Brands must know themselves before they start to publish

Rebecca Lieb, Jessica Groopman, and Susan Etlinger of the Altimeter Group published “A Culture of Content,” A Best Practices Report. The report covers in detail how leading brands are creating a corporate ecosystem that encourages content development at every level of the organization. While many of their best practice recommendations were not new, one insight that stood out was that brands must know themselves before they can create content that is meaningful and helps to achieve business goals.

When brands decide to jump on the content bandwagon, they suddenly realize that an online presence can quickly overwhelm the resources dedicated to producing online content. That’s why we see so much “me too” content from competing brands.

Brands that effectively deliver meaningful content share these three attributes:

1. They are the best at what they do, whether offering a product or service.
2. Everyone in the organization can articulate what makes their brand different from their competitors.
3. They listen to their customers and make the necessary changes, cultural or procedural, to enhance the customer experience.

In today’s always-on media environment, brands can feel pressured to produce online content that doesn’t meet strategic criteria for being published. Leading brands have solved this problem by asking these simple questions:

• Does this content warrant the resources necessary to produce it?
• Will this content produce a rate of return equal to or greater than a paid media insertion?
• Does the content solve a customer’s problem or concern?
• Will the content support the mosaic of the overall brand story?
• What is the shelf life of the content?

In the not-too-distant past, great brands — B-to-B and B-to-C — knew their DNA. They knew their history, where their value systems came from, and valued the inherent creativity of their employees. This was evident in their marketing and confirmed by their market share.

Today, these same traits are needed to produce content because now in the Omni-channel media environment, content is becoming the face brand across every customer experience.