What Content Is Not: Seeing Content Through New Media Eyes

Content is the single most important element of online branding and marketing. Content is the voice with which a business communicates.

It’s content that speaks to the unique value propositions of a business’s offerings. It’s content that tells a brand’s story. It’s through story that an audience recognizes deep personal relatability.

With all that content offers, achieves and can be, there requires a shift in definition, expectation and outlook of content in order to use content to its fullest potential. In the realm of commerce, Content (with a capital “C”) is language, where different content types are words that come together to communicate a message in dynamic dialogue.

If that sounds too new-age, it may help to define Content by outlining it with what content is not.

Content Is Not (Just) Text

Content occurs in innumerable forms and combinations with unlimited means of interaction. In terms of consumption, trading, building, iterating — content is full of possibilities for brands online. But one thing is required in order for a business to participate in the rich content economy. A brand must invest in Content.

Content Is Not Any Individual Piece

Buying Content requires a new way of thinking about purchasing a product. We’re used to buying things, tangible and finite. However, the form an investment in content takes is unfamiliar for most. Quality content starts in the form of a strategic foundation supporting a brand. Deciding on content to create before a strategy is in place is like choosing a solution for an unknown problem.

Content Is Not a Servant of SEO

If content is relegated to the function of a keyword delivery system, you’re not creating content; you’re creating junk. A search engine judges the quality of a website by content quality averaged across the site. Any effort to add content quantity while overlooking quality harms the site, period.

Content Is a State of Mind

Rather than a package of defined goods, an investment in Content is counted in time. First comes a strategy with an intimate understanding of audience, and from there content campaigns and individual content pieces can be specified. Individual content pieces can be created to reach the audience by speaking to their needs through their regular channels of media consumption.

Content is the foundation on which a brand empire is built. High rises of blog posts are surrounded by a stream of Twitter and Facebook promotion. Solid structures of inbound links are supported by infographics and videos and other rich-media assets.

Before you create content, your Content blueprint must be developed to build reach and meaning for your brand. If a business’s product or service is deserving, Content is the means of magnifying its message to the masses you aim to attract to your empire.

Virginia Nussey is the director of content marketing at MobileMonkey. Prior to joining this startup in 2018, Virginia was the operations and content manager at Bruce Clay Inc., having joined the company in 2008 as a writer and blogger.

See Virginia's author page for links to connect on social media.