June 10, 2015: The tactic of producing content is terrifying for the brands of today. Back in the old days, companies would simply need to buy TV ad time, hire an advertising agency to make some creative print ads and collateral, and then measure whether or not sales went up. Now, in the new age of integrated marketing, it’s no longer enough to create a winning ad or a clever jingle. Brand performance is all about the content — and it needs to stand out. If you want to appear on the search engines, mobile devices and social media services, you must have engaging content.
It’s important to understand that content creation is not a chore. It has to be part of your entire brand promise and why you’re in business in the first place. It is a critical form of communication with your customers and should be at the heart of your business. We, at Didit, have composed some tips to help you stay brave in this scary world of competitive content.
- Your content must be GOOD. Brands must invest as much in talented writers, editors, visual designers and strategists as they do in other aspects of their business. Audiences now control the terms of how they receive messaging, and they will reject your value offer if it’s not explained to them in a story that is on their terms. This means that your content must be integrated, well-designed, visually engaging, and well-written.
- Your content must be mobile. As our recent articles on Mobilegeddon have shown, we now live in a tablet, smart phone-based world. If your content is to be found online, it must be in a mobile- friendly format.
- Your content must be visual. Design is absolutely vital to standing out. You can have the best writing and data in the world, but if your content is not visually engaging and easy to digest, your point will not reach your target audience. We really like the tutorials at com and design blogs such as Design Clever for help in this area.
- Your content must be fresh. Your writers need to make sure that their research is based on current events and trends. Providing new information, that other sources can’t provide, makes your content legitimately useful and helpful, which is the soul of inbound marketing. We regularly review subject matter communities at Reddit, Quora, Tumblr, leading blogs and podcasts. An invaluable resource that shows what reporters are researching, called Help A Reporter Out, also indicates what is trending.
- Your content must be connected. Your content must be both socially shareable and authoritative. Content is shareable if it’s formatted for social media networks – visually, in terms of SEO and textually. Authoritative content comes from industry thought leaders, who have solid followings and credentials over time, as opposed to mere celebrities. Guy Kawasaki, Seth Godin and Brian Solis are great examples of experts who back their shareable content with hard data across multiple formats and channels.
- Your content must be partnered. Strong content partnerships help to spread your content and show that your brand is worth listening to. When your content appears on a highly-regarded partner website you gain a share of your partner’s credibility and get access to their followers. When your partner’s content appears on your site, the converse happens. One of the best examples of this is Ted Talks, which recruits the best experts and then spreads their content across multiple platforms. This can be measured with most analytics and social listening packages, such as Vocus.
- Your content must be backed by research. In order to earn trust, your content needs to be verifiable, cited, and researched. Wikipedia has earned its Alexa rank of 381,803 by its rigorous insistence on reference links, annotation and citations in its articles. Likewise, smaller content providers such as Snopes and the YouTube video series, Extra Creditz, use rigorous research in their content matter.
- Your content must be measured. Using content tracking and inbound marketing tools such as Google Analytics, Buzzsumo and HubSpot are now standard for measuring content performance. Using methods such as A/B testing, tracking engagement numbers and even measuring simple page views can let you know how your audience is responding to your content and guide the direction of your content development. Even a simple sharing tool such as ly gives important sharing and social numbers.
