I believe we are marketing in a post-digital world. By post-digital, I mean a time when the communication landscape is no longer defined by the potential of any particular medium (digital, social, interactive, etc.), but instead by its overall ability to connect with particular human needs. Today, the medium has become secondary to the message. Finding one’s way through this new phase of communication and creating a lasting connection with the audience begins with the understanding that content truly is king.

What Content Means for Business

Content covers the sum of your brand’s publishing activities. When your company offers white papers, YouTube videos, webinars, XML feeds, and social streams, you are already acting like a publisher. In a post-digital world, the successful company publishes through a complete content strategy created with the customer in mind. Successful content strategy begins with the creation of content that tells a compelling brand story through an engaging user experience. This content is incorporated into the overall customer experience. Great website content, free training demos, how-to PDFs, story driven website copy, micro-documentaries, solution overviews, etc. are just part of the mix to engage audiences. Below this surface, the content must contain an intelligent structure in terms of meta data, search, metrics, and code.  Further, content is not just for demand generation, but also for improving customer service and delivering value to current customers.

Effective content must be useful to the customer, and be wrapped in the social and made available in communities. Creating such content requires brands to reflect and express what customer’s value, not what marketing departments believe customers should care about. Forget about what you think makes you different and find out what your customers think.

Like other business strategies, companies need a content strategy based on customer research and customer service improvement. In 2010, most brands don’t fully employ a content strategy in developing their customer experience, customer service and business process. True, everyone is producing content on some level, but the relationship between actual business process and content strategy is not fully engendered. While companies have social media czars, how many companies have a content king? Organizations may have a UX manager, a development team and a marketing dept, but lack a content strategist or content manager to help bridge the gap between these groups and to forge a concise, cohesive strategy. If content is this important, let’s think about adding this person to our teams or partnering with content agencies.

Hail to the King

The post-digital world is ruled by King Content. Content is not just what you create, but the overall approach to your brand and what you publish. As we move forward, forget about the latest medium, and focus on your customer: who they are, why they buy from you, and what they care about.

Couple of points from this TechTarget Presentation:

1 — Prospects WANT video — shows that marketers produce less video then prospects want. 72% of users use online video to research tech solutions.

2 — Syndication is critical (one video leveraged to many places). Prospects view video content on multiple sites (youtube, corporate sites, content providers, etc.).

3 — Users like diverse amounts of video content (demos, case studies, testimonials, conferences).

4 — IT Buyers like COMPARABLE content.

Thanks to Tanya at Xinify for sharing the presentation!

Flash Presentations, Flash Demos and Online Demos are VERY effective tools to help sell your products and solutions. Most companies have product demos on their websites, and most of them are not very good. Considering that if you look at web analytics, product demos are the type of content that people actually click on and will watch, companies ought to invest in making quality product demos—and leveraging this communication across various mediums.

Viewstream has a lot of experience in creating product demonstrations — and we wanted to share some of our tips and tricks. So we wrote an article, that shares some of our insights. It’s a little long for a blog posting, but check it out here.

Please make comments to the blog!

There is a great case study here of how to use a multi channel media strategy to bring a product to market, and align everything around keywords and key messages supported by varied media types. I have seen this integrated marketing and PR strategy work very well for many of Viewstream’s clients. If played right, using this strategy creates significant competitive advantage.

As companies like google continue to dominate, vertical content sites are growing slower than the big content sites (Social Networks, YouTube, Google) – which means an integrated communication/search strategy is a better place to spend your dollars then on online advertising. From the data that I have seen, the long tail is beginning to look like The Stumpy-Tail Cattle Dog (a dog that has no tail).

I am simply amazed at how many times clients tell me that they got a call from someone who found them on Google and then closed a huge deal. By the same token, ROI from online advertising has never looked sadder – with a decline in online ad click through rates and the unreliable data from advertising properties. Search drives sales – we have always known that – and the data shows this more and more.

Viewstream is well positioned in this changing environment as we are able to work quickly in many mediums (integrated search, digital media, website, creative, messaging) to get companies to market faster, better and cheaper than the slower advertising conglomerates that companies have traditionally relied on.