Ready, Fire, Aim

The digital world has a ravenous appetite for content.  Brands have so many parties involved in content generation that it is impairing the delivery of a cohesive and coherent message.  All the work starts from a different place, and brands often don’t have the technology platform to view it easily as a whole.

You can't move forward unless you understand where you have been, and the spaghetti mess of content out there speaks to that.  Quantity has trumped quality, and pressures to fill content quotas, driven by tactical/SEO considerations, has resulted in a mass of digital drivel.

Just stop and take a breath.  Great brands need to become their own content studios, and YOU must become your own showrunner.  Nobody else is doing it, and nobody is better prepared for the job. To do that, you need to answer a couple of critical questions.

·       Do you have a visual, searchable platform for marketing content that enable you to get all agency partners (digital, social, PR, retail, brand, etc) on the same page?

·       You probably have a brand strategy document.  Do you even have a content strategy document?  Has anyone ever forensically audited what you have done to assess what you are saying about yourself? 

·       How detailed are your creative briefs? Have you seen a movie script before? Where everything (dialog, foreground, background, expressions, music, etc) is described in the script?  How close do your briefs come to that? 

·       Can you schedule content easily across channels, to make sure that it evolves {from week to week and month to month} in a coherent way?

Answer these three questions with yes, and you are on a path to get so good at planning your own content that external costs, for agencies and content and production, declines.  Dramatically.