Content has become vital for businesses to connect with their audience and drive success. With that in mind, content should not be confined to a single department or limited to a specific format. When harnessed across the organization, it is a powerful tool that can drive growth, enhance brand perception, and foster meaningful customer connections.
Viewing content as merely blog posts or articles limits its potential impact. To fully leverage the power of content, organizations must embrace a spectrum that spans from blogs to engage in forums and beyond.
Often, a company may be tempted to favor one method or the other when committing to content marketing. It can be an unnecessary race to measure the efficiency of individual content tools, usually with the aim of cost or labor efficiency.
Businesses may have difficulty understanding this, and it can be very easy to ignore this concept and invest in one end of the spectrum or the other. Yet, this can end up leaving them in a tricky spot.
For instance, focusing on blog content may help build your content value, but it's usually difficult to promote written content on a broader scale since there are so many of them. Meanwhile, podcasts take time and effort to create, but tools like shorts and trend boost help give them more exposure to a broader marketplace. So which should you choose?
It's a trick question – if you have the resources, you can employ both.
A lack of openness to this inclusive option leads companies to under or over-value different approaches to content marketing. However, being too open can lead to other issues as well. It's always important for any business to balance each end of the content spectrum and adjust it to its own needs.
Understanding the spectrum
Different content executions exist on a spectrum of content marketing. Convincing your company to see content as one marketing spectrum will be challenging. So, it'll be helpful for you to look at it from this angle: How does it all contribute to your final goal? You may have more specific goals for fulfilling ROI or fixing immediate problems.
You can't usually fulfill the general aims of your content with just one approach or tactic. The content spectrum relies entirely on fulfilling the organization's central goal, though those goals may vary depending on your needs. These goals can come in the following scale:
- Audience generation: In this phase, you need to view content as your main asset, making your product something that lies in a secondary layer. Your primary goal is to find an audience and generate value from that audience. Much of content marketing lies here, including blog writing and podcasting.
- Company promotion: Somewhat between the two extremes, your content help drives sales and encourage buyers to consider your product or service. You’re trying to appeal to your current market while also engaging in new markets to keep your brand relevant. Most advertising and paid promotion lie in this context.
- Enhancing experience: Create content that enhances customers’ experiences with your product. You need to differentiate yourself from your competitors through your content, building a relationship with the current customer base you may have by providing convenience. Mobile applications or physical events are some examples of this content.
Most companies don’t understand that this spectrum must overlap and continue off one another to maintain growth and engagement. It isn’t a stage-by-stage development. It is, instead, a collaboration between the different forms of content marketing and their goals.
Breaking the silos
Content encompasses various mediums, including videos, white papers, public forecasts, social media posts, and more. By recognizing these diverse forms content can take, marketers can tap into their full potential and unlock new avenues for engagement.
However, they cannot be the only ones making this recognition. For other teams to understand how to view content beyond a singular spectrum, the marketing or content team should encourage employees from various departments to participate actively in content creation and distribution.
Other teams, such as sales, product development, customer service, and HR, should be allowed to identify their unique perspectives and insights. This can involve sharing expertise through guest blog posts, contributing to thought leadership articles, or engaging with customers in online forums.
Breaking down silos and encouraging cross-departmental collaboration is essential for a successful content strategy. This collaborative approach ensures that content resonates with the target audience and aligns with the company's overall vision while simultaneously demonstrating how an integrated content strategy can contribute to achieving broader organizational objectives for the people within the organization itself.
Optimal approach
So how do you best use, let’s say, your blog and podcast to balance the spectrum and reach the audience?
These marketing tools perform best on the audience generation and business promotion side of the spectrum. Blogs can generate SEO and traffic, while podcasts can use online virality. While both have pros and cons, you can adjust them to apply to their strengths and cover for each other’s weaknesses.
For example, podcasts can be an easy gateway for your branded content. While a podcast may not be able to provide as much of an in-depth view of your audience’s relevant topics, its audio format allows them to be easily digested and spread on different social platforms.
If your company generates value from its audience, you can thoroughly prioritize podcasting as a method of audio generation, building subscription-based models or sponsorships. However, if it aims to promote the brand, podcasts can subtly generate interest and draw in more leads from your audience.
Once the virality of your podcast content draws in an audience, they may be curious enough to look for more information. This is where blog content can shine the most. Not only is blog content good for generating leads through SEO, but it can also provide much-needed clarity and details that a podcast may have missed.
This two-pronged audience generation strategy allows more organic traffic to flow to your content. With the regular flow of helpful information or guidance, potential clients develop a stronger relationship with the brand. Both approaches help enhance their experience with your company and are thus more likely to win their trust.
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