The content basics and fundamentals

'Brands get rose-tinted glasses about entertaining people and think that is all consumers want', 'What brands need to do is break down their content, take a step back and ask, for their industry, what the role of content is. Whether it is to inspire, educating, help, reward, inform or entertain then rank them and work out what is a ‘must-have’, where the opportunities are and what they should not be focusing on at all.'
Source: Marketingweek

The icky sticky truth is that you have to start with your basics. Without those, you are on your way to failure.

60% of content created by brands is ‘just clutter’. The majority of content created by brands is having little or no impact on business results or people’s lives, according to Havas’ latest ‘Meaningful Brands’ study. A study from 2017, my gut feeling tells me this has gotten even worse with the rise of content.

Creating content is like learning to walk before you start to run and go for that marathon. A long term effort with learning by doing, continuous training, ongoing evaluation, and improvement. With a ‘fail fast, adapt faster’ mentality and with some ‘stealing with pride’. If you start in a sprint, for sure you will not make it to the finish line.

Hence… First thing first.

Before you even consider creating content, please make sure you have your basics and fundamentals in place. Failing on those basics, it is like building a straw house that gets blown down by the first storm. Or even worse, your little content straw house might even collapse by itself.

What you need for content basics

Stay tuned, the articles on how to do this are soon to be released. An overview of the basics and fundamentals for effective and efficient content:

• Your why: why do you do what you do as a brand
• Your leadership: the domain you want to claim
• Who you are: develop your brand persona
• Audience first: add value for them and solve their problems
• Business objectives driven: content should always contribute to the business objectives.
• Budget: content follows your media spend
• Create a threesome for budget optimization: brand - media - creative
• Why content fails with the most common content mistakes