Color, music, stunning images, powerful words, movement, art, design — all the tools we use to produce marketing, media, meetings and corporate communication — are … simply cool. Let’s face it — we all like to play in the creative sandbox. The problem is we do it too soon and too much. Here’s how you can write better, more effective content by not trying to be creative! Remember content drives creative.

The Silent Secret

There’s a silent secret your customers, viewers and all those people in the audience won’t tell you. They don’t care about that stuff. They only care about the:

1. Relevant information
2. The value — Why they should do what you want
3. How to use it, do it or buy it
4. The experience of learning and using 1-3

You can wrap those four things up and call them the “Why” of marketing, media, meetings and corporate communication. Everything else is the “How.” Think about the last program, campaign or event you worked on. How much time was spent on the “how” of production?

Too Much “How”

Without counting grey hairs, I have created and driven dozens of highly successful conferences and campaigns across the nation, for industry giants and bold start-ups. In every one of them, the biggest challenge was getting the client to focus on the real content. We only spent about 5% of the time figuring out what we needed to accomplish, what the target people were supposed to do, and what we needed to say and show to get them to take action. In most situations, the discussions of creative, production, venues and menus had already begun before the team really knew what we were doing and why.

They were focused on producing content before they knew what the content really was.

Design, layout, photography, copywriting, speechwriting, agendas, sets, videos, Powerpoint, Web marketing, direct mail and email marketing aren’t content — they are the delivery systems for the content.

Remember, your valuable target audience doesn’t care about the production and the execution. They only care about the relevant content and the experience.

“You can’t figure out the ‘what’ of it until you understand the ‘why’ of it.”

A Wise Man

Change Your Focus

What will happen if you invest the time to determine what all the key groups need to happen, what they need to take those actions, and their requirements for the “best experience?” Change your focus and invest 20% of the time to develop a valuable, elegant experience that’s easy to understand and compels action. Let the content drive the creative!

I know the actual production time will be cut. That’s okay because, remember — you’ve taken the indecision out of it. No more guessing what things are supposed to say. No more last-minute revisions to the agenda and tossing in panel discussions and Q&A to fill time. No more empty marketing that provides a beautiful picture but never asks for the sale.

Spending more time developing the content makes the rest of the process more efficient and cost effective. Plus, your target audience will understand and value the information, take your desired actions and love the experience.

If you want to know more about communications strategy and powerful content development just click on CONTACT US and get in touch.

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