As I discussed in the first of this series of posts on content strategy, marketers increasingly must
think about their jobs in terms of major media companies -- producing constantly updating streams of media that engage, inform, entertain and result in widespread sharing among audience
networks. In future posts, we'll get to how these activities can lead to bottom-line-oriented outcomes, but today I'll focus on the various definitions of "content" and why each is important to
your strategy.
Proprietary Content
This category of content is the most important and will form the basis of SEO, social sharing, and lead- and demand-generation
objectives. It's the stuff your teams produce, completely original and owned exclusively by you. It's the stuff you write for blog posts, press releases, e-books, conference presentations,
original research and static Web site copy. It also includes your proprietary video, audio, webcasts and animated demonstrations. This content also includes your information graphics,
illustrations and photos. Whether in-house teams produce this stuff or you hire third parties to produce it on your behalf, proprietary content can only be called that if you own all the rights to
it.
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Central to the development of all proprietary content should be three considerations (there are others, but these are primary):
1. Your audience, their interests and
tastes, and the ways in which they look for subject matter related to your business.
2. Your keyword strategies and SEO objectives.
3. Rising and falling memes and how
those relate to or can be leveraged in your own content.
Because it is completely original and owned just by you, your proprietary content is the stuff that will be indexed by the search
engines; linked to by bloggers, social sharers and the news media; and referenced in places like academic research or conference presentations. It takes priority above all other forms of content.
Syndicated and Third-Party Content
Syndicated or other third-party content can be a great way to augment proprietary content. This might include subscriptions to Getty
Images, research from places like Altimeter, Forrester or IDC, and even targeted news feed services from places like Reuters. Subscriptions may seems
expensive but, when compared with the effort to produce enough original, proprietary content on a daily basis, may present an effective alternative that is also authoritative and of very high quality.
Fair-Use Content
Services like Daylife, Moveover and OneSpot make it easy to aggregate, categorize and curate an enormous volume of free, fair-use media from tens of thousands of sources all over the Web. These
services also make it possible to present these sources by media type in attractive modules arranged around your proprietary content to bring constantly updating context and perspective from around
the Web. These include modules with rivers of headlines, snippets and associated thumbnail photos; photo galleries; video galleries; pull-quotes; timeline graphics; and rivers of topically appropriate
social-media feeds from Twitter and others. They can also help large enterprises with multiple content management systems in place to lasso, organize and present their own, proprietary content more
efficiently and effectively.
Movement Marketing
Though this category of content could be a series of blog posts by itself, I'll summarize it by saying
brands increasingly turn to movement marketing as way to effectively engage audiences around issues or ideas both value in common. Movement marketing enables you to produce content and
engagement activities that leverage memes adjacent to your brand -- environmental or green issues, for instance, or breast cancer awareness -- and to appropriate the associated keywords in an
authentic way that creates a win for you, for your audience and for the cause you both believe in. And, it's a great way to capture images of your audience interacting with your brand and its
representatives -- to humanize what might otherwise be a completely corporate face.
In such limited space, I've no doubt left out important ideas here, so please feel free to add
your own in the comments space below, or to offer additional clarification and feedback. In the next post in this series, I'll be discussing my favorite mantra: Produce once, repurpose many!