The Content Engine

A Model of Productivity

Once you’ve recognized the need to create content to drive your marketing, you will undoubtedly ask, “How do we create valuable content?” The generation of quality content is a labor-intensive process that can incorporate the interests of many parties.

In this Efficiency & Productivity report, we show you how content creation is properly carried out in practice using what we call a Content Engine. With careful planning, your content will ensure your relevance and visibility in the marketplace and increase your bottom line.

Strategy Comes First

Before you roll out any content, the first step is to create a good content strategy by answering these questions:

•    What topics should your content address?
•    Who is your audience?
•    Should you create text, audio, or video content?
•    Where should you distribute your content?

Each content strategy will be unique and defined case by case. For more on content strategy, see Giving it Away, Thread Marketing, and Finding Value in the Distributed Content Model.

Assembling The Content Engine

Once you have a strategy nailed down, you need a content creation process or, as we call it, a Content Engine. The Content Engine equates to the actual tactics employed in carrying out your overall strategy – it’s the way you plan, coordinate and generate your content. This has three main steps:

1.    Editorial Calendar
2.    Editorial Meetings
3.    Knowledge Leveraging

Establish an Editorial Calendar

The Content Engine begins with the editorial calendar. Content series, or features (think of them as shows on TV), are mapped out for delivery on a regular, recurring schedule – daily, weekly, monthly.

Let’s say we’re creating content for marketing a Natural History museum. A whitepaper series, targeted at high-school classrooms, called “Natural Science Update” is scheduled for release on the first Tuesday of each month. A Twitter post series with a review of today’s feature at the museum’s Omni screenings is scheduled for daily release.

The editorial calendar delivers a number of benefits:

•    Prevents content overload or blackouts for writers and the audience
•    Identifies conflicts and synergies in topics, allowing for schedule adjustments
•    Enables promotion of upcoming topics
•    Helps consolidate costs and time when researching, interviewing, and producing audio and video

Most importantly, the editorial calendar allows you to work ahead of schedule. As soon as you’re focused on creating valuable content, the old model of sitting down each morning to write that day’s blog post won’t cut it any longer.

Quality content requires time for research, multiple drafts, rewrites and even starting again from scratch. The long lead times provided by the editorial calendar are completely necessary for creating audio and video content.

Pitch First: Editorial Meetings

Along with the series schedules, the editorial calendar includes weekly editorial meetings. At these meetings, specific topics for each series are pitched and approved. For example, the individual responsible for the museum’s monthly “Natural Science Update” series will present several concepts for this month’s release.

Pitches should be short and to the point. The time required for an individual to generate pitch concepts should be minimal. The key is to come up with loose ideas quickly and efficiently that the team can then expand upon. Remember, there is no such thing as a bad idea – the dullest-sounding idea can spark a conversation that leads to a brilliant one.

By discussing each pitch in an open forum, the team can deliver immediate feedback on the concepts, provide helpful insight and references, and ultimately identify which topics should be run this month.

Knowledge Leveraging: Everyone Contributes

The best knowledge and insight into your company rarely comes from marketing staff and copywriters. In fact, marketing jargon can often cloud your message with imprecise language and vague conceptualizations of what you really do or make.

It is important to reach out to your organization and get input from the people who are in the trenches doing the work. They are going to give you eyewitness accounts that will translate most easily into quality content. Leveraging their knowledge and experience will help you generate vital concepts for your content.

In the long term, you may even want to develop these knowledge-rich employees into content creators themselves. Nothing says expertise and transparency better than a corporate blog or a live webcast written or produced by someone who really knows your product or service from the inside.

Takeaway

Frequent, relevant content will drive your marketing success, and establishing a content engine will improve and streamline your content creation process. Identify your strategy, create an editorial calendar, and maximize collaborative participation via pitch meetings and multiple contributors.

One more key: be aggressive. A content engine that only produces a small amount of content each month will not pay dividends. You need to be producing a large volume of content – enough to continually engage your audience and facilitate fluid analysis and adjustments to your strategy.

About the author

Brett Virmalo -

As a creative director at Tippingpoint Labs, Brett leads a team deploying ecommerce and content marketing solutions for global B2B and consumer clients.

Brett has worked with clients including PG&E, Kodak, American Express, TomTom, Putnam Investments, and most recently, Breville. He has been with Tippingpoint Labs since 2003 serving as a designer, developer, art director, and now creative director.