The Power of Strategic Content Creation

Strategic content creation is important for business growth and increases brand visibility and reputation. It can enhance trust. It can increase chances of increased leads at minimal cost. Strategic content has become an essential element of growing a business or reputation of an organization.

Against this background, it is important not to create content just for creating content’s sake. You need to invest time and energy in ensuring that the content you are creating will deliver impact and increase chances of gaining new traction.

Any successful social media marketing strategy relies on creating high-quality, consistently engaging content, and the right tools make content creation so much easier and more successful. 

According to The State of Digital Content report published by Canto, “… content and creative teams are facing a surge in content production volume, with 74% anticipating a growth in workload over
the coming year. This rising demand necessitates enhanced efficiency and resource management.” The report states that organizations face many challenges in creating, managing, and distributing
content. Those challenges include increasing content demands for various channels,
locating and accessing assets efficiently, budgeting, workflows, and more.

Content and creative teams are faced with the challenge of increasing content demands across various
channels as well as allocating adequate budget and resources to address these growing demands as
they create, manage, and distribute content.

Enhancing productivity and efficiency in content workflows has become of great priority, and is being necessitated by the need to cut back on time wasted in searching for new content. According to the Canto research, the practice of searching for and locating the right content is a major barrier to success. Digital asset management can go a long way to reduced the amount of time wasted, and this requires identifying and deploying the appropriate tools that can be used to streamline this line of work.

Strategic content creation can indeed help to smoothen the process of creating content. According to Hubspot.com, ” … a content strategy is the planning, creation, publication, management, and governance of content. A great content strategy will attract and engage a target audience, meeting their needs while driving business goals.”

In essence, strategic content creation is is the planning, creation, publication, management, and governance of content. A great content strategy will attract and engage a target audience, meeting their needs while driving business goals.

Managing Social Media: Bottom-Up

Getting a handle on social media has become a necessity in our increasingly digitised world. To gain effectively from social media requires tact, forethought and forward planning. A key first step is to do an analysis of your current efforts. Digital is exponential in change, so a clear and agile plan is needed to meet this challenge.

When assessing your current digital landscape, it’s recommended to include: technology, skills, data, content and a benchmark of your current performance. A digital assessment gives a benchmark to build upon and creates areference point for any future progress. This identi es the current gapbetween the current usage and importance to the business.

Success is driven by strategy. In the absence of a digital engagement strategy, the chances of hitting a brick wall are high. So the question becomes: what is a digital engagement strategy.

Simply put, it is a time-based plan that defines where your organization is today, where you need it to go, and ultimately, how to get there. A digital engagement strategy can help you provide a better target user experience and boost your return on engagement and bottom line.

Think of it like this: a digital engagement refers to all of the digital touchpoints your target audience has with your brand, including email, social media, applications and even your website. Digital engagement doesn’t just happen in a vacuum: it takes a plan.

“You can post on social media all day long, but without a plan, there’s no goal,” says Andy Crestodina, cofounder and chief marketing officer of Orbit Media Studios. “If your business is present on a digital channel, you need to have a strategy.”

At its core, digital engagement is about reaching out to people to create two way conversation. An effective digital engagement fosters dinner table-like conversation as opposed to being an echo chamber where you constantly churn out content and information that barely moves a needle of your target audience’s emotions.

At the outset, it is vital to determine why you want to engage on social media. This is largely informed by your organisational vision, mission, values and objectives. It’s important to stress that to be successful, the digital engagement strategy needs an informing framework, a band that brings everything together in a fluid manner.

Once the informing framework is properly defined, the next step involves identifying what makes the organisation great. What is special about your organization? What special cause are you fighting? How do you go about doing your business? What values guide how you approach your work?

These are all important questions to ask right at the beginning because they help to guide how you will frame and shape your content.

Most social media initiatives and tactics are ego-centric, for lack of a better phrase. They focusing on churning out instead of building a space for engagement. A better plan is therefore required to get better results.

Each digital channel needs a tailored strategy—they are levers that can be pulled for different goals. The channel determines the promotional strengths of your content. It is important to create a matrix of channels and topics to see where opportunities of digital engagement lie.

