Content Is King But Who Said Being King Is Easy?
It’s established when it comes to social media engagement or inbound marketing strategy, “content is king”. Without it, there’s not much to talk about, share, discuss, communicate or grab people’s attention. To a step further, it’s not just any old content that will do the trick and get people flocking to one’s website, flooding the CRM’s with online requests, mob the Facebook page and achieve web marketing Utopia. If that were true, there are millions of articles, videos, songs, blog posts and images churned out every day on the web…why not just reuse what’s there?
Well, that’s just not how the social web and content marketing in general works. It works on the foundation of being able to give online audiences quality content that speaks to people and makes a connection with them one way or another. Creating great content that’s going make that kind of an impact or connection with people needs thought, dedication, effort (lots of it) and creativity because as cliche as it may sound, you got to keep it fresh! Especially in a world where millions of pieces of content are fighting for the attention of online audiences in just about every space you can think of.
To illustrate what goes into “keeping it fresh”, here’s a behind the scenes look at the making of a 2 minute web introduction video we were working on at BuzzFactory for a client recently.
The Making Of A Craft Web Video At BuzzFactory
It all starts with several hours of prep including work bouncing ideas, creating a story board, sequencing events, creating copy, inputs from the client, graphics / drawing, printing and setting up all that’s needed to get started.
This is followed by the actual process of capturing a stop motion or 2d craft video one frame at a time which can be a tedious process which stretches some hours. At the end of this we have enough images and frames to create 2 minutes of video footage!
Then to the audio workstation to record and synchronize voice-overs, sound effects and background music..
The sound editing involves adding the sfx and layering the voices and music and adds up in terms of impact
The final editing cut gets done and several hours since the process began…the video is ready to go online!
That’s just what goes into creating a 2 minute long animated web video to communicate an offering in a more fun and engaging way that we on the web love. When it comes to coming up with a great blog post, an interesting slideshare presentation, a good downloadable PDF document, a captivating info-graphic or a facebook promo…it’s still a considerable level of effort that goes into it and this is what sets quality content apart from ‘short cut’ tactics often employed to “get traffic fast”.
Consistently providing your audience original and relevant content is not easy. But is it worth the time, resources and effort that goes into coming up with quality web content?
Historically a King would get to the top spot by succession but Kings of the social web today get there through sheer determined effort…and a spark of creativity!