The 7 Pillars To Smart Content

Content
Content marketing has come quite far for a relatively new communication tool. To give some perspective here, if you do a quick Google search you’ll find over 300 million results for content marketing and over 62 million results for the definition of content marketing alone. But what is content marketing, really? Remove Wikipedia and fancy marketing jargon from the equation, and it’s simply stuff people want to see. And we see a lot of that; millennials now consume almost 18 hours of content a day, which means they are either sleeping or consuming content. In those 18 hours, they are bombarded with over 5,000 different pieces of content, yet only 12 make an impression, which is exactly where our seven pillars to smart content come into play.

The first of our seven pillars is shareability. This is potentially the biggest reason we create content and is the mark of successful content. Most campaigns are measured according to likes, shares and comments, as it is inherent to what we do and has become the social currency. When talking about sharability, it’s hard not to use the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge as an example. The ALS Ice Bucket challenge is a great case study to look at and understand how the power of a cause created one of the most viral campaigns ever made.

Useful is the next pillar of smart content — the least exciting but perhaps the most important. Some brands intend to entertain. Others should be useful if they have something to offer and can add value beyond pure engagement and awareness. Perhaps the most used word when it comes to creating content, and our third pillar for smart content, is storytelling. This may be an overused buzzword, but the truth is we have been listening to and telling stories since we were children. Stories are timelines and stories connect people. Keep in mind that every brand has a narrative and that this is the single best way to connect with your audience.

With all the various new social platforms popping up, it’s becoming increasingly important to be tailor-made. Brands need to customize with regards to both the audience and distribution. A great example of this is the campaign ‘Dumb Ways to Die’, which addressed a seemingly boring topic about train safety to millennials – a notoriously difficult target audience. It is equally as important to be tailor-made for the medium in which you are distributing the content. One size no longer fits all, a 30-sec TVC will not be as effective on YouTube and a Snapchat campaign will not work for LinkedIn.

Snackable content is the next pillar of smart content – albeit a buzzword – with the rise of platforms such as Vine and Snapchat, snackable content is critical for brands these days. Recent studies show that humans have a smaller attention span than goldfish which means brands have less than 8.25 seconds to make an impression and according to Facebook, they will tell you it’s less than three seconds. As a result we have seen brands develop small bite-size pieces of content that will grab user’s attention in the few seconds they have and deliver a brand message.

Content also needs to be smart – both in terms of content creation and amplification. With shrinking budgets, it is important to be efficient with production and smart with the amplification of content.

Finally, simplicity is the final pillar to smart content. As we know, less is more, with all of the technology at our disposal. We have seen this industry go full circle and come back to simplicity. We tend to over think content campaigns but it is the simplest of campaigns that perform the best.

We are in an industry saturated with brands trying to get a piece of the pie. Most content campaigns will not check all seven boxes every time, but it should check a few of these boxes at once to get their content through to consumers.

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