As important as what
Have you ever stopped to think about the content you remember best? Why did they resonate with you?
Famous advertising boss David Ogilvy, a man who helped write the rulebook of modern marketing communications, once said: "If it doesn't sell, it isn't creative."
It's worth thinking about your content marketing in the same way. If nobody sees it, reads it or shares it, it isn't any good. Harsh maybe, but a useful discipline.
There are basic questions you should ask yourself repeatedly to ensure that the time and money you spend creating content is not wasted.
The first step is to establish who you are trying to reach, then understand what they care about and how and when they consume content.
In making your content marketing programme a success, you cannot only rely on your target audience to consume - let alone share - your content. Instead you need to also think about your content distribution network.
Brent Barnhart describes this network as “the people who care about what you have to say. These relationships ultimately determine how ‘far’ a piece of content can potentially go.” In other words, these are the people who take your message and broadcast it to the world.
Maximising the number of people engaged in your content distribution network will maximise your chances of success.
In 2017, LADbible launched a campaign called the Trash Isles, in an effort to “empower young people to lobby the United Nations to acknowledge the plastic in our oceans as a country, in order to force the issue to be addressed”.
The campaign reached 340+ million people via social media and garnered more than 37.3 million YouTube views and 215k official Trash Isles citizens.
The secret sauce behind the campaign? LADBible ran a survey with its readers asking what kind of content they wanted more of. The multi-channel Trash Isles was dreamt up as a direct result.
When you're deciding which channels to use for maximum exposure to the right audience there are three critical things to consider:
Once you’ve answered each of these questions, you’ll then be able to think about how each of your channels work together to amplify the same message in different formats.