Content marketing articles from our agency

This is the line that sums it up nicely: Creating content for a brand feels a lot like you’re running a daily news program. Bang on.

Content is responsive and reactionary. It’s created both carefully and on the fly, published then pushed out through channels, commented on, aggregated, added to, curated and consumed. Brand news coming to you live from the brand station you tune into. And if we stay with the news program metaphor (which we first heard via a fantastic JESS3 slide deck available on SlideShare), then businesses can begin to understand the argument for content that brings value. It has to, otherwise the audience will simply tune out – and there goes the customer lead or brand value with them.

Branded content must meet the needs and objectives of the business without sounding like a shameless infomercial. It’s a bigger challenge than it sounds. It also has to demonstrate ability to be engaging and needs to meet the requirements of the user (customer = this is a company that understands my industry; advocate = this is a brand we’d recommend or be associated with; talent = this is a company I want to work for).  Done well, branded content can nail all these user needs at once.

Once you have strong branded content playing on your station (website), the next thing to do is advertise that quality content – and you do that by publishing it on a range of social media channels which it helps to see as playing your digital ad. And of course, just like traditional advertising strategies, different ads suit different audiences. Sure, there’s Facebook for your general audience, Twitter for your reach audience, LinkedIn for your business audience, but there’s also SildeShare, Vimeo, YouTube, Delicious, Dribble, FFFFOUND, Forrst, Behance, Flickr, Quora, YouTube, CrunchBase, Tumblr, Visual.ly, Pinterest, AngelList, PearlTrees and that’s just for starters. Each channel has a different audience. Some channels  focus on visual content, some focus on written, and lots do both. The thing is, each member of that audience is a potential customer, a potential advocate or potential  employee.

Brands are media companies, make no mistake about it.

And even better, put on a good show, and people will record it and play to everyone they know. By this we mean, share your content to collections of audiences (a diverse spread of social channels) that will in turn, share it with their audiences (again on a variety of social channels). These are the posts you dream about, where Fan of your content X, shares one of your articles relevant to her industry Y, via her 500+ connections on LinkedIn, her 2000 Twitter followers, her (by now, although it’s growing daily) 80 Pinterest followers…. and so it goes. Your brand is in syndication mode in more markets and across more continents that you can possibly keep track of. Seinfield, eat your heart out.

And finally, there’s search. That nugget of gold we refer to when what you find is even better than what you hoped you were looking for. How great is that feeling when Google serves up something that is totally off-the-charts fantastic?  Good content is the Holy Grail, and no one knows this better than Google. Except now, so do you.

* image by Faye Valentina @Flickr