“A coherent and ambitious content strategy is a strategic emergency for brands”

Brands have become media. This phrase has been circulating in landerneau marketing for years. And rightly so. The points of contact with consumers have multiplied, from the website to the application, including the CRM program and social platforms. Communication formats and content also vary depending on whether you are talking to a loyal customer, a prospect or someone new to the brand.

Beyond this assertion and its legitimacy, the reality is that the market is still often at the start of history in this field of “content marketing” and which still remains a poor relation in marketing strategies alongside advertising. notably.

However, it is more than urgent to accelerate on this subject and put it back at the top of the list of strategic priorities of the CMOs and even of the executive committees.

Beyond the multiplication of contact points and the diversity of content to be developed to adapt to the varied expectations of consumers, content has become a more strategic subject than ever for companies. I see at least three reasons for this:

• The inbound marketing that content marketing allows – in other words ensuring that consumers come to brands on their own rather than the other way around – is a source of significant optimization of media costs in a hyper inflationary context.

• Consumer engagement, which attractive and quality content allows, is also a source of value creation, both thanks to the best conversion rates generated and thanks to the contribution to improving brand perception.

• Finally, massive access to proprietary data has become an urgent and strategic necessity in an ecosystem set to become cookieless. Massive, well-structured and well-labeled proprietary data is also essential to feed new value chains that will be driven by Artificial Intelligence. Without high-quality owned media content, it is impossible to build these massive and structured stores of proprietary data.

Content development poses new challenges for brands

Developing a coherent and ambitious content strategy has therefore become a strategic emergency for brands. But it is also a complex subject. To become media, brands must initiate ambitious projects and provide themselves with the means to implement them. Becoming a media is not limited to having a few articles written and developing a few videos or Instagram posts.

These are new forms of devices to design and implement, and complex questions to address:

• Strategic questions: What is my editorial line? What is my editorial planning and its variation according to my different targets? What are my distribution channels and their complementarity?
• Operational questions: What organization should I put in place and how do I adapt it according to my business units, my regions, my markets? What processes should I put in place and how do they coordinate with my other marketing activities and teams and the rest of the value chain?
• HR questions: What kind of resources do I need? Should they be salaried or external? What are also my needs in terms of partners?
• IT questions: What needs do I have in terms of tech and how do these fit into a more global technological architecture?

Integrating artificial intelligence into content strategies

These new questions arise even as brands face a changing and uncertain context. The revolution brought about by artificial intelligence and in particular what is called generative AI, is completely reshuffling the game’s cards. Beyond the buzz around ChatGPT and a few other platforms, artificial intelligence is on the way to literally upset the marketing professions, in particular its content-related component. This revolution can be summed up in three words: automation, predictions, “at scale” personalization.

Here too, the challenge is strategic and urgent, with the need for brands to approach the subject with ambition and structure:

• Define value creation opportunities and prioritize them
• Deduce the use cases to be tested, prioritize them, then set up the test, deployment and industrialization protocols.
• Define the necessary data typologies, the collection, storage and structuring plan
• Define the target technological architecture, analyze the existing and compare with the need, deduce the technological roadmap
• Define the needs in terms of resources, decide which ones will be internalized and which ones outsourced
• Set up a task force, a dedicated, cross-functional AI lab.
• Ensure that this AI Lab remains strongly connected to operational services and markets for international companies, so as to concretely anchor initiatives in the value chain
• Define and implement an evangelization plan for the organization, change management being the key dimension of this type of work

Content marketing has been around for many years, but it’s still often at fledgling levels. The acceleration of the stakes around proprietary data and AI have made this subject very strategic. It’s time for brands to step up in this area too.

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By Guillaume Planet,
Managing Director France of Green Park

External contribution