Too many companies are stuck in the old mentality of content production built from the days of legacy media when TV was your best way to reach a large audience.
By necessity, due to the high production costs of TV advertising, your marketing team would have to narrow down all of its ideas for content production down to 1 or 2 options that get approved by leadership and become your marketing strategy. Usually for many months on end, if not longer. With high end campaigns costing millions of dollars in production and placement, there was simply no room for experimentation, you were forced to hedge your bets on the “best idea”.
The flaws in this methodology are that the “best idea” is typically determined by a small group of people who are generally too close to the product or company to be objective. This creates huge hit or miss scenarios where large sums of marketing dollars can be wasted on an idea that ultimately doesn’t resonate with your core audience.
With the rise of digital and the accessibility of short form content, companies now have the option to reach massive audiences with media that costs a small fraction of the traditional methods. This allows companies to test far more frequently and get immediate feedback from your core audience.
Despite this, too many companies are still taking the top down approach where leadership wants final say on all content and creative. This severely limits an organizations ability to adapt to market shifts and consumer demand.
Having brand guidelines are important to keep the overall theme and feel of your company consistent but within that framework you can afford a significant amount of flexibility to test and learn.
Leadership simply needs to learn to let go and allow your creative to be just that, creative. From here your audience will tell you what is working based on how they interact. This is a far better indicator of what your proper content strategy should be than a board room of employees deciding for the consumer.
Beyond the flexibility is the reach. A viral social media post can reach an audience larger than the Superbowl but without the multi-million dollar price tag. Testing multiple lower priced content pieces allows for more reach, more diverse content and more consumer learnings. From there you can take the “winners” and build out a more robust marketing effort based on content that you already know will be impactful with your core audience.
TLDR – Leadership needs to loosen their control on content, produce far more of it, test constantly and let the audience determine what the winner is.