Why You Are Still Relevant In An Oversaturated Branded Content World

How do you stay relevant as a content producer in the world oversaturated with content? How do you reinvent yourself? Do you diversify? How can you evolve to keep yourself just as relevant today and tomorrow as you were yesterday?

There is such a huge increase in the amount of uploaded content today. Ads don’t work. All brands are now trying to be content publishers. Every company selling any type of a product wants to be a media company in order to get heard. It is getting much harder to stand out and get eyeballs to things you create in such an overcrowded content space. There’s just too much going on.

It is no longer enough just to write 300 words and get pageviews. An increase in quality of content is contributing to escalating time and resources needed for content production. Even the distribution is no longer free and the promise of organic “viral” marketing reach doesn’t exist any longer. Big brands pay a lot of money to get their content created and then they pay even more for the attention of their audience. This contributes to entry barriers being higher and higher. “Amateurs” and low budget producers who were the stars of the early days of online content boom are now being pushed out.

There is a skills gap

This is not a sustainable strategy though. There is just not enough demand for all that content supply. Many brands will fail. Most brands will fail. This hyper-competitiveness sounds like something you don’t want to touch nor be around as someone who wants to try and make a name for himself online. But there is a light at the end of the tunnel for any small business or individual. The content creation craze shows that there is a skills gap.

It is very difficult for brands to build internal teams that really understand and get content marketing. Internally in large companies people are recruited from the PR team, from copywriting team and from traditional marketing and these are now becoming “content” teams. Most of these employees still have the traditional mindset of pushy advertising messages and being the one that shouts the loudest. They don’t get what engaging content means. These people are not passionate about the topics they are now supposed to create thrilling content about. These people are not experts creating content about their sweet spots. You cannot buy passion and the creativity that comes as a consequence of passion.

Lack of ideas and insights

Companies also look for agencies to solve these issues, but generally agencies are not doing the best content job either. A large amount of SEO agencies have been rebranded as content agencies recently. These agencies are good at churning out farmed content. They are good at being content machines. They can write many “unique” articles focusing on your “keywords” and they can even include some “viral” infographics in your content mix.

But in their content they are answering questions nobody’s asking. Their content lacks insights and ideas. This weak content can be prettied up – it can have irresistible headline, nice looking imagery and professionally produced multimedia. But the core of this content is not great at all. It lacks substance. It lacks value. It is not passionate, useful, entertaining nor interesting. That is why there is so much content published today that gets none or next to none attention.

You need to find a fresh approach to your topic. You need to tell awesome stories in order to stand out. You need to add substance to your content. Great content will always win. And that is why you are still relevant and you still stand a chance of gaining that share of the audience. Keep pushing!

via Business 2 Community http://ift.tt/1hT1phu