The internet world is overflowing with content. It can be overwhelming creating content that flags down your target audience. Businesses of all sizes need to combine brilliant copywriters and designers to communicate effectively. Here are several ways to help you organize your content that effectively communicates important information with your stakeholders, employees, customers, prosects, shareholders, partners, and venders:
? View Content Through a Broader Lens
Creative art is an indispensable success factor, which is why more than 70% of businesses invest in professional design to help their brands stand out against their competition. Digital marketing agencies have teams of graphic artists who are experts in visual communications who put images, typography, and graphics together to create compelling designs for digital projects of all kinds. Consider working with seasoned designers in producing content assets you need to raise brand awareness and generate interest in your business.
In B2B marketing, the rise of content marketing has put more focus on the creation of white papers, e-books, how-to guides, and infographics because these items are key to attracting and keeping audience retention. Content strategies to create and deliver online experiences for deeper, more meaningful interactions with their various audiences has grown as well. There is more of an emphasis on optimized content for web and mobile engagement. These avenues provide opportunities to drive creative material and lead generation for your business 10x over.
Important internal business content comes in many forms, including PowerPoint Presentations or Keynote, Word, and Excel files plus structured documents like investment prospectuses, technical manuals, and pharmaceutical labels. Government agencies are also digitizing their forms, legislative documents, codes, and standards documents. Even bots, powered by AI and ML, need to reflect brand standards, therefore creating a design that expands through all these items are critical. These documents require layouts and branding, so hiring a professional design agency to create these less glamorous but important forms will make the content more impactful and easier for employees to keep their attention.
? Become a Key Business Partner
Work directly with subject-matter experts across your company and the marketing agency. This includes product managers, designers, and developers, even the CEO (especially if they are the final decision maker). Produce the content that is required using important information gathered from each team, whether that’s a product video, or layout design for the website, etc. Explain how your product/service addresses a market need or have subject-matter expert do it for you. Use their words to build the narrative that will help build a brand story. Then use a designer to think about which visual elements will have the most impact. Together, your words and images work together to tell a compelling story that educates, entertains, or influences the target audience who will experience it in the various ways established.
Digital devices have given consumers more power and control over how and when they shop, search for information, read the news, or watch their favorite shows. They have their own path that allows businesses to reach more people like them regardless of geography, which can translate into more influence and potential growth for your business. Expectations are high, even B2B companies and their stakeholders appreciate not only accurate and consistent information but also attractive colors, interesting images, and interactive elements. B2C and B2B design are becoming similar in experience, which means old boring black and white formats don’t cut it.
You don’t have to recreate every new design for every channel. Automated omnichannel publishing makes it possible to accomplish these tasks quickly. Create a single piece of content and publish it to all channels simultaneously, without compromising format integrity. This makes marketing more productive, and your client gets your message into their hands or onto their screens faster. Understand technology trends and stay current on how to incorporate them into your work process. Quicken productivity through tech will enable you to pursue more opportunities and deliver greater value to clients. Technology should be part of your exploratory process for your clients too. This will also build stronger partner in-house or external client relationships if you can do the work quickly with less friction in the creation process. You will be their vendors to support them with the right skills and proper scope.
? Understand Content Complexity & Compliance
Volume, variety, and velocity. Huge amounts of content in various formats need to be produced quickly to meet client demands. That might look like giving employees in the customer support department the standard operating procedures in the form of an interactive pdf they need to enroll customers in a new service. This could also mean updating your website so customers can see the menus from their favorite restaurants online, order, and have them delivered to their homes.
Hundreds of data sources might be required to power a website, especially if it has an e-commerce platform. Data can come from copy, charts, forms, videos, shopping carts, etc. Many people are involved in supplying the data as well as reviewing and approving the front-end copy and creative before it can be published. Website designers will have to interact with people from marketing to IT, product management, finance, and legal as well as operations, distribution, and customer support. Make sure the final design translates across the numerous web browsers and that it scales up and down correctly on tablets and mobile phones.
Logo and color scheme, selected fonts, and established a tone of voice are important elements in brand building. A brand guide enables marketing and all departments to create a consistent image, and, in so doing, increase brand awareness and equity. Brand compliance is part of business compliance is important to reputation, value, and growth overall.
Other regulatory compliance in other forms of compliance vary by industry and geography such as health, safety, and manufacturing controls. This can also apply to content. For example, “According to Life Science Leader,” states that it costs between $800 million and $1.2 billion to bring a new drug to market. That means meeting regulatory requirements for the associated content is a quarter of that cost. A pharmaceutical company might have to make more than 30,000 label changes during a year, and complex label changes can take more than a year. Having a professional agency have a design ready for these flexible changes could cut the cost and knock off one less stressor to the product development phase. From websites and apps to offline documents, regulatory compliance is a key consideration when creating, managing, and publishing this type of content.
Overwhelmed on how to approach your content marketing strategy? Call 248.528.360