Measuring your efforts on social media cannot be overstated. The most effective way to know whether you are on the right track is to regularly report on your progress. The most powerful tool we have to drive long-term success is insights. You need to demonstrate success through a data-driven strategy.

Success is built on many parts coming together to create the whole. You need to have a plan (strategic and/or tactical), working alongside your deliveryactivity—across the whole funnel.

All built upon the right foundation — people, processes and technology.

Enabling Utility of the Internet in sub-Saharan Africa through Social Capital

Access to the Internet is expanding at a phenomenal rate in sub Saharan Africa. However, the quantity and quality of information relevant to African internet users is minimal thus diminishing the utility of the medium.

With just one registered domain per 10 000 people in sub Sahara, it is apparent that the continent is underserved of content (Umuntu Media, 2012).

A lot of the literature on Internet in sub Saharan Africa has adopted a utopian view of access to technology at the expense of shared knowledge and collaborative relationships that are key drivers of successful Internet growth.

While  low cost, high speed internet and access to mobile telephony is vital to bringing new audiences online in sub Saharan Africa, it will not necessarily provide a solution to the paucity of locally-relevant information.

Not much has been written about the role of social capital or the human infrastructure in propagating Internet growth in sub Saharan Africa, that is, engaged people who create, sustain, and maintain networks.

Why Humility Matters to Leadership

Great leadership is a bottom up mentality. Great leaders should suspend their ego and ask how they can help their employees to build the organisation. Leaders should be humble, selfless and helpful. Paraphrasing CS Lewis, it is not that leaders should not think less of themselves. Rather leaders need to think of themselves less.

The idea that a leader is the be all and know all is a fallacy. Leaders build on the people that surround them. Leaders who thin they know everything are destined towards disaster.

Building Great People Experience

The internal communications and engagement function is instrumental in building a great people experience to maximise engagement and performance across an organization.

Organizational progress happens by bringing together people from all walks of life, who have the drive and the influence to achieve something bigger than themselves.

It is the aim of the internal communications team to build internal understanding of the business strategy, culture and values
Internal communications efforts provide employees with timely and relevant information, reinforce the values of collaboration and innovation, build employee engagement and trust, and inspire employees to do their best work and to think of the client as a great place to work.

In addition, IC should engage and inspire all levels of stakeholders with a continuously evolving corporate narrative that drives globally consistent execution of best practices through engaging communications.

Creating concise, compelling and timely communications that utilize all available platforms and media including, but not limited to live events, written communications, round-table meetings, intranet messages, video, new associate onboarding, training and presentations is vital to keep employees on the pulse.

To build a great people experience, it’s important for IC to synthesize business language and complex information into clear, relevant messages and writing and editing with clarity of purpose, intent and broad perspective for a variety of internal audiences.

Building a tribe where extra-ordinary people work together to enable success and to realize their full potential, passion and competencies takes a multi-dimensional understanding and sythesizing of business objectives.

Fostering a team spiriti includes visualizing the actions that each and every person can take in order to contribute to the mission of the organization. It is effective and motivating to regularly post and share information about what a team or the organization has achieved.

A well-functioning internal communications system can motivate employees to work toward common goals. Internal communication presents a valuable opportunity for companies to understand their workforce better.

Talking to employees is a key business function that inspires and aligns our whole organization.Effective internal communication is a powerful force that leads to a 40 percent increase in customer satisfaction, a 30 percent increase in profitability, and a 36 percent increase in the overall performance of a company.

Building A Content Strategy for Internal Communications

As a global internal communicator, you need to be able to communicate issues to internal audiences in their own language about issues that matter to them.

Given the highly matrixed and globally dispersed nature of the workforce, you need to strike a balance between communicating issues that are common to the whole organization and those that are locally relevant in order to foster a spirit of engagement.

Redefining the Publishing Model in Zimbabwe

There has been a terrific amount of tumult in the publishing sector in Zimbabwe. Many of the old publishing models are no longer fit for purpose. Surprisingly, there has never been a concerted national effort to fix the publishing system.

While new technologies such at the Internet and social media have been blamed for killing the reading culture in Zimbabwe, publishers have not stepped up to provide new ways of thinking about publishing.