Five Myths About Your Content Marketing (and what needs sorting)
Dispel the myths surrounding content marketing and learn how to streamline your content production, manage digital assets efficiently, and leverage asset intelligence to keep your marketing content impactful and organized (written as part of my role at www.medialake.ai)
Every company and brand from the one-person start-up to the legacy multinational has to produce and store content. Content and content production are no longer the preserve of creative agencies or those with deep, deep marketing pockets.
But with this new creative power comes a new responsibility. As the speed of technology’s advancement quickens, concerns over data storage and rights and diverging data sets with no central insights, there needs to be some clarity to content data. Here are five myths that are muddying that particular water and what companies need to do to get themselves some asset intelligence in their working lives:
Myth 1: We need a team to manage our library of content assets
Everyone (everyone) produces content, but content management is a laborious, repetitive role that should be outsourced to AI.
You don’t need numbers to tell you, nor do you need graphics to show you how much content is being produced by companies and individuals every hour, let alone every day.
Every brand has its product catalogs, advertising and marketing collateral, and social and PR video, text, and images. Not every company has it all stored, tagged, and cataloged correctly. Traditionally, this was the job of an in-house or outsourced librarian to go through and ensure everything was in its right place. In one place to start with and then the right place.
Myth 2: Content is cheap to produce and cheap to maintain
Neither is true. Every shoot you produce in-house, every piece of content generated by your users and customers, and every asset you commission from an agency requires more love and care than slinging it on a hard drive. And, just because your behind-the-scenes content was shot by a social intern on an iPhone, doesn’t mean it should not get the same attention as to where it’s stored and how it’s tagged.
There are several — decidedly un-apocryphal — stories of multinationals who’ve had their legal fingers burned by not keeping track of their assets. As content becomes easier to create, you still need to ensure everything: location rights, talent rights, and individual market rights are kept up to date. The solution is not to cut down on the amount of content produced, but to increase the information about that content: who made it, what does it feature, where is it kept, and… when do your rights run out.
Myth 3: We need to produce more content to feed the increasing number of channels
The proliferation of production agencies that offer content creation has followed the trajectory of channels and publishing opportunities. It used to be simply a press release, but on top of which there is now a website, and then a social channel, then several social channels, then customer-generated content, video was king, then virtual reality, then WEB3, then the MetaVerse… keeping up with where you could put your marketing material was a full-time role, let alone having a strategy, some tactics or a production schedule.
The more rational — and cost-aware — marketers create content that can be diced up to work on different platforms. Your podcast could be filmed for YouTube, your catalog images could be carouselled in Instagram, your TV ads could be re-cut for pre-roll advertising… but this is only possible if you’ve kept tabs on what has been produced and established a system of repurposing any content: not just this season or this campaign’s. Only this way do you avoid the content landfill which is both ineffective and expensive.
Myth 4: Generative AI creating more content can only be a good thing
One of the promises that generative artificial intelligence (which creates text, images, or video using data it was trained on) makes is that it will take all the manual work out of creation and production.
This is, on the one hand, a good thing. Good for the finance department and good for the production budgets. However, there are two downsides. One is relinquishing control. Meta (Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp) launched its Advantage+ this year which automates the creation and testing of adverts. The advantage is there will be less manual A/B testing, but (as ever with generative AI), it will need human input and monitoring — otherwise, it’s your company branding and unique positioning that is compromised.
The second is keeping track of what has been created and what has been successful. The proliferation of new variations is going to mean an increase in the need for oversight and control.
Myth 5: We have to have one single place to store all our marketing assets
This was once the case. But since every brand has multiple producers creating multiple assets for a multitude of platforms, and each one of those regional vagaries, the likelihood of having everything on one digital asset management platform is, let’s face it, unlikely.
The storage of content has multiplied almost as fast as the places you can publish. Laptops, hard drives, clouds, USB sticks, Google Drives, DropBox… few companies and fewer creative departments keep content in just one place. This creates two problems: there is no oversight of what has already been produced and it takes forever to find what you think you remember someone saying they thought another department had produced. That’s time-consuming, inefficient, and costly — none of those words are a great way to describe any part of your business.
There is hope, however.
What the team at MedialakeAI has done is look at all these asset storage and content management pitfalls and designed a comprehensive way of giving clarity, order, and (hello Finance!) efficiency to the situation. Introducing MedialakeAI will give you oversight of what has been produced, where it lives, and the rights associated with it.
There’s a good reason why we call it asset intelligence.
