The cold, dark month of January is a hard time. The festive season is behind us and the promises of spring are still too distant to be hoped for. To make matters worse, we’re also seized by that collective impulse of self-mortification – New Year’s resolutions – where we reject the pleasures of rich food, drink, parties and frivolous spending in favour of de-tox diets, sobriety, early nights and tightened wallets.
Maybe you’ve already compiled your list of New Year’s resolutions in an attempt to be the ‘new you’. Maybe you’ve already broken some of them. If that is the case, have solace in the fact that you are certainly not alone. And maybe, just maybe, you might be ready to scrap your 25-point plan for un-specific betterment and concentrate instead on making just one, highly achievable resolution: cut out the junk in your content marketing. You will feel better, your team will feel better – and, best of all, you might be producing something your customers actually want to consume.
The winter of our discontent
During the closing months of last year, the major concern on every marketer’s mind was content overload. Stats flew as thick and fast as Christmas-special snowflakes suggesting marketers were producing more content than ever before, increasing the amount of time and money spent on it exponentially. But for all their efforts, they were seeing plunging engagement from customers who simply do not have the brain-processing power to absorb and remember all of the marketing content flung their way. Forty-one per cent of people, and even 33 per cent of extremely digitally savvy millennials, claim to feel ‘overwhelmed’ by content; and yet marketers’ response is still to produce more of it.
Given its undoubted effectiveness when done well, it’s not surprising that marketers still feel compelled by content marketing. But it is surprising that so much of it is so bad. Boring, bland, self-involved or a virtual carbon-copy of everything else being produced in the industry. We’re not in the business of pointing fingers – and we don’t have to. Unless you were living out a weird resolution from last year and spent 2015 impersonating an ostrich, you already know the kind of thing we’re talking about and you know the deleterious effect it is having on getting your customers interested.
Okay, so enough of reflecting on the mistakes of the past. Let’s inject some optimism into proceedings and look at the ways marketers can make sure this year they’re giving customers content they want. (If it makes you feel better, I’d suggest reading the rest of this piece sat on a couch in pyjamas, with a large drink and a plate full of any remaining Christmas ham.)
1) Don’t do it just because you can
Out of all the issues contributing to the proliferation of content, this is the biggest issue and the first that needs addressing. Unless you have a clear plan for what you want your content to achieve, producing it is a waste of time and energy. Our own Content Benchmarking Report 2015 revealed a whopping 31 per cent of marketers are still approaching content with no formalised strategy in place. While EM Forster could say: ‘How will I know what I think until I see what I write?’ this won’t cut it in a business context. Think ‘business outcome first’: what is the specific, measurable thing that you want to achieve with your content? Simply sitting down, writing a blog and firing it off into the internet won’t butter any parsnips.
2) If a job’s worth doing…
… it’s worth paying someone to do it properly. One of the more plaintive moments in Why your copywriter looks sad, a pocket-size publication by the DMA, bemoans the status of copywriters compared to developers: “Because most people can write in one form or another it’s not seen as a difficult skill to find. But because bosses, clients etc often have no idea how to put code together, they see it as magic in comparison.”
Good copy – be it for a script, whitepaper, or even a simple tweet – really is magic, in that it combines the hard skills of technical knowledge and experience with the ineffable ability to make a concept sing (see box out). If you don’t have someone in your team who can do this, don’t settle for ‘any old copy’: find an agency that understands your company and has great ideas for the brief, and let them get it right for you.
3) Snacks ruin appetite
An increasingly common response to content overload is ‘snackable content’, shunning longer form pieces in place of bite-size marketing morsels. Undoubtedly, the artificial content length of a tweet or a video on Vine has contributed to this. And while everyone should be glad the days of the 20-page whitepaper are behind us, brevity for its own sake isn’t the benchmark for all content. Content should be concise, for sure, but the starting point shouldn’t be ‘we must make it as short as possible’.
As Scott Mclean, COO at The Intelligent Marketing Institute says: “The truth is that mass-produced short-form content will always annoy. Put yourself in the shoes of your audience and you will realise that if the subject is interesting they will want to read or watch more about that issue, not simply move onto the next bite-size morsel of content. This is why online publishers such as the BBC abandoned continuous short-form content years ago. They realised that they were starving their audience of true insight.”
Have faith in your audience to be interested in your content. If you don’t think they’re going to be interested, ask whether it’s a question of making it shorter, or perhaps it’s not right at all.
4) Be prepared to fail
It’s better to fail in trying to produce something awesome than to play it safe and push out something drab that tries to please everyone. Honestly. You won’t please everyone; you’ll bore them to tears. Obviously, no one wants to be the business that goes viral for the wrong reasons (Windows 7 ‘Hosting Your Party’, Thorne Travel and so on); but even getting a big, fresh idea wrong is going to teach you a lot more about getting it right than producing another blog post about your product’s latest functions.
A brighter future for content
Content marketing shouldn’t be a headache – it should be what lets your customers see the beating heart of your business’ creativity, passion and expertise. Ultimately, all of the above points come down to one thing: putting your audience first. If your customers are at the centre of your thinking, you won’t just engage them, you’ll be able to move them along a whole content journey allowing you to achieve the commercial objectives your content investment requires.
Let’s all agree, content overload should not be a complaint of our customers in 2016. The darkest days of the winter of our dis-content are behind us; spring is coming.
The good and the bad
Doug Kessler, co-founder, Velocity Partners, illustrates the difference between ‘content by committee’ and content with ‘mojo’ by comparing the text found on the two respective landing pages of Verizon and Dropbox describing their data storage facilities. One is high-fibre, hits every point and gives a comprehensive description of the product. The other is good copy.
Verizon: Verizon Cloud offers secure compute and storage resources with the flexibility and control through the cloud console. Public, private or hybrid, Verizon Cloud features scalable solutions for comprehensive security, durable storage and robust performance.
Dropbox: See what’s possible with Dropbox. You can do more when your files are always with you and easy to share with anyone.
