Page 73 - The EDIT | Q3 2017

Thoughtleader
What makes a content strategy great
Can you believe that people are watching one billion hours of videos per day on YouTube? And they are uploading 400 hours of video each minute? That’s 65 years of video content being uploaded every day*.
It’s a fact — people love content and they’ve never been hungrier for it, so why do brands find it so hard to create content that sticks?
A good content strategy leads to the moment a brand becomes entertainment instead of disruption. It’s the moment a brand creates experiences through the smart use of media, innovation and creativity. Easier said than done, right? But is it really?, asks Stephanie Tyan.
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Building content is often reduced to coming up with a great idea. True in a way, but there is so much more to it. The idea itself is just the
top of the iceberg, while the success of a content strategy lies in the work leading up to this idea.
This essay is about sharing the learnings I gathered as a content manager, to provide you with the right mindset to excel in content marketing. In my personal experience, there are six principles for creating great content.
1. Be smart, turn data into insights
Great content strategies are built on strong insights. Key to this is identifying an audience’s unmatched need, desire or interest to address. Whenever building a content strategy, I ask myself: Are people going to care? Is this making a difference to them?
Human behavior influences and is influenced by technology. With the accelerating development and adoption of new technologies PHD identified in Merge — AI, chatbots, AR, wearables, you name it
— their expectations for great content are growing even faster. Consumers simply demand more from brands — and content is about delivering what consumers want, when and how they want it.
It’s a value exchange model — the time we ask people to interact with a brand should be proportional to the value we bring to them.
Our use of technology and the data it generates, represent unprecedented means to define that value. This data provides more granularity and clarity than ever to define impactful insights. To name a few, Google searches reveal consumers’
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THE EDIT ISSUE 7 | Q3 2017