraging properties that allow said consumers to ask their questions. Quora is one such property. Find a relevant category and look for questions that may be trending. Be sure to be as helpful with your response as you can. In doing so, you may find you’ve discovered something new to write about. – Stephen Kleiner, Bloom Ads Global Media Group

2. Look At Relevant KPIs

Quality content can be assessed by looking at KPIs (key performance indicators) including search visibility, dwell time and engagement. Search visibility shows how a website’s content ranks for a wide range of keyword combinations. Dwell time reveals the length of time a person spends looking at a web page’s content, and engagement measures the interests, opinions and thoughts of the reader. – Don Dodds, M16 Marketing

3. Start With Your Sales Team

“Quality” content is in the eye of the beholder — in this case, the customer. Starting with your sales team to find out what prospects are asking about and wanting to solve lets the marketing team focus on how to tell the story of how your brand can uniquely solve those issues. When you can answer questions before they’re asked in your own way tied to your brand values, that’s a quality promise. – Courtney Smith Kramer, Co-Active Training Institute / Co-founder PureMatter

4. Use Data And Analytics Tools

Instead of making assumptions about what your target audience finds useful, use data to see what actually resonates with them. Use analytics tools to understand how your content is being shared on social media and how it compares to your competitors. Dive into what types of content have been most successful for you and your competitors, and use that to assess your content’s quality. – JP Johl, AdTribute

5. Conduct A Content Audit

A content audit enables you to take a deep look at the strengths and weaknesses of your current content strategy in order to determine how to improve moving forward. A complete content audit includes assessing your current topics, link structure, metadata and so on. This allows you to identify gaps and pitfalls in your current content strategy that you can use to improve future marketing campaigns. – Adam Binder, Creative Click Media

6. View Its Quality In A Rounded Way

Impressions, interactions, consumption and the relationship between each are important data to understand in order to answer questions such as, “Is there enough?”, “Was it pitched at the right audience?”, “Was it the right ‘quality’?” But the eyes of your experienced content experts are still important perspectives to complement the data-driven universe. – Ken Mainardis, Getty Images

7. Monitor Engagement Statistics

The best way to assess the quality of your content is to monitor the engagement stats — views, shares, likes, comments and subscribes. If you’re new to generating content, take a look at your competition’s content and engagement. What generates the most buzz? Assessing engagement is a great way to give your audience more of what they want and stay top of mind. – Chelsey Pendock, Innovision Advertising

8. Ask Yourself If You Like It

If you, as a user, wouldn’t engage with your own content, it’s probably not ready for prime time. Before you hit publish, ask yourself, “Does the content inform, inspire or entertain you?”, “Does it serve a purpose aside from promoting your own business and agenda?” Make sure you’ve answered “yes” to both before putting it out into the world. – Kate Weidner , SRW

9. Determine How Much Value It Gives

By giving people a tremendous amount of value in the content that gets put out, you immediately build trust. People still buy from people and trust matters now more than ever. – Seth Winterer, Digital Logic

10. Work With Professional Editors

You should not have the same person who is writing content be the one editing it. Instead, hire an editor or work with an agency that has professional editors to review your content for grammar and style and ensure you’ve cited the correct sources and that the content flows organically. Editors do a lot more than catch misplaced commas, and they are well worth the investment. – Kelsey Raymond, Influence & Co.

11. Look At Your Biggest Competitors

Research is crucial when it comes to generating engaging content. Looking at your biggest competition and what they’re putting out in terms of content, be on top of what’s trending in your industry. Try and emulate what’s getting good engagement and make it better by adding more personality to it. – Sam Founda, Social Connection

12. Check Traffic And Rankings

Days after you’ve posted the content and made sure Google was aware of it, we suggest taking a look at the organic page traffic, number of associated indexed keywords and the rankings of those keywords. If you’ve written something of high quality that’s helpful to your buyers and also has demand in your marketplace, Google will reward that page over time with more views. – Dustin DeTorres, DeTorres Group

13. Plan Ahead With A Survey

Putting together a survey to assess key messaging to a targeted audience before going wide is an important tactic to build into your strategy. Before investing valuable time and resources in messaging that may not have the impact you initially thought, a survey gives you the opportunity to readjust on a cost-effective and targeted basis. – Jessica Hawthorne-Castro, Hawthorne LLC

14. Assess If It’s Useful For Non-Customers

Ask yourself this question when reviewing a concept for any new piece of content: “Will this piece be useful to someone who is not a customer of mine, and might not ever be?” That question helps you determine if the content is valuable to a broader audience or simply serves as a soft promotion for your products. The best performing content is objective and product-neutral. – Amith Nagarajan, rasa.io

15. Aim To Answer Ideal Customers’ Questions

As a business, we’ve hired consultants to deep dive into our client’s psyche to understand their top questions and concerns in doing business with us. This has led us to a list of five key questions all prospective clients ask. One way we assess the quality of the content we put out is to ask ourselves if this content is going to help answer or provoke thought around one of those questions. – Patrick Dillon, WISE Digital Partners

16. Evaluate Relevance By Using Personalized Visuals

Quality content is increasingly rooted in relevance. Brands can tap into user-generated content (UGC) to create highly personalized messages through regional, demographic and culturally-specific imagery. Consumers want to see themselves, their lives and, subsequently, their needs reflected in the brands they support, which cultivates a high-quality overall brand experience. – Analisa Goodin, Catch&Release