With the growing realisation from any 21st century marketers worth their salt that quality content is the key to businesses really achieving positive reputations online, one could be forgiven for thinking that this was a recent phenomenon.
In one way it is – the need for businesses to generate quality content so that they can engage with their online audiences is fairly new. Without quality information and data to submit and comment on, all written to a technical spec to boost a buiness’ SEO, online traffic would decrease and no meaningful dialogues will be generated with customers and industry peers. This would only have a detrimental impact on a company’s performance in today’s digital market place.
But in another way, the importance for quality content has always been there for marketing professionals. For any company or organisation committed to communicating effectively with external audiences, whatever the channel, quality content has been a commercial truth since the pre-digital age.
Businesses and organisations with long established reputations for expert marketing communications such as Virgin, the Prince’s Trust, Great Ormond Street or Apple, have always realised that “quality content” has always been the key for communicating with target audiences. It doesn’t matter whether you are doing a press launch, creating and placing an advert or a promotion, or just writing a press release for a journalist.
Whatever the channel, the marketing communications strategy remains the same for businesses wanting to target their key audiences.
Be relevant. Be interesting. Stand out from the competition. Have an actual opinion. Include as many visual images in any communications as possible for more impact. Invest in creativity for more impact. And only release market data with real validity which says something new. Think about the interests of your audience first and then ensure that all your messages will hit this mark.
In some ways, digital marketers seem to have moved on a million years from their predecessors in previous decades. In some ways, we really haven’t moved on at all.