Evolve Your Content

The speed at which storytelling is evolving in a digital-first world is exciting—personally, I enjoy the process of discovering what each new social media channel has to offer and seeing what works well. But as content continues to evolve and new media trends emerge, sometimes it’s tough for businesses to keep up.

With the average person using seven social media channels per month, that offers a lot of potential to share your stories—and a lot of chances to get it wrong. 

What’s a company to do? Each social channel has its own unique flavor, but regular content generation can feel overwhelming and time-consuming. You can repurpose your content, but it won’t perform the way you want it to across every channel if you publish the same thing everywhere. 

The best thing you can do when it comes to content is to understand the importance of planning ahead. That’s the key to making your storytelling and your content a success. 

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Break it down

I’m a fan of the PESO Model pioneered by marketing expWert and “Spin Sucks”  founder Gini Dietrich. This integrated communication model uses a combination of paid, earned, shared, and owned media. It’s about harnessing the power of the various digital media channels under one cohesive strategy to support your marketing communications goals.

Bottom line: It means examining the core stories that you’re planning to tell for your campaign and breaking them down into the different ways you can tell them. 

Think about the different kinds of content you can make. 

Micro-content includes those short-form videos and stories dominating platforms like Instagram and TikTok, the so-called ‘snackable’ content. It’s great for brand awareness, and good for impressions if it has viral appeal and reach. It’s also excellent for promoting a larger piece of content. 

But I think people focus way too heavily on the micro-content or jump onto trends without a plan. If your content isn’t tied back to the larger ‘why,’ you can spend a lot of time on it and not have it drive towards a bigger goal. A good brand storytelling strategy should not rely solely on micro-content. Ask yourself: Is this micro-content leveling up to your bigger strategies? 

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Long-form content includes blogs, case studies, videos, podcasts, e-books, and the like. It’s good for larger storytelling goals, for showcasing expertise, and for developing thought leadership. As AI-generated content continues to take over the internet, long-form content allows us to differentiate and establish a deeper connection with audiences. While it takes time and effort to create those pieces, it’s a good investment of your time because longform pieces can be great for your overarching storytelling goals.

Then you have user-generated content: It’s harnessing authentic stories from customers and communities. It’s all about making it possible for your customers or influencers to talk about you, your service, or your product. 

The key here is authenticity: Fakeness is everywhere (including with user-generated content) so if yours has any whiff of being manufactured, the internet will let you know. It’s scary, but consumers trust authentic user-generated content more than they trust advertising. 

When I was working with the Fox Cities Performing Arts Center, I developed a community reviewer program to be included with the PAC’s blog. We would offer reviewers free tickets to shows in exchange for their honest assessment — and we’d give them full license to say what they thought, without edits (except profanity).

Needless to say, it was a very interesting pitch to make to our then-president. But to be content that people really valued, it had to be authentic. The program went forward, and it was very, very popular—in fact, it was some of the most viewed content on our website and on our social media, and the program ran successfully for many years. 

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Control what you can control

But this program was a risk—we had to give up control and allow others to give their authentic reviews. With user-generated content, you have to learn to be comfortable with not controlling the narrative. But in a time when everyone can be a broadcaster, your control has a limit anyway. What you can control is understanding who your target audience is, who you are, and the value you bring to that audience.

User-generated content gives people a platform to experience your brand and all it has to offer, and allows that experience to take shape and to have influence. Whether or not our reviewers liked the show we sent them to—and not everybody did—they loved the experience and having the opportunity to be part of that process.

Don’t worry: You can strike the right balance between authenticity and professionalism. When you’re looking at your forms of content, the stories you want to tell, and how you want to present yourself, being authentic and true to who you are as a brand comes first.

Otherwise, you’re going to just chase trends, and that’s not going to come off as authentic and may not come off as professional either. That doesn’t mean you can’t have fun with Tiktok dances and other trends—just don’t chase every tactic out there.

You can choose how you represent yourself, and if you’re connecting authentically, your audiences are going to connect with that.

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Repurpose thoughtfully

While it’s unrealistic to produce unique content all the time for every channel, you can plan ahead and know what your pillar content or stories are going to be. Be aware of how each channel operates and what types of content performs and how they all work in the ecosystem.

My father had a financial business, and his tagline was ‘No lazy money.’ I’ve adopted and adapted that tagline to ‘No lazy content.’ You may establish a campaign during which you’ll produce high-quality content—or as the content marketing institute once coined it -  ‘blockbuster content’—you invest heavily in producing your core content, and then you riff off of it in different ways.

A perfect example of this is the Why I love Oshkosh video series. Behind the scenes, we’re planning our core stories. We have a couple big planning meetings a year, and we meet multiple times monthly to develop our storyboard, identify who’s going to be in the video, and develop the scripts. Once we get these core pieces figured out, then we can talk about all the little side stories that we can do. 

For example, we’ll plan to post our videos on YouTube, Instagram, and Facebook. Our social media manager will also research Tiktok to see if there are any relevant trends happening while we’re working on the shoot that day. We can get behind-the-scenes content for Tiktok, and we can get photography to use for Stories. We’ll make the most use of that full production day, creating everything we can think of, and we’ll get multiple weeks of content from it.

The hardest part is slowing down and planning. But by taking the time to sit down and really plan and think about how the content fits into our core storytelling strategy, we’ll get more out of it. 

If some content doesn’t fit, sometimes that’s OK. Sometimes a good opportunity arises that you can’t plan for. But instead of chasing every single trend, come back to that core. The world of content is amazing and there are so many fun things to do—but the key to doing it right is having that solid plan in place.