Creating content without a clear vision and strategy will lead you down a fruitless and costly path, writes Andrew Coroneo
The velocity at which content marketing has developed across the Middle East over the past few years has been remarkable. Whether through the adoption of new social platforms, collaborative partnerships with publishers or standalone ‘spectaculars’ (e.g. Coke Studio, Maggi Diaries), brands have been pushing more marketing dollars to content led initiatives.
Yet can you recall something that sticks in the mind? What brands do you go to as an authoritative information source or for their perspective on a subject? What brand sticks in the memory as one you want to hear their opinion on relevant subjects? Chances are the majority of us will not be able to think of one relevant example, highlighting that brands lack a meaningful connection in their interactions with people.
There are a number of factors in play as to why brands struggle to be relevant, none more so than the ever increasing volume of mundane content produced by brands and a lack of investment to cut through via distribution. Creating content for the sake of it, without a clear vision and strategy in place as to the role it is to play in your organisations overall business vision, will lead you down a fruitless and costly path.
But it does not have to be all doom and gloom. All the tools are out there to make content a successful, central pillar to your marketing strategy, start with a vision of the role it is to play.
Casting our gaze globally, we can see how others have made a success of their content strategies, in particular in the B2B space we have the rise of the ‘content brand’. These are brands that have built dedicated platforms outside of the usual brand website, not just run a blog on their existing site.
BRANDS ARE NOW PUBLISHERS
This means working with internal and external creators, publishing partners and also leveraging relevant, third party content through carefully curated sources, and making sure distribution and amplification tactics are in place to make sure relevant people are exposed at scale; making a fundamental shift to embrace organic marketing principles that focus more importance on owned, earned and shared, than purely paid media alone.
Yet ‘content brands’ are not slashing paid media investments but utilising it in smarter ways that connect their various tactics to a single end goal. Brands such as Adobe (CMO) and Capgemini (Content Loop) have created standalone platforms that attract users through the likes of search engine optimisation (making sure content is discoverable organically), native advertising (e.g. publishers such as The Economist) and content distribution (Outbrain or Adzouk).
Consumer facing brands have also embraced a publisher mentality with the likes of fashion e-commerce platform Mr. Porter launching a weekly digital publication (The Journal) and Ford Motor Company (one of the few regional ‘content brands’) which has a diverse record in content marketing.
By using paid media in this manner they are able to draw users into the content ecosystem and start creating more personalised content that is relevant to each person. This does not mean you as a marketer have licence to spam people with generic ads via retargeting. But it provides a means for you to understand what is relevant to your audience and create content that serves that need, building relevance with consumers at the same time through a more considered content creation strategy.
So how can you as a brand marketer ensure you have enough relevant content to fuel these one too few engagements though? Successful ‘content brands’ use a variety of tactics (whether it is audio visual, essays or infographics), creators and sources to ensure they have a constantly growing ecosystem to tap into to fuel this long-term. The role of ad-tech and content-tech is enabling brands to source and curate larger volumes of quality content from leading publishers to feed such ecosystems (e.g. Newscred has access to thousands of global publishers for brands to license existing content or even licence to create new content).
This technology also enables brands to learn what works best for certain audiences, allowing for faster optimisation and delivery of new content that has more resonance with the end user. Smart ‘content brands’ also use these insights to fuel micro-moments on social platforms and understand that as more time is spent primarily on small screens, this micro-content is an increasingly important tactic.
Each of these components are critical to being a successful content brand. It cannot be a case of build it and they will come, nor should you be investing heavily on amplifying mundane content that’s not relevant to what your brand proposition is about. Successful content brands are not afraid of investment to test, learn and adapt as they go – where you start should not be where you are in 12 months’ time.
In the Middle East true ‘content brands’ are few and far between. Will 2016 be the year regional brands are bold enough to take that step?
Andrew Coroneo is director of strategy and insights at Havas Media