Content is king!
Content is King. Really?
I’m quite sure you’ve heard the quote “Content is king” before, so it’s not a new concept. My objective writing this article is to discuss about it, but also to propose an “evolution” to this quote by adding two other important elements that are helpful as they make possible to reach more people bringing knowledge to them.
I hope I don’t create any type of frustration saying that, but content without distribution and data, can be a king, but the king of a broken kingdom.
Doesn’t matter how good your content is, if it doesn’t reach out the right audience, all effort invested by your teams writing a great piece of knowledge, will be lost as the content will never be seen by your customers, so no benefit to your customers and no return to your company.
Unfortunately, the equation is simple like that: great content seen by no one is equal to no value.
So, with that, we all agree the importance of good content to customers, but we also must ensure this content reaches the customers at the right moment and channel. This is what we call Distribution, and here we are adding one more phrase to our initial quote: “Content is king. Distribution is queen”.
There is an important part that I will be talking about in a different article, regarding your content reaching out the right customer, and not every customer. Know your customers, understanding where they are in their journey has a high impact for your business, no matter what type of business you are. Content is not one size fits all, and the most important is to ensure you have generic, but also specialized content to help all types of customers.
For now, please record this sentence: “Content is not one size fits all”.
Now that you have relevant content prepared and your customers get to know about it, you can say that you have everything you need, right? No. There is a 3rd and important piece that will grow our quote once more.
The 3rd part is data and it splits in two parts: your objectives and the feedback provided by customers. We will be discussing these two parts later on this article, but for now I want you to think about your objectives when launching a new piece of content on your company website, how these objectives connect to the corporate objectives, and how you measure it.
With that, we are now good to add a third and last (for now) part growing our quote to: “Content is king. Distribution is queen. Data is god”.
This article will help you to understand how these 3 players, Content + Distribution + Data, can team up helping you to provide the right content to the right customer.
Yes, Content is King!
After the introduction above, it is clear the importance of content but also that content doesn’t lead the kingdom by himself, leading side by side with distribution and data.
In 1996, Bill Gates published an article on the Microsoft website talking about the “opportunities for most companies involve supplying information or entertainment. No company is too small to participate”. Interesting to observe that few years later we could see Bill’s words becoming reality as part of Netflix transformation.
Content is the heart of every digital transformation, and it wasn’t different with Netflix. The company basically came to the market as a Blockbuster competitor, renting DVD’s through mail, but giving users two big advantages, they don’t have to go to physical stores to rent their movies, and also the new model solved one of the biggest Blockbuster users complaining: late fees (what by the way represented a significant portion of Blockbuster revenue).
Evolving their business, Netflix started to offer rental over streaming. A true business disruption at that time.
In both stages, renting DVDs or streaming, Netflix based their business in offering other companies’ content, spending millions and millions of dollars every year buying the rights to distribute that content either renting DVDs or streaming.
“House of Cards” came as a huge Netflix bet, as the very first content produced by the company. It was a 100 million dollars investment for 2 seasons only. Until then they used to pay 25 million dollars acquiring for 2 years the rights of movies from Disney, Sony and other studios. So, the investment in “House of Cards” itself was 4 times higher than all the budget invested acquiring rights.
Produce their own content was crucial to make Netflix the giant that we all know. Let me call your attention to an important detail. Netflix desire wasn’t only produce content but produce state of the art high quality content.
The result we all know.
I spent the last paragraphs sharing a bit of Netflix story to exemplify how content can be transformational. People are avid for knowledge. You acquire knowledge consuming high quality content.
Distribution! Distribution! Distribution!
Distribution is how people get to know about your content, unless you plan to make your information confidential. 😊
Many things are important regarding a good distribution plan, but I consider the right channel mix the most of them. As content is not one size fits all, the distribution must be planned considering your personas and channel preferences.
Yes, you can do a one size fits all using a single channel for example putting all your communication strategy on email marketing campaigns. But you must know that the results will be far behind. It is only a matter of setting expectations.
When using a good channel mix you can plan to have one channels reinforcing the message delivered by another channel.
It is important to acknowledge that these days people do not go online, but they live online. What means that it is natural to them to use multiple screens jumping from one channel to another, like youtube, email and social media.
A great point regarding social media is most of the people are present in multiple networks, so consider this when planning your communication strategy.
A good channel mix is the key.
Data, dear Data!
I’ve mentioned as part of the intro that data splits into objectives and feedback provided by customers. My first advice to you regarding data is related to objectives: be very clear on what your organization wants to achieve and how to measure it. Actually, this is a very good exercise to be completed before putting your new content live.
I want to emphasize here that part from previous paragraph “completed before putting your content live”. Always ask yourself a simple question Why and keep asking until you have a meaningful answer. Don’t stick to shallow metrics just because they are easy to measure. Remember that your organization has a strategy, and your work is to help to achieve the bigger goals, and not measure number of page views on a website.
Let me give you an example. Imagine that your organization is launching a new website where your customers will be able to order samples of products commercialized by your company. For your organization, drop samples is a strategic pilar that helps your business to reach more and more customers by allowing them to know the benefits of company’s brands.
When proposing what to measure in this new service, you can propose metrics like page views, number of visitors or average time on site. But none of these metrics will really impact your business.
Here what is important to your company is to understand the number of samples ordered, number of users ordering samples, who are the users ordering samples and why not, understand about the users who have added samples to their basket and not completed the order. These are examples of metrics that will move the needle.
Again, Measure what Matters to your business, and not what is easy to be measured.
Now let’s talk about Feedback. This discussion is important as it allows you to take the maximum from your content, helping you to understand how many times users have seen your content, in what devices, how deep they go when reading your content, but also if the language is too technical to a certain type of customers… in summary there are many types of data you can capture — qualitative and quantitative. But you must know exactly what to measure and how these measures will impact your business.
At this point I hope you have realized that data is not a bunch of stats about your content, but how this content helps you to achieve your objectives. Statistics without a purpose are only meaningless numbers.
My last advice in this article is a mix between content and data. Your content must be prepared helping you to measure it. Instead of a long page with all your content in a single place, why not prepare a main page with different call to actions that will help you to understand and track about what your customer wants. Just an idea.
Measure what Matters to your business, and not what is easy to be measured.
