Forget Media Planning, Embrace Content Planning
Content can be created, bought, and borrowed; here's how.
Content can be created, bought, and borrowed; here's how.
Media planning as a function has been around for ages now, and with increasing media fragmentation it is getting difficult to find audience within limited resources. Newer and newer media platforms are emerging and marketers are increasingly losing control over these platforms as most of them are now being controlled by consumers themselves. Thanks to social spaces like social networking platforms, blogs, user-generated content video platforms, discussion forums, and so on and so forth.
One thing which has not changed is ‘consumers’ need for good content‘ irrespective of platforms. And that is the primary reason for this huge fragmentation that we are all experiencing. Consumers are finding relevant content elsewhere and they are not sticking anymore to traditional ways of consuming content.
From marketers’ perspective, it will get even more difficult to create content for all possible media channels, it has always been. I feel that everybody in digital domain needs to think about content in a different way. Historically, content has always been a responsibility of creative agencies or nowadays digital content agencies. The content was always thought about to be created by brand itself through its agency partners, it needs to change and needs to change quickly to survive in the game. Let me give you a perspective on how content can be everybody’s responsibility and capability.
We always treat media these days as owned, bought, and earned media, likewise content can be created, bought, and borrowed. Let’s understand this in more detail.
Created Content
This encompasses traditional ways of branded content created by agencies for any brand. It includes TVCs, PR articles, radio jingles, branded videos, etc. The brand has full control on the content and messaging which goes to an audience at large. The end users have no scope of participation in brand-created content and is normally broadcasted to them through various media. If the brand is global, lots of content made for other countries can be repurposed to suit other local markets, especially when some global celebrities are involved.
Bought Content
Marketers who find it difficult to create content can go for this option of buying content from appropriate and relevant sources, e.g., a cosmetics brand can buy content from a beauty and lifestyle portal and use it on brand’s own websites, microsite, etc. This bought content helps the brand to expand its social presence too, if disseminated properly through relevant social channels. Many advertisers are paying bloggers also to create content for them in their web spaces.
Borrowed Content
How Content Planning Helps in Digital Marketing
Content should be intrinsic to your digital strategy. Going forward, you can’t afford to have a digital strategy without content being an integral part of it. It’s not ‘how important is content in a digital marketing strategy?’ it’s ‘how important is content strategy in digital marketing?’
Here’s a list on the clear benefits of having a good content strategy in place: