Customer Experience

By Liam Dowd - March 4th, 2015

From car manufacturers and apparel companies to IT solution providers and chemical companies, everyone’s a ‘publisher’

A study by eMarketer forecasts that content budgets will increase by 34% in 2015.

With the vast amount of content being sent to and searched for by your audience, companies have to be intelligent with their content strategy. If they’re not then their content will be drowned by all the noise.

Useful Social Media recently hosted a webinar debate with three leading firms on how they strategize their social content strategy. The webinar featured:

• Jeff Pundyk, VP Global Integrated Content Solutions , The Economist
• Matt Gentile, Global Director, Social Media, Century21
• Matthew Zito, VP of Product, Synthesio

The first finding from the webinar is that the majority of the 468 audience members stated their content budget was increasing in 2015, as highlighted below:

One would assume more budget automatically means more content. That wouldn’t be the case for Matthew Zito. He stated that “more budgets should not be a case of making more content, but better content – content that the audience wants.” He indicated quality and timeliness as being paramount.

An interesting point made by Jeff Pundyk, and one that might be overlooked, is whether a company’s content strategy is being approached from a communications and advertising perspective, or is it from a publisher perspective? Jeff stated that “just because you can publish, doesn’t make you a publisher.” Jeff went on to say that The Economist, along with other publishers, put their customer first and company second.

This is an interesting consideration. Companies need to understand why they’re producing the content. Is the content part of a marketing/sales cycle or is it timely content that your audience needs. These two aren’t exclusive of each other, but are definitely two different mind-sets.

Creating content of value

A common mistake is to create content based on what the company wants the audience to hear, whereas the most successful content is always in line with what the audience wants/needs.
Matthew Zito believes a data driven approach is the key. First companies need to understand who their audience is. Matt Gentile made a good point that audiences will differ across the channels, and the message needs to reflect that.

If the webinar audience is an indicator of the general social media community, then there’s some way to go for a data-driven approach to content – as highlighted in the second poll image below:

Once a company knows its audience, before producing and publishing any content, they should spend time listening to their audience, as Jeff Pundyk puts it “to find their passion points.”

To ensure the content strategy is timely and is successful, a company needs to gather information on:

• What their different audience groups are saying
• What the audiences are saying about their company and the competition
• The perceived brand position of the company and where they’re credible

And finally, using all of the above information, the company can understand what only they can say – where they add genuine value. And in doing so, create content that cuts through the noise.

To access the full recording of the webinar, where the above ideas and a whole lot more is shared, visit here