Having a centralised content strategy would help
You have created an awesome video, written a gripping article or drawn a masterpiece. You publish to your website and social channels. Being a good marketer, you then amplify the reach of your content by posting, pushing, advertising and emailing your content to all your selected audiences through all the channels that you are present on and it goes viral!
At least that would be the best practice for getting your content seen, wouldn’t it?
Firstly, that isn’t what a lot of content creators in big brands are doing. And the reason for this is mostly due to silos and not having a centralised content strategy. Content is created in one place for one purpose and not shared to all other channels and departments. Not only is this suboptimal for the management of content it is not the ideal customer experience. Without a centralised content strategy, content often goes unseen because it is not amplified in some way. This on its own is waste that we should be taking a good hard look at.
Secondly, if you had a centralised content strategy you would have each piece of content in a sequence or map, so you wouldn’t necessarily amplify each item. In a mapped approach you are not measuring the performance of one item of content but all content within a journey and the audience that are travelling that journey. Amplification is performed at the beginning of the journey to attract your audience. If an item of content is not performing within the context of the journey you can swap it out.
Thirdly, do you remember those personas you spent ages workshopping and are now gathering real or virtual dust in some folder somewhere? Well, if you want your content to be consumed then it needs to be contextually relevant for your target audience. The persona work helped you identify what is contextually relevant, but now you need to ensure that the right content is reaching the right audience or, funnily enough, they won’t bother to consume it as it’s simply not interesting to them.
So, what to do? For a start, stop treating content strategy as simply the creation of content. You need a strategy that is audience-centric, putting their needs first. Then you need to understand their content journey and make sure you have all the content they will need to progress from engagement to purchase and beyond. Then, and only then, can you have a fighting chance of having content that is always consumed.
This article was originally published on odyssiant.com
