There’s a reason we leave content till later on in the #CommsCamp series as we believe you really have to grasp your strategy, audience and stakeholders before creating strong, targeted content. If you go into this too quickly, you’re at risk of being too tactical and not strategic enough.
Brand Guidelines – It doesn’t need to be complicated!
Brand guidelines communicate a variety of things around your brand, both internally and externally. If you don’t feel you’re at the stage of having extensive guidelines you could have something as simple as a document outlining your chosen typography, sizes, pantone colours and logo variations. The calligraphy style may be pretty and popular but is not always practical so make sure you have backups for different scenarios. This will ensure that things are applied correctly and consistently across the organisation.
There are many ways of presenting these guidelines like a collage or look book. This is an artistic way of showing off you styles to your organisation and stakeholders.
A good exercise to carry out is think about what makes great content for your organisation and transfer this over to your guidelines. A tone of voice section or separate document is also a good addition.
Creating great content
Looking beyond the brand guidelines, you want to be thinking about content that’s original and distinctively yours. Nathalie adds “viral is often an overused word that stakeholders can expect from a campaign, but truly organic, viral content can be few and far between and usually the content with the highest reach has significant budgets behind them.” As communicators we need to educate our client side and organisations that going viral isn’t quite as easy as it sounds! There are lots of other ways you can make interesting, engaging content;
Being entertaining may be a good starting point depending on your message and organisation. Nathalie has seen some great Twitter content coming out from the UK police accounts trying to engage the audience on their more serious topics.
In communications, we’ve got this holy grail of coming up with original thought leadership which is fantastic but can’t always be done. You might want consider being ‘thought provoking’ instead and offering an opinion on a story already out there. Alternatively, you could go out and do your own research for provoking or if appropriate, more controversial thoughts.
At preproduction stage, try testing your content and bigger proposition with some core questions ‘would we talk about this at the pub or watercooler?’, ‘would I share this with my friends or colleagues?’. If you’re team are not willing to engage with the content you are working on you might have to rethink about your work culture or content.
Types of content
You’ve got your idea, big or small, that you can run your whole series around or have a quick tactical pitch.
There’s two ways which you can split this content, user generated and corporate content. Ideally, you’d have a mix of both;
User generated: This gives you extra credibility and turns your customers, service users etc into ambassadors and helps you reach their network through their content. A great way of achieving this method is creating visually appealing branding/products and encouraging people to share their experience through your hashtag.
Corporate content: This is content you create yourself and push out.
For assisting assets we can produce four main types of content: pictures, video, audio & copy.
Pictures – Think about standalone pictures or graphs that could work alongside the article. Nathalie believes there’s real value in bringing in a press photographer to get some killer shots particularly for bigger events/activities.
At Muckle Media we use this checklist for getting the perfect picture;
Feature the person linked to the story
No more than three people
Always have props, the more creative and eye-catching the better!
Include some form of branding
Use your location to tell a story
With this formula in place, think about where you’d like it to be placed in newspapers and social channels.
Video – This can get expensive but it doesn’t need to be. Filming on your smartphone can look very slick especially with extra props (tripod, lighting etc).
This content doesn’t always need a storyboard or be heavily edited. On your social channels try keep it short and snappy.
Copy – An obvious one but probably the most important! Make sure you’ve got something prepared with the story if it needs it.
Nathalie doesn’t favour clickbait headlines but believes you need to consider that there’s a lot of content out there so it can be difficult to grab someone’s attention. Think to yourself what you would click and have you found what you were looking for otherwise you’ll have terrible by trace and your followers won’t trust your content.
Audio – People tend to forget about audio beyond podcasts.
If you’re doing any kind of video it’s important to make sure you have good audio prepared. You could also use your smartphone to record a clip to share with radio stations when putting out a big story. We’re finding this is becoming increasingly popular and they’re being used more and more.
In the next session of #CommsCamp we’re going to build upon your content and explore four types of channels – paid, earned, shared and owned media (also known as the PESO model). This will help get your content out to all your channels most efficiently.
#CommsCamp runs every Thursday 09:30 – 10:30 via Facebook Live & live updates on Twitter.
If you missed the content session you can view it back here.
For more information regarding our media training courses, please email hello@mucklemedia.co.uk
