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Building your content story
Taking content from idea to effective delivery—every time.
A great piece of content takes work. Even something as simple as a blog or a social post requires thought and research to ensure it effectively conveys your brand, achieves your goals, and most importantly reaches and resonates with your audience. That’s not even thinking about how the execution underneath your content. The design and medium impacts the reception your content can expect to receive. A great piece of content is insightful, compelling, and well-designed, so thinking about all the different parts that go into a successful delivery is critical.
BUILDING THE BRIEF
The first point of call must be the goals of the piece of content you’re producing. What part of your business is this content highlighting? What key message is it trying to convey?
Who is it for? And what do you want people to do once they’ve consumed it? All of these questions should guide and inform what you produce, the medium of delivery, and how you execute it. Having all your goals for a content piece in place before you begin will help keep the content on track—and pointed towards success. Not only do you have to consider your own underpinnings, you’ll need to take into consideration your audiences’ "Layers" too. What they believe and the things that they value are also crucial to achieving a successful piece of content. According to Google Cloud, 82% of shoppers want a brand’s values to align with theirs, and 75% of those same consumers would part ways with a brand over conflicting values.
The Fold approach
At The Fold, however the request comes through to us, the first thing we do is to gather strategists, creatives, and copywriters together to interrogate the brief, ensure we’re on the same page as to the purpose of the project, and then replay our assumptions back to the client. That way, we know that both the agency and the client are all expecting the same things.
GATHERING CONTEXT
The next step is research. Begin by exploring the market, audience, and proposition to ensure that whatever creative is produced resonates with the intended recipients and, most importantly, effectively delivers on the brief’s ask. This process will draw on your strategic understanding of the business, the proposition and the audience—an understanding that your design team also possess. Including the creative team at this early stage can be vital to reaching your desired outcome.
The Fold approach
For us, collaboration is key even at this early stage. We sit down together to both gather and contextualize research. This is so we can get under the skin of the product, the market and external factors, and to ensure that all the strategists, writers, and designers are aligned on the lessons learned through research.
GENERATING THE IDEA
Then we move on to the creative process itself. Hopefully, you’ll have included your agency or internal designers at this point, so you’re all working from the same research-based starting point. Although different parts of your creative team will be working on the project separately, it’s a great idea for design, copy, and motion creatives to share work in progress. That way, you can sense-check as you go to make sure that everyone’s remaining on track—and aligned to the purpose and research that you’ve established up front.
The Fold approach
Across copy, design, and motion, we draw on our collective decades of experience working on some of the biggest B2B brands in the world, to add that extra touch of creative expertise on every client request. On top of that, we pride ourselves on our ability to apply our understanding of markets, trends, and our client’s product portfolio—delivering content that really shines.
BEAUTIFULLY EFFECTIVE IDEAS
of customers consume between 3-5 pieces of content before buying
of shoppers want a brand's values to align with theirs
NAVIGATING APPROVALS
Most creative projects will require approval or feedback from others to bring it through to delivery—and sometimes this is the point in the process that can be most challenging to navigate. As the project owner, it’s down to you to collate and qualify any internal feedback you receive—ideally before that feedback is sent to your designers or your agency. Contextualising this feedback for your creative team will lead to smoother, quicker revisions. On the other hand, if the feedback is more technical in nature, it could be a good idea to arrange a direct meeting with the tech team and the creatives. This way, feedback around the specs or technical details of a product featured in a piece of work can be received directly—rather than at one remove.
The Fold approach
Although we’re working together all the time, once all departments are in a place to share, our team comes back together to review all the separate pieces of the brief to ensure they’re all consistently hitting the mark and work together seamlessly.
THE FLIP SIDE
So, not only can you look at content as a product of all the different "layers" that make up any compelling piece of work, it’s also important to consider how all the different pieces of content that you produce "layer" up to deliver your key messages in the mind of the customer. After all, as HubSpot reports, 47% of all customers consume 3-5 pieces of content before moving towards a sales conversation. That means you need to make sure that your content can not only stand alone to convey your message, but that each piece builds to create an integrated view of your brand, product, or proposition.
The Fold approach
We’re very aware that any deliverable doesn’t exist in a vacuum. That’s why we make sure to explore both the clients’ current content portfolio as well as taking the pulse of external best practice and the latest innovation. That way, messaging is on point across our client’s entire content estate, and they’re receiving industry-leading work.
LET'S TALK
If you’d like to talk to us about how to build some great content for your business, drop us a line at info@thefoldcreative.com.