What is Content?

A King We Can’t Qualify

As ubiquitous as Christmas but as tangible as Santa Claus, ‘content’ represents, we’re told, a huge marketing opportunity. If only digital agencies could agree what it was, how it works, and who owns it.

Indecision and disagreement on these seemingly basic elements means marketing agencies can follow near-identical internal structures… until it comes to the ‘content team’. No two process flows match up, no two job profiles are the same (that the job titles may match regardless just adds to the confusion). What sits in one department in one agency, sits somewhere else in another.

Does this matter? Internal structures, line managers, reporting flows — should we care? It would be nice to live in a world where they didn’t and the work was just the work, but impose any organisational structure on something when you’re not really sure what it is, or who should ‘own’ that process, and it feels like a mess. It gets marginalised for work streams that make more sense and people feel more comfortable with. It can never reach its full potential.

For experts in the field, looking to move from one agency setup to another, this can be a challenge. First the candidate has to explain, in detail, how they have worked in the content environment. Then the employer has to explain how they work. Both sides then need to cross examine each other to work out whether they fit together. Only if they maybe possibly do can you get down to establishing whether you need each other.

If you struggle to understand it yourself, how can potential clients, speaking to multiple agencies with their distinct setups, ever hope to?

Content fit for a king

The phrase ‘content is king’ is seemingly traced back to a Bill Gates essay published by Microsoft in 1996. Gates suggested that it would be content that would represent the monetising potential of the nascent world wide web. His essay is set against the background of Microsoft joining forces with television channel NBC to create MSNBC, so it’s not surprising that he uses television as his yardstick for future growth. He notes that “the broad opportunities for most companies involve supplying information or entertainment”.

Was he right? Kind of. Ironically, broadcast television and traditional media have suffered hugely from the impact of the internet, and it’s taken them a long time to turn to web-based models to bring themselves into the internet age. The lines are blurred, but it’s hard to make a case that it’s the content creators who made the most money out of the internet. It’s the companies, like Microsoft, like Google, YouTube, Facebook and Twitter, that connect you to the content that have really thrived. ‘Supplying’ entertainment no longer means you have to make it. Not great for the television networks, or the newspapers, but then again they themselves were making huge amount of money from the creators for decades.

Anyway, the ‘content is king’ phrase was latched on to in the early 2010s, by marketers flummoxed by Google’s repeated assertions that it didn’t want people trying to game its algorithm with their blackhat SEO. Finally the message sunk in: you will be found if your website is worth finding.

‘Content’ became the answer, but then quickly became a problem. How do we best use it? How can it help all our work streams? Content is part of our PR strategies, but also our SEO campaigns; it’s also part of our creative, our brand work. It needs to add depth to our social. Everyone needs to use it. Who gets to decide how it’s done? And where do they fit into our agency model?

I’m yet to meet a marketing agency that is not wrestling with these questions on a near-enough continual basis. Any seeming consensus representing nothing more than a fragile truce, open for debate, challenge and overrule. A land grab.

Why you’re backwards

Perhaps fittingly for an article about the development of the internet, there’s detail in Gates’ essay that has been overlooked in favour of the soundbite. He touches on the answer to ‘what is content?’:

“When it comes to an interactive network such as the Internet, the definition of ‘content’ becomes very wide. For example, computer software is a form of content — an extremely important one, and the one that for Microsoft will remain by far the most important.”

Effective marketing is a very complex, very skilled discipline. But fundamentally, it’s very simple: communicate the right brand messages to the right people. Content is anything that communicates those messages. From the words people read to the images they see, to the very website they view or the app they use. It’s all ‘content’.

From this perspective, content is not an aspect of your marketing that needs to fit in somewhere — it is your marketing.

It’s the whole reason it is exists, and this is why so many agencies have it backwards.

How can you make something that underpins every activity a strand of one of those activities?

It shouldn’t be about ‘how can PR/SEO/social/paid media use content?’ It should be ‘how can content can use PR/SEO/social/paid media?’.

Make it easy, make it fit

If you were to build a marketing agency from scratch, to service the world of digital marketing as we know it now, how would you do it?

Instead of working out an SEO strategy to amplify web pages and get more traffic and conversions, and then thinking about what to put on those pages, or planning a PR campaign to reach certain media and then linking it back to the brand, why not think about what you want to tell customers about this brand, its products, its services?

Start a client process with establishment of what you want to communicate through the website and the best ways in which to do it — this is the ‘content’. Then work out all the ways that someone might find that information — these are the activity streams you need to plan.

Build an SEO strategy, a PR campaign, a social strategy and a paid media plan that reaches them at all the different potential stages of that journey. This is telling people information they want to hear, when they want to hear it. This is marketing.

Your ‘content team’ doesn’t fit in your agency structure because it’s not solely a function of any of those teams; it’s the reason they exist in the first place. Let the content guide your activity.

If content truly was king, it wouldn’t take orders. It would give them.