Is That Cliché about Content True?

We all know the saying “content is king”, and even though you may be bored with everyone harping on about this, I’m afraid to say… It really is true!

With Christmas approaching, you’re soon (or perhaps already are) going to be bombarded with Christmas messages. Telling you to go see this show, or buy this present, or absolutely convince your kids that they need the latest breed of sea monkeys that can fly or turn rainbow colors (or whatever kids are into these days).

But the point “content is king” only stands if you actually have high-quality content. Content that hits the right person, at the right stage in their consideration journey and has cut through over the multitude of other messaging. And that might be quite tricky to do.

Creating New Content for Content’s Sake Is Not Good Enough

The point that content is only worth its salt if it’s relevant feeds back into one of our agency’s earlier blogs Have we reached peak content? in which Ben Waterhouse, Content and Social Media Manager at Pull, talks about how making content for content’s sake isn’t good enough; it has to have a specific purpose.

Obviously, creating content for brands is a valuable enterprise and is worth doing. Interestingly, when I look at the descriptions of the Content Manager position (and there are literally hundreds of these job advertisements on Google), the role of a good Content Manager should be to bring together many different elements of the business that may have been separate in the past. From Design to Digital, a Content Manager should be creating content with and for these teams, be it print infographics, digital ads, or anything else.

But do we need to create new content every time? Is there any value in re-purposing old content?

Re-using Content Done Right

For example, take Coca Cola—pretty much every single year they have essentially the same Christmas advert. A lit-up truck, driving through a snow-covered landscape with people looking on with glee. They even use the same song track. While the ads aren’t exactly the same, they use the same elements, and this is because it works! The Coke Christmas ads have become so familiar that even hearing the song triggers images of that truck in a snowy scene.

Obviously, Coke has a very identifiable brand image, which absolutely works in their favor, but the format of the advert in itself is almost as recognizable as the actual brand.

This has only been done by using the same advert elements, again and again, every year, making it a childhood memory for pretty much every child growing up in the '90s. The year 1995 was when the adverts first launched, but the style of the Santa on the trucks makes it look much older than this, perhaps a clever marketing ploy to indicate to the audience a rich and old heritage.

So, if Coke has the strategy of using the same elements of a campaign they know works and only slightly tweaking it every year, can’t other brands do the same and take a leaf out of their book?

The Coke Christmas campaign is enormous, with a large marketing budget, but how can we implement this re-useable strategy on a micro level?

How Can You Repurpose Your Content?

Something that can be implemented on a micro-level, but which actually makes a huge difference, is the process of editing existing webpages and slightly altering the content to make them relevant instead of creating a whole new page.

Not only does this avoid duplication of content, which can be an SEO problem, but also prevents wasted staff time. Something which can help is the new Kentico Kontent platform that allows marketers to unify content across the entire organization.

As Petr Palas, CEO of Kentico, explains, “Unlike most Digital Experience Platforms, Kentico Kontent is designed to become part of your Digital Experience Stack and gives you the freedom to combine it with any digital experience technology.”

This means that it differs from a traditional CMS because it’s not as limited—your content is consumable on any device, and it can be integrated with your other digital experiences, from AI to Chatbots.

Kentico Kontent is a Content-as-a-Service (CaaS) solution that enables you to repurpose your existing content. You may want to use a webpage almost identical to one you’ve already published but edit it slightly for different audiences. CaaS allows you to do this by consolidating all your content in a single unified environment where it’s easy to create, manage, and edit.

Using CaaS allows organizations to build up a library of reusable pieces of content which can be edited to be fit for purpose, instead of creating a whole new piece of content. Just like Coke, you could take a campaign you know works for one audience and alter it slightly to serve to a different audience, saving you putting together a whole new set of assets.

Not only that—you can then deliver this content in a consistent way across all of your connected platforms, providing a unified user experience.

The Key Takeaway Here

So, content is still indeed king, but you don’t need to be a slave to creating content that already exists.

Indeed, it’s better not to create content continually from scratch. Investing in a content system that allows users to see what content already exists and devising a marketing strategy that actually allows your content creators to build on this content is also essential.

Which is why I’ll end this blog by stressing this: create content for a specific purpose, don’t use quantity to measure success. Remember, less is more.

_{Article written by Francesca Salino, Campaign Manager at The Pull Agency}