Three principles of content

While it’s great to see everyone from strategists and designers to media buyers increasingly advocating a focus on content, one of the biggest problems is that ‘content’ means many things to many people. There is no agreed definition of what it actually is, and very little in the way of best practice in how to deploy it for the full range of commercial purposes.

So I thought I’d talk a bit about how I approach content which boils down to three key principles:

1. Content is not a channel.

2. Content strategy, content production and content marketing are three distinct disciplines.

3. If you aren’t promoting your content then you aren’t doing content marketing at all.

Content is not a channel

My former colleague Phil Adams gave an APG talk recently where he asked a room of some of advertising’s best strategists to come up with a definition of content. They found it surprisingly tricky.

In fact, 60% of the people thought it was a very tough exercise and were unhappy with their definition. Try it yourself — it’s harder than you might think.

But it got me thinking that we should probably have one, and so I turned to the dictionary and adapted what I found to fit our team’s purpose. I came up with this:

‘Information made available by a website or other electronic medium, as distinct from its form or style’

The first thing you might notice is that it’s a very broad definition. That’s deliberate. Content isn’t quite everything, but it is the information conveyed via the words on every web page, every display banner, every video, every call to action button, and every social media post on the web.

Ultimately when it comes to the online space your brand doesn’t exist without content.

Which means I’m always surprised when people talk about content as optional. As if it’s a channel that can be turned on or off; that you could choose between, say, PPC or content.

What are we meant to point those ads at? Blank space?

Content is not a channel — it’s all that a brand says about itself online.

One important thing to note is that content isn’t the form or the style. How things look and feel, how they are arranged, how we use them and how we interact with them are not fundamental aspects of the content. A good example of this is how it is completely possible to come up with a design for a web page with no content at all.

However I’d always argue that we should design with real content as opposed to lorem ipsum, and it’s also refreshing to see designers prioritising layouts that let content shine. The existence of a design function within our content team is intended to ensure that content purpose, form, and style are aligned.

So, armed with a definition of what content is and isn’t, we need to look at how it is planned, created and then distributed throughout the web.

The three content disciplines

The way I’ve always approached content is to look at three distinct disciplines of content strategy, content production, and content marketing.

Those terms are often used lazily and interchangeably but, as with all aspects of digital, it’s important that we are precise with our use of language and are clear about what we mean at each stage.

Content strategy is already well defined. It is the planning associated with content. It not only answers the vital questions of why we’re producing content, for whom, and what content we should produce, but also the often overlooked, internally focussed questions: who is making it? When? Where? How? How will we measure performance?

Over my career I've used a range of research and workshop techniques to arrive at a content strategy. The nature of that strategy changes from client to client, but I never move into production without it.

Content production is perhaps the most ‘straightforward’ and easily understandable aspect of the content lifecycle, although it has the risk of getting messy and so requires a particular set of skills and experience to manage it effectively.

I believe that to succeed, our clients' content needs to be better than their competitors’. And so we aim to push the bar creatively while retaining a focus on the desired commercial outcome. Streamlined production processes, identified at strategy stage, ensure efficient and cost-effective delivery.

I define content marketing as the activity that is undertaken after its production to ensure that the content reaches the intended audience. This is where I differ slightly from the Content Marketing Institute’s definition (which includes production).

However where I agree with the CMI is that content marketing has to incorporate the distribution of content. And this is where the ‘full stack’ approach comes in.

Full stack content marketing

Despite content’s rise in prominence, there are still many client-side marketers who aren’t convinced that content provides a return. They tend to be those who have invested in content programmes only to see it dilute their conversion rate, or not provide the direct revenue they were expecting to see.

One of the main reasons for this doubt is that, in the ‘create more content’ boom of the last five years, the expectation has been set that businesses can reach their intended audience and achieve success just by publishing content.

I would fundamentally disagree with this approach. Simply having a regularly updated blog does not mean you are ‘doing content marketing’.

Distribution of that content, via both organic and paid channels, is absolutely essential.

That's why I have a four-phased process that I call full-stack content marketing. It includes outreach, in which we actively tell influential members of a community about the content (I refuse to use the term ‘influencer marketing’, but that’s another blog post for another day).

It also includes distribution, in which links to clients’ content are manually seeded around the web, having researched the most relevant Reddits, LinkedIn groups, Facebook pages and, yes, forums, in which to place them.

And finally promotion, in which the most appropriate mix of paid media is put behind each piece of content.

It's not necessary to use every tactic, every time. But it's important to consider them for every piece of content. Only then, when you have a promotional plan for your content, would I say that you are doing content marketing.

Wrapping up

I genuinely think one of the biggest issues facing the content industry is a lack of clarity — around what content is, the different activities involved and skills required, and a real understanding of what is required to achieve success. These three principles aim to address those issues in as simple and prosaic a way as possible.

And what I've always aimed to do is to structure my teams around these three principles in order to provide clarity both to clients, and internally, around what we do and how we do it.