However you choose to look at it, as strategic marketing, or building brand equity, digital content assets creation or the much talked about content marketing – the fact remains content remains supreme. So how do you design content that’s effective?
Apart from attracting search engines, it lends you opportunities to build conversations with prospects, generate leads, and establish you as a thought leader in your respective field.
Also, you really don’t have to stick to the standard prose, there are multiple multimedia options, graphical representations and DIY videos that can make your content rich and responsive.
But the question is, do you have a content strategy in place? Do you have content writers and graphic designers collaborating with your Subject Matter Specialists to draw the expertise and build them into meaningful collaterals? If not, then there is no better time than now to invest time and effort in building your content structure. While there are endless possibilities in building content for your organization, I have listed below 6 standard methods that will ensure you have high quality content that set you apart.
Creation: By far one of the most earnest approaches to content generation, creation requires expertise, time and thinking. It could come from your leaders, subject matter experts and function heads who have enormous expertise and experience. And this can be harnessed into content assets by way of interviews, videos, podcasts, white papers, and infographics. This will be unique to your organization and attracts a lot of reading and yes Google will love it.
Flip Side: Warrants a lot of effort and planning and of course writing.
Curation: This type of content creation has gained traction in the past, as several organizations are leveraging this. It is a systematic way of scouring the public domain for valuable information on a particular topic. Once this is done, the information curated from various sources is combined into a meaningful whole and paraphrased appropriately. In several instances additional perspectives are added making the content holistic and comprehensive. Due credit to the sources needs to be attributed specially when statistics are used.
Flip Side: Warrants patience and the curator need to be selective about sources.
Collation: Here again it’s a congregation of information from various sources that is compiled together. It could be a set of quotes from people, or even a set of numbers and statistics obtained from various global research publications. This is brought together and presented and packaged neatly for your readers. This helps because, your readers can view and assimilate information from various sources at one go.
Flip Side: Warrants patience and information must be carefully selected only from dependable public domain sources.
Calculations: People love numbers. Its quick and easy to understand. So, you could explore the possibility of having a team conduct primary or secondary research on a particular topic and share the empirical findings. This is a great way of establishing your leadership in your industry. You could transparently show how you arrived at the numbers by sharing calculations and draw the inferences as well for swift understanding.
Flip Side: Warrants sufficient resources who have a firm handle on numbers and calculations. Numbers can go awry if not perfectly matched.
Collaboration: Surely a smart way of creating content for your organization. If you can partner with likeminded individuals, boutique outfits who are aligned to your focus areas that would be worthwhile. As new concepts, ideas, fresh thinking emerge on your chosen topic. And more reach is assured when collaborative content comes into place as more stakeholders are involved and content is shared more.
Flip Side: Warrants the right selection of collaboration partners. If the partners don’t have the right image your content also stands a chance of being jeopardized.
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And yes, you can read more of my blogs on Branding and Content Marketing right here. And would love to talk to you to discuss your content marketing goals for your organization – bhuvanarajaram9@gmail.com or + 91 98415 96366 (Whatsapp also).
