Great content the digital marketing challenge

Because digital offers highly targeted, trackable reach to specific audiences at great prices. Throw in the increasingly influential viral impact of social networking and you've got a communication channel that can save the company advertising bacon in hard times.

Catch

There is, of course, a catch - with so many players on the park, getting noticed is becoming an increasingly tough business.

The resolution? Great content.

But, there's a further catch - 21st century content is consumed at such speed that enough is never enough. Even if your brand has great content that is sought after by readers, Internet users and twitterers, to keep feeding the beast can become an insurmountable challenge. While the user-generated content (UGC) phenomenon has lifted a degree of content pressure, there remains a spiralling demand from global consumers for great digital content.

Quite simply, we're in the put-your-money-where-your-mouth-is era. For years, brands have had carte blanche on communicating their desired positioning or identity to consumers, mostly via one-way channels. Few brands actually practised what they preached.

But in today's social networking and user commentary environment, brands really need to live their image. Information can be consumed over multiple devices, and if you offer people information that actually adds value to their lives, they will be more receptive to your message, and therefore your brand.

Perceived conflict

What makes producing attractive digital content such an issue is the perceived conflict between digital and real worlds. Great digital content relies on being present and understanding real world communities - something that not many digital publishers or advertisers manage to do successfully. The idea (which has been around since the beginning of the Internet) that online and offline are different places is a major mistake.

Communities are communities and whether you're reaching them via digital or traditional media they remain essentially the same.

So, if you want great content for your target audience, you need to understand that audience, you need an authentic presence in that community and you need to know how to speak to them in their language. If you don't have strong roots in a community, you will struggle to generate content on an ongoing basis. Conversely, if you have an authentic presence within a community you will know instinctively how to service it properly.

Community credentials

At The Content Bar our speciality is the young adult urban market - not because this is a decision we've taken strategically, but because it's the community we've always been involved with, so we're able to service it effectively. This is a good rule of thumb that brands and advertisers should pay attention to. Work with content providers with community credentials and you're at least half way to meeting the digital content challenge.

But what, exactly, is digital content?

It can be anything... Cellphone journalism, content for mobile magazines and portals, Internet journalism, UGC portals... There's a universe of possibilities out there, which, really, is part of the problem. How do you decide what to do? How are you going to do it? Who's going to generate the content for you on a daily basis? These are major issues and for most digital media owners they never go away.

One example that is working well for us at The Content Bar is mob flashing.

Mob flashing?

We go to an event, hook up a specially designed backdrop that fits with the event's ethos, bring in a great photographer and allow members of the public to take wild yet very well-shot event photographs, which are then circulated via digital channels. It's very participative, fits well into the social networking context and so forth.

Changing fast

Whichever angle you come at it from, content really is king. And in the years ahead it looks like our understanding of what digital content is, and how we'll use it and digest it, will keep on changing - fast. The big trick for most brands will be the understanding how to get regional and specific with their offering.

Get that right, and the rest will fall into place.