How Do You Move to a Content-First Approach?
Creating and Quantifying Your Content Production Process
Storytelling has become synonymous with brand messaging. Great storytelling makes for great marketing. It’s a fact. We love stories and we love content that moves us and reaches into our emotional center.
Content-first is how many marketers are positioning how to be effective in brand storytelling. They may be synonymous, but they’re not mutually exclusive.
More times than not, change results in some form of absolution.
Content-first means focusing on the content before the vehicle. It’s putting the cart before the horse. But not in a bad way. Focusing on content before the medium puts the emphasis on engagement rather than conversions. And that is a very good thing.
How Do We Shift Our Traditional Approach to a More Content-Centric or Content-First Approach?
There always has to be reasoning behind strategic decisions and changes. Changing your processes and how you conduct business is often a hard and scary thing to do. We don’t like change. It’s not in our nature to embrace it. Change doesn’t always mean evolution. More times than not, change results in some form of absolution. Whether that result is positive or negative lies often in how that process (or culture) change is implemented.
The first step to qualifying your content-first approach would be to actually show your clients that you (want to) operate on a content-first approach. Show them that you don’t just talk the talk — you walk it as well. If you can’t show them that you have processes in place and data and case studies that back up your own effectiveness and successes, then you will have a hard time qualifying this approach for them.
At Britton Marketing & Design Group, Content Cartography is our overarching content “blueprint” that drives all of our content practices. From this content strategy formula, and its multitude of touch points, we have been able to tie in success metrics, KPIs, and follow best practices to make sure our content receives the best organic reach possible (hint: if you pair that with programmatic paid media, you’re in good shape).
How about showing them your content production process, from creative brief to published, maintained and repurposed content? If you don’t have a formal production process, now would be an excellent time to put it down on paper.
Every company has a process for how it creates content. Whether we’re talking about updating our website, publishing blogs or sharing on Facebook, there’s an underlying process.
From our Content Cartography formula — where the content aggregation (discovery) and creation process combined with our editorial process — our internal content production process emerged.
This process chronicles how the content progresses from the inception of the idea to finished content. This gives your client a visual that is easy to follow, while conveying the importance your team places on content production. It also establishes authority and precedence for a functional, scalable process. The icing on the cake is that you quantify the amount of effort (or resources) that goes into your individual content production steps. How many hours do you spend drafting the brief? How many people, and how long, is the review stage? Quantifying hours of each stage will let you know where you have opportunities to improve the process. It will also give you the numbers that you need to have for quoting a project. Bonus!
The fact of the matter is that creating quality content is hard. It takes a lot of work. It takes a strategic approach. These two tweets from @jcolman, from a recent content strategy meeting featuring Kristina Halvorson of Brain Traffic, speak volumes about the approach we should take when it comes to content:
Actionable, engaging, scalable and measurable content is hard to produce. This has to be stressed and conveyed to the client. Anyone can create content, but if it doesn’t use brand voice, vision, goals and strategy, you will fail, because you haven’t defined your success.
Honing and optimizing the way you produce content is a great way to find out what your strengths and weaknesses are. What touch points require most resources? Why? How can this be done in a better way? How can we shave off an hour on our review process? Is there a way to reduce the research process by making adjustments to the brief? Is there a way to shorten the share process by having the writer craft social posts using a predetermined social post template?
So when you’re ready to walk the walk and talk the talk, show your clients how your strategic approach to content creation — and sharing — can help them create and share more content, while using less resources. Your clients will surely appreciate that.
You might wonder, “What about content aggregation?” or “What about repurposing and maintaining content?” Well, I will leave those for other blog posts.
One thing at a time. Content first.
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Photos/Graphics: BMDG
