Ready or Not, Here's Your Content Challenge

To capture attention and deliver value, your content must be relevant to your buyers and readers. 

It might be cliché to say buyers are inundated with information, but I don't see organizations really committing to strategies that deal with this reality. 

While many have changed the way they market over the last three to five years, I don't see corresponding changes in the way they create content. 

I call the traditional approach a "point production" method. Sometimes this is referred to as "one and done." I put the emphasis on "one" -- one blog, article, webinar, whitepaper, video, etc. 

If we are committed to creating relevant content that works for our organization and our readers, it must be created to speak to a specific individual, specific interest or issue, buying stage, industry, competitive context and other relevance factors. Not all of them together. 

 


If we believe it's important to make our content convenient for buyers to really consume, we must deliver content in different formats: long form documents, articles, blogs, video, visual diagrams and infographics (among others) that meet their consumption preferences. 

If we want buyers to share our content we must deliver compelling, engaging formats that motivate or prompt sharing with colleagues. Video. 

Inevitably this drives up the volume of work required to create different relevant versions and formats. The traditional, "point production" method that creates content one at a time, won't scale affordably to accomplish this in a timely enough -- or affordable -- manner. 

You know you have this kind of thinking in your organization if you hear: "First, we'll build our … blogs, articles, whitepaper, webinar, video -- then, we'll repurpose this into other formats, or edit for other purposes or personas." 

Can you hear "sequential," more effort, more dollars -- will never happen? 

What's required is a process that designs for multi-purpose and formats in the first place. 

IDG Connect suggests organizations must capture and create "core essence" of content from which other content can be created through re-purposing. This is the right idea -- IF you have the right source insights and content in the first place. 

Unfortunately, using "finished programs" for core essence is the wrong tactic. 

In my next blog I'll discuss an approach that works -- for large or small organizations and budgets. It's practical and highly scalable. In fact, publishers have used this approach for decades. It means going beyond "thinking like a publisher" to creating like a publisher.