2015: the year of choose your own content

Businesses are spending more time and money than ever before on generating content. We are drowning in a sea of pithy blogs, in-depth whitepapers and tongue in cheek videos. But are we all a bit too obsessed with getting as much out there on as many topics as possible? Wouldn’t it be better to take a step back and give people the choice as to how they want to consume that awe inspiring opinion piece you’ve just written?

As marketers and communication pros, we’re (mostly) pretty good at understanding our audiences’ interests and preferences and are able to apply that knowledge to our content creation, but what about its delivery?

Whether written, visual or audio, we think choice in content delivery is going to be one of the most important trends of the coming year — it distinguishes us as individuals in terms of content consumption and unites us in our desire to control who interacts with us and how.

I’m an individual and I want a podcast.

Where would we be in marketing if we didn’t have a buzzword to describe a practice or process? Business to Individual (B2i) marketing is by no means a new concept, it’s been scribbled on whiteboards and etched on tablets (the digital kind) in fashionable marketing meeting rooms across the globe for some time.

The big focus area of B2i marketing is of course understanding what an individual rather than a mass market will respond to in terms of marketing collateral and initiatives. On a content level it’s almost entirely focused on understanding what subject areas and topics are going to get the individual to pay attention to you and your brand. But then the individual targeting stops there.

Sweeping generalisations are made as to how the content will be delivered. ‘Oh well this individual is an 18 something male, so they must love Tumblr, a blog it is then’ — content delivery decision made. But that’s a half-baked approach. The method of delivery is utterly crucial, and what’s more there is certainly no one size fits all.

Marketers are now beginning to thoroughly investigate the different ways in which content will be consumed by the individual. If you’ve got the time, you might well spend thirty minutes reading a whitepaper on ‘The Merits of Underwater Basket Weaving’ online, but you might want to download it as an audio file to be enjoyed on a crowded commute home, or indeed the finer points of aquatic crafts presented to you as an engaging video. The crucial thing to understand here is that the theme remains the same, the time is spent on giving people the option as to how they engage with that theme.

A perfect example of this in practice came from The Economist. Of course, The Economist already provides choice to its subscribers, with not only a digital and print version of its newspaper, but a downloadable audio book as well.

In a recent essay on the future of the book, they presented the perfect example of Choose Your Own Content in action. A delicious bit of content presented in a way that allowed the reader/listener to make the choice for themselves as to how to consume it.

This approach is a shining example of what’s to come. Undoubtedly big media organisations will lead the charge, but other brands from other industries will follow. We’ll see a marketing world where providing choice of content consumption is given as much thought and time as the topic of the content itself.

Informing the individual

Big media will lead the way in Choose Your Own Content and an extraordinary example of the power of providing choice has already come from the BBC. In the 1980s/90s the BBC undertook a significant campaign to educate as many people as possible on the effects, causes and symptoms of HIV/Aids

What’s changed over the thirty or so years since the Beeb’s reporting on HIV/Aids is the number of channels available to reach the eyes and ears of people across the globe.

Of course, TV and radio are playing an important role in delivering information across West Africa right now. But with over 250 million mobile subscribers in sub-Saharan Africa, mobile is a channel that must be utilised.

What’s interesting is that when it came to raising awareness of Ebola, the BBC chose WhatsApp as the delivery method for information and content. They did this, not just because of its usage (the most popular chat app in Western Africa), but because of its versatility in delivering the same information in as many forms as possible.

Compared to the West, smartphone penetration is still relatively low in sub-Saharan Africa, so video and rich media is not necessarily the best method of delivery. What’s more, literacy is not a guarantee either. As such, a mix of content needed to be delivered to ensure information got through to different individuals with different consumption habits.

Image, text and audio all had to be utilised. There is no one size fits all, but it must be applauded that the BBC is not resting on its laurels in terms of delivering content across channels it knows best. Rather, it’s analysing the statistics then marrying different content types with a single, widely used, platform across a vastly adopted technology.

A masterclass in content delivery as part of a very noble quest. A lot can be learnt from this, mobile in particular offers a variety of opportunities for vital government communications to be delivered across a single technology via multiple platforms. Reaching out to citizens in a way that allows them to choose how to be communicated with should stimulate a more informed and engaged public. So expect governments to follow in the footsteps of big media in the way they use different forms of content to get their message across.

Advertising to the individual

Individual empowerment in content consumption doesn’t stop there.

The world is privacy obsessed and secure alternatives to data-hungry ad-based platforms are becoming increasingly common — just look at the fact DuckDuckGo is now a default browser setting for your iPhone. People are switching off but worst of all, as a brand looking to advertise your content, you will probably never even know about it.

In response, behavioural targeting is being replaced in some corners by incentivised systems that actively encourage users to opt in and choose their ads. Rather than giving viewers the opportunity to get back to their favourite vlogger or latest TV series faster by skipping ads, platforms like Ad Points actively invite users to watch ads of their choosing in return for set rewards.

It’s far from a silver bullet, and it’s difficult to measure how effective these techniques have been so far. But what is clear is that it’s increasingly hard to land the right content in your audience’s lap.

Empowering the individual

With that in mind, and all things considered, it’s time to go the extra mile.

Rather than stopping at the point of identifying and reflecting your audiences’ passions and interests in content and across channels you deem relevant, why not hand over the reins? Want more for your audience this year, they’ll appreciate you for it.

This article comes from our Digital Trends Report — your guide to the digital trends that will shape marketing and communications in 2015. To learn more about what else we expect from the year ahead, check out the full report or come to our launch event.