With so much talk over the future of content, it’s time to ignore the hype and get back to basics.
Whether we like it or not, the word ‘content’ has come to encompass a whole breadth of publishing formats. If we accept advertising legend Dave Trott’s point that ‘content’ in its broadest sense is simply a delivery mechanism we can then move on and focus on what we should deliver.
The challenge for organisations is that the pressure to become a regular publisher of content has turned the Internet into a wild cacophony of noise, and not all of it useful or of high quality.
To understand what constitutes ‘useful’ content, we need to strip it back to basics: people. Who are the target audience? And what’s the purpose of the content being served to them?
Who is the audience?
As brands and their agencies taken on the mantel of publisher, it is critical they have a journalistic background. Journalists’ audiences are real people, not corporations, so they know how to structure the story and always relate it back to them. If they confuse, bore or patronise their audience, they lose it and will struggle to win it back.
The same goes for brand publishers. People must come first. What are their audience’s issues, and how can our brand help them solve them? It’s not about the product functions, it’s about the real ways those functions can help people.
Our content must achieve emotional resonance.
What’s the mission of your content?
In the same way organizations should not issue press releases when they contain no news, brands should not publish content until they are clear on its true purpose. Otherwise we’re just adding to the noise.
Each piece of content, whether it is a video, podcast or simple Twitter card, needs to have an objective. Is it to entertain, educate, instruct? Where does your content fit into the wider decision journey of your target audience; are you driving brand awareness or advocacy, for example? Are you clear on the action you would like them to make and how this could potentially benefit them? Have you factored in the device from which they’re most likely to be consuming your content?
These are elements that we as marketers should feature in our content calendars so that every time we publish we are disciplined in who we’re trying to reach, and relevant when they interact with our content.
Embrace the a paid media future
I once heard someone say that if your content is good enough it will be found, and I agree to an extent. Content nowadays has to be extraordinary and have the catalyst of an influencer to give it wings.
For everything else, there’s paid media. Grayling’s Global Director of Digital Marketing, Jan Mikulin, recently spoke at a UK Public Relations Consultants Association (PRCA) debate on the future of paid and the consensus among consultants present was that paid media is going to feature heavily in future campaign planning and execution.
In conclusion, if we want our content to resonate and achieve our business objectives, then we need to make it useful, people-centric, visually stimulating and we need to be prepared to have to pay for it to be seen by audiences beyond our existing online communities.
Source:Grayling
