What content strategy is, and why it matters
The most valuable thing you may ever attain by way of your words, is your audience’s attention. Regardless of how you acquired it, the first message you must convey to your audience is that you value that person’s attention. Without that message coming through, you are in danger of losing this attention. Once lost, the cost of reacquiring it increases exponentially.
All content strategy follows from this axiom. Attention is the most valuable commodity. Without attention, even trust withers and dies.
Your attention, please
No, you won’t find “Attention” plotted on anyone’s version of the classic marketing funnel. You will find “Awareness,” but that’s not the same thing. People are well aware — perhaps too aware — of things, people, or messages they prefer to actively ignore.
Four permutations of the classic Marketing Funnel. Clockwise from upper left: The earliest known visualization of the original four stages, published in 1904; a later, 9-stage variant with a recycling filter as perceived by the website Business2You; a butterflied configuration where the customer pool somehow gets bigger post-purchase, as envisioned by National Positions; and McKinsey & Co.’s completely re-imagined “funnel,” which apparently introduces the notion of four-dimensional spacetime.
The marketing funnel, or funnels, were products of a different era of human existence. Back then, the primary media for mass communications were one-way channels, and sales were registered like bells from cash registers, and celebrated like angels receiving their wings. Like the game of Monopoly, a marketing funnel assumes you have all the necessary resources placed in front of you by decree, the first time you roll the dice. With online content in particular, you cannot assume you have $1,500 the moment you move your token off of Go. Every resource you spend in acquiring your audience’s attention, is something you have earned, either now or over time. You begin at Square Zero.
This is why advertising, as we have come to understand it throughout the twentieth century, does not work in an online medium. Conventional advertising relies upon something else to have already attained and fixed the audience’s attention: the article they actually want to read, the program they intended to watch, the song they turned up the volume to hear. An ad interrupts the program while attention is tuned elsewhere, and promises not to suspend it for very long. It fights to entertain the audience, in hopes of dampening the attention loss as best it can. Only during the Super Bowl are the ads more important than the program.
Online, each element of content, whether it’s ostensibly an ad or an article (or, in many cases, a variable combination of both) fights for its own attention. And everyone has the power to ignore or even eliminate anything that person chooses not to see or hear. So if you follow an online content strategy, you must by definition avoid a conventional advertising strategy devised for publishing or broadcasting. You must unyieldingly offer a message that someone would desire to know. This is what you deliver to your audience, in exchange for that most valuable commodity: attention.
Now that I have your attention
The mere fact that you’re reading this article is not, in itself, an indicator of an effective content strategy. I have your attention, but that’s the first stage in a process. I now have the opportunity to persuade you, but the act of persuasion is marketing. And although content strategy is a sub-department of marketing in most organizations today, in practice, marketing is but one component of content strategy.
True content strategy cultivates attention, and then invests it toward the delivery of a message that may fulfill both the audience’s desire and the publisher’s intent.
If your ability to receive, read, and comprehend the message I’ve crafted for you is as important to me as I would hope you would perceive it to be to yourself, then it is my job as its presenter to ensure that it be delivered, discovered, and accessed. I need to make my message to you discoverable. It should pertain to something you would want to see. It should appeal to your interests and sensibilities. It must respect your tastes and your intelligence. However circuitous a route this message may take to reach you, once it’s in front of your eyes, it should speak to you as though I were standing a few feet away.
For any content strategy to be effective, every published element must be not only informative but desirable in its own right. Each article or program should communicate, through its mere presentation, the incalculable difference of value between knowing something and not knowing it. The first objective of content strategy must be to deliver this information clearly, distinctly, and irrefutably. Yet like ants in South America that build bridges over creeks using their own bodies, your content itself must build the route this delivery process takes — the contextual links, associations, and narrative foundation that makes content visible to the services that would make it discoverable. Every content element you publish that fails to work for you towards this objective, works against you. You cannot build this bridge between yourself and your audience without design, without intent, and without will.
The Way to Go, and the Way Not To
This mission is no longer as simple as it was when the most prolific publishing nation on Earth had three-and-a-half broadcast networks, two-and-one-half newsmagazines, and any number of halves of daily newspapers. The mere presence of a message on any channel, regardless of its popularity, no longer automatically conveys its importance. Everyone and anything can make itself appear not only as important as everything else but, perhaps more importantly, indistinguishable from anything else. For this reason, some execute a content strategy based on ambiguity — on acquiring attention through deception.
In their early and, in some cases, even their intermediate stages, content strategies that utilize deception yield some successes. In the end, whenever the end should come, they all fail. Some are willing to accept the cost of such failures, if the benefits reaped by way of deception are valuable enough — for example, paying to stick “Download Now!” links on random pages where the act of downloading something appears to take place. Ten thousand or so people may have clicked on it, and fewer than a hundred may have appreciated the result. But compared to the number of folks who may click on a single, innocent, truth-telling tweet, a number fewer than a hundred may seem satisfactory. That’s why “fake SEO” can be so appealing.
Because transparent content strategies are difficult to engineer, and often more difficult to execute, programs that utilize deception tactics tend to proliferate. They tend to mis-use the acronym “SEO,” and for that reason, the legitimate practice of search engine optimization undeservedly gets a bad rap. SEO — the real SEO — is a good thing. It’s a means of making your message and your narrative discoverable, which is a principal goal. Search engines interpret content in ways humans do not. Nevertheless, the arrangement of a page’s headers, semantics, and key phrases must inform search engines (the list of which is comprised mainly of “Google” and “Other”) as to the basic context of its included information.
However, the moment you pay more attention to informing the search engine than you do to your audience, you lose the ability to gather attention, and with it, the resources you need to build engagement and trust. Content strategy begins with replacing the thing you may think is most valuable in an online relationship — specifically, “the sale” — with something far more critical to human existence: trust.
Contact Scott
If you have an idea in mind for a content mission, and a way I can help you lead the way, let me know.
E-mail
scott.fulton@net1.news