Over the past decade I believe there has been a change to the practice of content strategy in large part to the consumer wanting new demands in terms of their content and how it is delivered. Content strategy helps to remind business owners of the fact that the needs of the company do not always necessarily outweigh the needs of the consumer and vice versa. Instead companies need to find the middle ground that helps to benefit both the company and user with content that relates to the consumer while adding to the growth of the company.
Rebekah Iliff in her article How Content Strategy is Changing, brings in a statistic from Stackla report which states that “almost two-thirds of marketers “feel pressure to continually produce greater amounts of content at a higher frequency” (Iliff). But this does not mean that companies can put quantity over quality in their production of content. No consumers expect a wide range and variety of content to choose from that they feel fits them the best and same amount of effort put into every aspect of it which helps to grow trust with the brand. Because at the end of the day the mission and message the company should be reflected back to them in all of their content.
Ahava Leibtag backs this up in her article too talking about how every aspect of the message delivered to the audiences is content whether its words, images, or video. This content strategy could not have been the same a decade ago as new forms of content require new demands. Newspapers were the biggest new source of their time and were always on top of the biggest developing news being printed in their morning issues. But now with instant social media and access to unlimited information, people expect faster but more importantly accurate information from these outlets. While the content does appear in the visuals themselves, Leibtag also points out that behavior and timing of delivery are also considered content now in today’s world (Leibtag).
Content strategy plans today have to go through a number of steps in order to secure the best possible experience for their users, especially in the growing world of UX design. Even the greatest content can’t outweigh the faults of a horrific user experience design which finds itself ever evolving to more simplistic approaches yet storing more content than ever before. Content strategy needs to plan and take into account its creation, delivery, and governance of useful but also usable content (Halverson). The content strategy should be able to stay relevant with that which has come before while laying the path for what comes next.
In order to achieve maximum revenue and cost effectiveness, companies are now conducting research into aspects of content strategy that wasn’t as measurable years ago. Omar Akhtar in his article Your 2019 Content Strategy: 5 Trends You Can’t Ignore, points out that reach is no longer the best performance metric for companies but rather interactions. In 2018, interactions or engagement (clicks, comments, or shares) maintained its status as the top metric 30%, but now reach finds itself dropping again now to 12% (Akhtar).
Companies that have short and concise content find themselves drawing in more consumers as people now want to see the information they seek in the click of a button and not have to search deep for it. People today have become more conscious of their time and now take into account the costs and benefits of being on certain sites more than others (Nielsen). If what they find on one site doesn’t satisfy them in terms of content, they won’t look to return in the near future most likely.
Works Cited
Akhtar, Omar. “Your 2019 Content Strategy: 5 Trends You Can’t Ignore.” Convince and Convert: Social Media Consulting and Content Marketing Consulting, 2019, www.convinceandconvert.com/content-marketing/content-trends-2019/.
Halvorson, Kristina. “The Discipline of Content Strategy.” A List Apart, 17 Dec. 2008, alistapart.com/article/thedisciplineofcontentstrategy/.
Iliff, Rebekah. “How Content Strategy Is Changing + Resources To Guide Your Success.” Business 2 Community, 23 May 2019, www.business2community.com/communications/how-content-strategy-is-changing-resources-to-guide-your-success-02203695.
Leibtag, Ahava, et al. “Excolo.” Excolo, Diffen, 1 Jan. 1970, excolo.com/information-v-content/.
Nielsen, Jakob. “Long vs. Short Articles as Content Strategy.” Nielsen Norman Group, 2007, www.nngroup.com/articles/content-strategy-long-vs-short/?lm=content-strategy&pt=course.
