Welcome to an occasional series kicking off 2015 with some resolutions for marketing and marketers. I’ll do my best to stick to them if you do.
First up, I resolve not to treat content as a commodity.
If content is critical to your strategy, and I’m going to assume that it is for most of us, you can’t order it by the pound or delegate its creation to people or vendors on the periphery of your organization. If you’ve tasked your intern with five blogs posts a week because somebody told you to blog every day, you’re missing the point. The key thought leaders of your organization must be intimately involved in content creation, whether they like it or not. Sure, you can and probably should hire writers and designers to flesh out ideas and tidy things up, but the ideas and opinions – the bread and butter of good content – have to come from the parts of your organization that create value.
This isn’t easy, I know. CEOs and founders and product visionaries are busy people, and often not inclined or even able to sit down and write a blog post or longer form piece very often. Our job as marketers is to help them to extract and refine enough of an idea or opinion to form the germ of a piece, and to manage the process of turning that germ into a full-blown article while keeping the uniqueness intact. Think of yourself as a journalist interviewing a source for a story.
I’m no purist, I recognize that every diet includes some junk food and also that there is some value in posting or writing regularly, but I urge you to shift your focus in favor of quality and value.
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