Most marketers think of content and channel as the same thing. But they’re really very different. And the more you manage them as different, the more exponential your value from them will be together.
Email marketers tend to create content specifically for their campaigns and newsletters. The social media team creates their own content strategy in a silo, independent of the rest of the organization.
Some of the email service providers today are offering social media features, but unfortunately many of those features are simply links to archived emails and newsletters sent to social networks. A step in the right direction, perhaps, but one channel promoting another misses the point.
For some reason, we’ve either been trained or made a habit of tying content to channel. But especially in today’s marketing environment – where content is so vitally important to building and managing current and prospective customer relationships – your content strategy needs to exist separately from the channels you use.
Several reasons for this. First, great content is great content. If you know your customer and audience well enough, the content is independent of its delivery mechanism. Plus, you will want that content distributed to and impacting as many prospects and customers as possible, independent of which channel they happen to be paying attention to on any given day or at any given moment.
Second, the most successful marketing organizations in the world today actively repurpose great, core content in a variety of formats and channels. A webinar, for example, becomes a video, an on-demand lead generation offer, a white paper, a series of blog posts and more. If content was developed specific to one of those channels, you’d lose the opportunity to drive value with it across the other channels.
It all starts with your customer – who they are, what they care about, what they’re thinking about and working on right now. Traditionally, marketers work on the next steps (content and channel) at the same time. But if you build your content first – filtered by customer priorities and independent of channel – I think you’ll find more flexibility, usability, leverage and performance across whatever customer-centric channels you choose next.
