Why Create Content Like a Publisher

It's approaching cliché, but we truly are in a new marketing era.  Consider just some of the terminology that we use to describe today's marketing:  internet marketing; inbound marketing; content marketing; social media; digital media, just to name a few.  So we'd like to ask what is your strategy for each of these marketing areas.  What are your plans, and how does this change your process and your procedures?  One thing they all share in common.  Content fuels each activity.  We put this web briefing together because everywhere we go we hear people complaining about the challenge of creating, managing, and delivering content in support of all of the requirements that they face. 

Joe Pulizzi of Junta 42 is among many marketing and more recently content marketing thought leaders who is telling us to embrace the publisher mindset because information is now one of our core products.  In fact, a primary value creator and key differentiator.  We are being told to become the media.  John Jantsch of Duct Tape Marketing is among many marketing thought leaders telling us that content is the new currency.  In his book, The Referral Engine, John suggests that the age of the four P's of marketing, product, place, pricing, and promotion, have given way to the age of the customer.  And in the age of the customer, the four C's are the keys to business success:  content, context, connection, and community.

Content, he says, has to be authentic content that educates.  It has to be relevant to the interests of each audience.  And he thinks that it's becoming an important marketing strategy to be able to produce content in the form of text, audio, video, and other forms.  Context addresses the fact that we're overwhelmed with the need to filter, aggregate, and make sense of all this information.  He suggests, "The ability to situate information within the context of a prospect's life has become a core marketing tactic."  So we need different content.

Now previously we produced content but it was mostly about our products, our services, our features.  And don't forget those benefits.  Our one size fit all because it was about us.  And we focused heavily on text and print oriented content.  Today we're being told to create content that's about the customer's problems, their underlying causes, and the various issues that they face.  It has to be educational in nature, relevant, and we have so many more media formats and delivery methods to address.  We refer to this as feeding the content beasts.  In yellow are the different delivery methods that we now have to produce for, and in green the different purposes.  Just a few years ago we weren't really creating content for re-nurturing purposes and maybe not even the aggressive lead generation of today.

We know that context is key to creating relevant content.  Relevance is a function of our target audience and the specific roles that they play, their specific needs, issues, and interests, where they are in the buying process.  What industries they are participating in, and how the messages need to be articulated and examples delivered in industry-specific context.  What their options are for addressing their business problems.  These would be our competitors.  So we need the ability to tell our story by optimizing each of these variables.  And if we were to do this in specific documents, and we had four options in each of our five categories, we would be upwards of a thousand discrete documents to accomplish this relevance objective.

Those who are very advanced at working in this realm of content, particularly for lead nurturing, have told us that in fact they know that they need three pieces of content at each of these combinations in order to advance a prospect.  So the challenge is daunting indeed.  These new content creation requirements, as well as opportunities, are creating new operational challenges.  With traditional production, production experts have told us you can have it good, fast, or cheap.  Pick any two.  We think it's time to optimize all three criteria. 

But in addition, we've learned that we need to be able to accommodate a demand for much higher volume of content.  We need to be able to tailor and personalize it so that it captures and holds attention and is relevant.  We need to be able to maintain It, share it, and reuse it so that we leverage the investment in this content, and extend its shelf life, and get more out of it, a bigger return on content.  And many of us are selling globally, so we also need to be able to produce content in foreign languages.

So we see that traditional production methods tend to be expensive, require too much lead-time, and they result in what we're calling a single purpose or point production.  But the ad hoc crafts of individuals or different groups to produce content leads to inconsistencies, variations in quality and hidden costs, and an inability to share and reuse in really effective ways.  So we need a new mindset, and we're suggesting it's a publishing mindset.  We need new methods, and we're going to need new tools.

This perhaps comes together with a new set of requirements that we see emerging as we're under more and more pressure to take our content to a new level, to go beyond text  and static documents, to embrace rich media content, more interactive content, essentially the ability to enable our front line communicators on a regular basis to assemble and deliver video and web briefings that are tailored to specific audiences, even an audience of one.  So how do you do that?