Content creation is increasingly redundant. This is true in blogging and media, but especially in B2B and B2C marketing. Every brand has to have a blog, but many brands recycle the same content or throw some buzzwords onto old concepts, to keep generating new posts. Short, low-hanging-fruit blog posts clutter the Internet. Either these posts say exactly what everyone else is saying, they repeat what they have said in the past, or they say nothing at all.
Lack of time. You have a constant demand for new content. This means your team has little time to investigate new topics deeply. You do not have time to sit down with your company’s SMEs, engineers, designers, line workers, or front staff. And they have their own jobs to do. They do not have time to chat with your marketing team every week. This keeps you from producing detailed articles answering the questions your buyers most need to be answered.
Internet saturation. This might seem counterintuitive. The Internet is theoretically infinite. But over 200 streaming services now produce more new shows than anyone could ever watch. Companies and individuals now write more blog posts than anyone could ever read (millions of new posts every day), and they are beginning to all sound the same. If everyone reaches for the low-hanging fruit, at some point the low-hanging fruit runs out and you can no longer say anything original without making a concerted effort.
Increasingly, the Internet will be dominated by quality content, instead of quantity of content. While quantity still has relevance, modern audiences know where to go to find plenty of shallow content. They do not need another source of redundant clickbait. Increasingly, they want answers to their questions, or they want to learn something new. If you cannot provide that, they will go somewhere else.
In blogging and media, many of the best content producers are moving towards paywalls instead of running ads. Tired of ads eating up their bandwidth, power, and attention, modern digital consumers will gravitate away from ad-based clickbait content. Increasingly, they will pay money for higher quality content. Shallow clickbait turns off readers, listeners, and viewers.
Internet users are more digitally savvy in 2021 than in 2011. They have seen what passes for good content and they are not impressed and know how to find better content. They can quickly assess new content and make a decision to engage or ignore. Gone are the days when your business could impress people just by having a blog. Everybody seems to have a blog these days. Many late Millennials and members of Gen Z have their own personal blogs (which are better than many brands’ corporate blogs). To engage with a younger, digitally smarter audience, you need to work harder to produce valuable content.
A new trend is emerging: collective content creation. It gets rid of content redundancy and takes advantage of the new digital landscape. Creating collective content requires collaboration. It means employees from diverse backgrounds within a company collaborating to produce more valuable content. The SMEs, engineers, and frontline employees are included in the actual content creation itself. Multiple creators with different perspectives work together to produce a single result. Gone are the days of 10-minute interviews with an SME or a member of the customer service department.
This approach will not only make your content stronger, but it will also entice your audience. People want to hear from the engineers, or the designers, or even the cashiers and clerks. They want diverse voices. By engaging with employees throughout your company, you are more likely to find the people who can actually solve your customers’ problems.
Collective content gives you both quality and quantity. It solves the lack-of-time issue. A team has more time together to focus on a problem than any lone individual. Over the past year, people have learned to like working from home, at their own pace, on their own hours. Loose collaboration beats office meetings and groupthink. It beats siloed individuals working without input from their colleagues. Collective content is distributed, not top-down, nor isolated.
Software teams have long embraced this style of working. Many teams operate in a remote, distributed fashion, coordinating via Slack. Yet they still produce a coherent product. If multiple engineers can collaborate to develop a single software program, multiple creators can collaborate to produce a single article.
Stop boring your audience with redundant and unhelpful content. If you want to produce material rapidly while improving the quality of each piece, you need collective content creation. Collaboration allows creators with diverse tones, points of view, styles, and experiences to craft more interesting messages. It engages your audience by answering their questions and by teaching them new information.