OK, OK so we all know the saying ‘content is king’ and whilst you may be bored with everyone harping on about this, I’m afraid to say…it’s true!
With Christmas approaching, you’re soon (or perhaps already are) going to be bombarded with Christmas messages. Telling you to go see this show, or buy this present, or absolutely convince your kids that they need the latest breed of sea monkeys that can fly or turn rainbow colours (or whatever kids are into these days…).
But the point ‘content king’, only stands if you actually have high quality content. Which hits the right person, at the right stage in their consideration journey and has cut through over the multitude of other messaging. And this, importantly, is much harder to do.
The point that content is only worth it’s salt if it’s relevant, feeds back into one of our earlier blogs
‘Have we reached peak content?’. Here Ben Waterhouse, Content and Social Media Manager at Pull, talks about how making content for content’s sake isn’t good enough, it has to have a specific purpose.
Obviously creating content for brands is a valuable enterprise and worth doing, when I search Content Managers there are literally 100’s of jobs on Google. The role of a good Content Manager should be to bring many different elements of the business together which may have been separate in the past. From Design to Digital, a Content Manager should be creating content with and for these teams, from print infographics to digital ads.
But, do we need to create new content every time? Is there any value in re-purposing old content?
For example, take Coca Cola, pretty much every single year they have essentially the same Christmas advert. A lit-up truck, driving through a snow-covered landscape with people looking on with glee, they even use the same song track. Whilst the ads aren’t exactly the same, they use the same elements and this is because it works! The Coke Christmas ads have now become so recognisable that even hearing the song triggers images of that truck in some kind of snowy scene.
Obviously, Coke have a very recognisable brand image, which absolutely works in their favour, but the format of the advert in itself, is almost as recognisable as the actual brand.
This has only been done by using the same advert elements again and again every year, making it a childhood memory for pretty much every child growing up in the 90’s. 1995 was when the adverts first launched, but the style of the Santa on the trucks makes it look much older than this, perhaps a clever marketing ploy to indicate to the audience a rich and old heritage.
So, if Coke have the strategy of using the same elements of a campaign they know works, and only slightly tweaking it every year. Can’t other brands do the same and take a leaf out of their book?
The Coke Christmas campaign is huge with a large marketing budget, but how can we implement this re-useable strategy on a micro level?
Something that can be implemented on a micro-level, but which actually makes a huge difference, is the process of editing existing webpages and slightly altering the content to make them relevant instead of creating a whole new page.
This not only prevents duplication of content which can be an SEO problem, but also prevents wasted staff time. Something which can help with this is the new Kentico Kontent platform, when released this will allow marketers to unify content across the entire organisation, as the
Kentico Kontent platform will be the central point of reference for all content creators in the business.
As Petr Palas CEO of Kentico explains, - ‘
Unlike most Digital Experience Platforms, Kentico Kontent is designed to become part of your Digital Experience Stack and gives you the freedom to combine it with any digital experience technology.’
This means that it differs from a traditional CMS as it’s not as limited, your content is consumable on any device and it can be integrated with your other digital experiences, from AI to Chatbots.
Kentico Kontent is a step towards
CaaS (Content as a Service), this is where editing existing content comes in. You may want to use a similar webpage, but edit it slightly for different audiences, CaaS allows them to do this by
‘providing a unified environment that everyone in an organization can use to create, manage, and deliver content.’
Using CaaS allows organisations to build up a library of reusable pieces of content which can be edited to be fit for purpose, instead of creating a whole new piece of content. Just like Coke, you could take a campaign you know works for one audience and alter it slightly to serve to a different audience, saving you putting together a whole new set of assets which has already been created previously.
Not only this, but you can then deliver this content in a consistent way across all of your connected platforms, providing a unified user experience.
So content is still indeed king, but you don’t need to be a slave to creating content that already exists.
Indeed, it’s better not to create content continually from scratch. Investing in a content system which allows users to see what content already exists and devising a marketing strategy which actually allows your content creators to build on this content is also important.
Which is why I’ll end this blog by again referencing
Have we reached peak content 😉; create content for a purpose, don’t use quantity to measure success and less is more.
Posted 1 November 2019 by