This Ain’t No Russian Novel. Thank God. Content in 2023 - What It Should Be.

Let’s take the term “content”. 

It’s just so generic. 

It’s interesting to me, and why we as marketers have claimed that specific term as the bedrock of digital marketing efforts. 

It’s like the term “authentic” - another term we grabbed onto to describe experiences. 

Why did we grab onto these terms? 

We’re lazy. Content is a wide reaching term that can be almost any brand-produced noun. 

For “authentic”, well, the cool kids were using it and we glommed on.

The truth is, everything we produce is content. In the same way that every experience is authentic - it could be ginned up, fake and crazy - but “fake” is an authentic experience, too. Ask my first wife.  

Content has become another shorthand grab bag for anything we produce. And that would be okay if there were some sort of delineation between content that just gets produced, and content that gets produced with purpose. Content that’s good. 

The problem is that we produce so little content that’s good. “Content” is a big, simple word with no real boundary around it. And sometimes we produce content because we’re told to, because we think that just putting something out there will work, or because our neighbors are. But those aren’t good reasons to produce anything - and if you don’t have a good reason to do something, the fruits of those labors will always be tainted. 

So - I say let’s make a stand and make sure that anytime we produce anything remotely resembling content, it does a few things well.

Always Provide Value

Content, as its sole raison d'etre, should provide something more than it’s asking its audience. 

That means that if we’re expecting someone to read our 25 page whitepaper, it better have a whole lot of new and interesting information - and not just a meta-analysis of other whitepapers or position pieces. I should leave the investment of 25 minutes (lots of pictures and graphs) with more than 25 minutes of value. It should inform me and…

Take A Stand

Content is your opportunity to prove why your product is better than competitors. BUT - it’s not espousing a series of functional and emotional benefits. It’s about displaying why your product is on the right side of the issue, how it serves people well, and the benefits that automatically come out of the approach that your product embodies. That requires taking a hard and fast position on industry trends, being educational on tech happenings, not just talking about yourself, and…

Creating Interaction

Digital content should be interactive. Done. If it isn’t, you’ve missed the point. Does that mean that every infographic is now a calculator? No - but if you’re using social media to disseminate an article, you should be starting a conversation (or trying to), even if no one is listening. It should leave your potential customers with answers, interest, and desire, and ultimately get them talking about you, because those conversations…

Build Brand Advocacy

And at the end of the day, that’s all you want your content to do. That means a boring 25 page whitepaper is going to be more memorable for not being read than being interesting enough to share. That means that a video case study illustrates what was done right, and not just what was done, with a hale and hearty pat on the brand back. It creates a need to talk about the brand. 

Does all content need to do this all the time? Ideally, yes - it should be a north star or part of your best practices or your playbook or whatever. Every piece of content should be subject to these at every point in production - and if, at the end, it hasn’t lived up to it, do it again.

So many brands are doing this badly - it’s truly an opportunity to do something good at absolutely zero cost (because you already have someone producing content). How?

*Required plug.

We help brands figure out their content strategy and help them build the playbooks or processes designed around where they are, what they are, and who they want to be. We work with their editorial teams to build something effective and useful and - efficient - so that work of high quality gets put out into the aether fully formed quickly, and ensure processes are in place so that your content doesn’t revert to being the same fluffy pancake of nothingness everyone else’s is. 

In short - we help you become the badass you think you should be.