Why Content Is More King Than Ever

How a good content strategy can get your business heard by the people that matter most.

The saying “content is king” has stood the test of time, however, in our digitised world, content has, more or less, become synonymous with marketing; words are written to sell stuff. With content of all sorts crowding online channels, ensuring that your content gets the attention of your target audience is increasingly difficult. There’s such an information overflow that audiences are getting more discerning and critical of what they want to spend time on reading, and pushy sales pitches or superfluous chatter ain’t it.

So… as a company, what should you do? The answer is to create value-driven content. Focus on what your audience needs and wants, not what your company needs or wants. Be helpful by offering content that answers your audience’s questions, and provides useful information, and relevant insights. Acknowledge your audience’s needs by creating content that is of high value to them, content that is engaging and most importantly helpful.

There are multiple ways to get relevant, value-driven content across to your audience: blogs, websites, emails, social media platforms, white papers, newsletters, webinars, videos etc. But you need to stop, think and plan ahead first. Set out a content plan that will enable you to come across as an empathetic and authentic brand to both existing and potential customers, while keeping the conversation relevant to your business or industry.

Develop a content strategy

A content strategy is the difference between publishing random words to knowing what to say, when, where, and to whom. While the discipline of content planning is nothing new, I’m still surprised as to how often companies drop the communication strategy part and jump straight into content creation.

“We need a blog”, “we need to go viral on social media”, “let’s get some videos out there” are all too common phrases. This kind of panicked push will do nothing for you. Instead you need to take the conversation straight back to basics: communication strategy and content planning.

Here are five questions you should ask yourself before creating content

1. Why do you need it? What are your strategic objectives and how is this piece of content going to help you achieve your goals?

2. Who should be reading it? What’s your target audience and what do you want your audience to do once they’ve consumed the content?

3. What are you going to say? What are your key messages and how are they relevant to your audience?

4. Where will this piece of content fit into your overall marketing plan? What other channels are you using and where does this piece fit in?

5. How are you going to measure success? – what metrics are you going to use to track the ROI on your content?

As Seth Godin says: “It might be that instead of spending more time looking for a louder platform, you could profit from digging in and doing the hard work of figuring out the change you seek to make. If you’re unable to influence one person in a face to face meeting, all the tech in the world isn’t going to help you change a million people.”

By Cristina Kristensen, Director of Communications