Cloud Based Content Strategy: Building a foundation
A good cloud based content strategy includes good communication because communication is everything. In business, the way your company communicates is the key to your success, or failure. You are being judged, by the interactions those outside your business have with your staff on the phone or via emails, in your official correspondence, during meetings and throughout your group presentations.
What is content?
Content is any form of communication your business has with your existing and potential clients and customers. These moments of communication all count because they are either contributing to your success or getting in the way of it. Every communication you have as a business is an opportunity to create a new perception, turn around negative attitudes, and change unproductive thinking and behaviour.
At Datanova, we view communication not as something that just happens, but as something we aim to do well – strategically and skillfully and in active partnership with clients and service providers. And that’s an attitude we think other businesses should adopt too.
Strategic and skillful communication starts with a cloud based content strategy. There are two levels to any effective content strategy:
1. The way the organisation presents itself in official correspondence
2. The way that organisation’s individuals go about their work
Your business’s future success largely depends on influencing the perceptions, attitudes, thoughts and behaviour of your clients. Every time you communicate with them, you have an opportunity to have this influence. But to be effective, your communication – your content strategy – must be targeted, clear, consistent, meaningful, timely and compelling. To build a content strategy, you must have a clear idea of your strategic goals, your target audience and your organisational strengths and weaknesses.
Customer expectations are very high and they always ask hard questions. But they don’t always ask you directly, particularly if they haven’t yet engaged with your organisation. Most customers will come across your organisation when they are seeking answers, and more often than not, this happens online. In the past, your potential customers were drawn to your organisation through advertising. But today, brands are now read, viewed, heard, experienced, sampled, used, poked, prodded, and laid open to public trial and judgement in a wide variety of channels that you’ll have no control over.
Fleeting encounters with ads and straplines don’t make brands any more. Deep analysis and interrogation of your business builds brands. And much of this is done via content.
Content is now branding, and content has a very big job to do.
What is Cloud-based Content?
In cloud computing, software and data is stored on the Internet. Accessible by devices such as smart phones, Desktop Computers, televisions and tablet PCs. The “cloud” in cloud computing is the hardware, networks, storage and services that combine to deliver the computing. Cloud-based user experiences use devices to access cloud-based content, software and services.
Cloud-based services provide content, backup, data protection solutions, storage and more.
Content equals sales
Much of the sale process happens before you ever meet your customer. Business-to-business (B2B) buyers often arrive at a vendor shortlist before making contact with any one of them. Vendors that provide the right information at the right time to help buyers work through the pre-purchase process are far more likely to make it to the final sales conversation. Unfortunately, most businesses are not prepared for marketing in this environment, as they simply don’t have experience. They don’t employ the right people to do create content and they don’t plan for content in their marketing budgets and strategies.
Nearly every major online marketing trend or strategy over the past decade has been held back, not by strategy or technology, but by content. Organisations are ignoring the opportunities for providing content to their customers. These content opportunities appear in a range of areas, such as a business’s one-on-one marketing, cloud content delivery, through the user experience, through viral marketing, search engine optimisations, websites, social media and much more.
To take advantage of the power of content and develop an effective, authoritative content strategy, your business must:
- Agree to a business/brand strategy and organisational buy-in about the importance of content
- Identify knowledge and content owners, within and outside the business, and have accountability for producing it
- Identify key content themes aligned to strategy and a foundation of source information for creating it
- Structure the approach and timeline for delivering content
- Find processes and technology to speed up the delivery
We call this content strategy.
Content strategy is based on your business and brand objective, and it defines who you want to talk to, what you want them to think and do, what content is right for the job and how you package and release it as a continuous, engaging story. The strategy also defines where the content comes from, how your business will produce it and how you deliver it.
Like any asset, content requires investment, management and nurturing to achieve maximum performance.
Our cloud-based content strategy process
A cloud-based service that enables clients to author, search and share content throughout sites, networks, diverse departments, or different technologies. Connecting content and enabling companies to discover, reuse, and distribute content in a secure cloud environment.
At Datanova, we take a long-term content strategy approach that covers research, auditing, planning, content creation, building and deploying that content to the right touch points and channels, testing that content and optimising its utility. We conduct an initial content and communication audit, which is critical in establishing the strongest possible theme. We aim to:
- Understand as many marketing activities as possible and create a plan
- Identify key existing content assets such as whitepapers or customer case studies
- Identify internal content already scheduled to be produced in the short and long term
- Gather supporting sales collateral and customer research that may be available
- Understand any related marketing activity that should be leveraged
Examples of content that can support multiple businesses opportunities include but are certainly not limited to:
- Banners
- Advertorials
- Campaign landing pages
- Webinars
- Website content
- Sales collateral
- Marketing support
A new breed of publishers
Brands that are online are now publishers, and they must act like it. Publishers develop themes and create stories. They create editorial schedules to deliver creative ways of talking about that theme. Then, they fight to meet their schedules. Content is now a strategic business asset that requires investment in a cloud based content strategy.
Cloud-based content services
Datanova’s secure, cloud-based content distribution and discovery service will enable clients to author, search and share content throughout a complex network of sites and channels. From blogs to features, editing executive reports to video interviews, our expert content creators can meet any brief, at any time. Datanova cloud based content strategy services include:
- Client services and planning, including project or account management, analytics and strategy
- Acquisition, including data planning and online marketing
- Content development, including content strategy, content research and copywriting
- Technical development, including hosting, intranets and database development
- Creative design, including websites, landing pages and online advertising
- Front-end development, including information architecture and game development
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