From the top: how to conduct well-coordinated content
Communicating effectively and consistently with audiences can be a huge challenge for big brands – so how can your team work together to stay in tune? Here’s why a ‘content-first’ approach is key to coordinating your corporate comms.
Picture a large symphony orchestra playing a piece of music. Now imagine splitting the orchestra into its constituent parts and sending each into separate rooms to learn the score. If you then bring the musicians back together into one auditorium, the resulting performance is likely to be a total cacophony. Met with clashing sounds and competing tones, audiences will leave the concert hall feeling confused by what they just heard.
“Something similar happens when a large organisation fails to effectively coordinate the constituent parts of its content operation,” said head of content George Wright Theohari during Speak’s ‘One Brand, One Voice’ webinar, which set out to highlight the pain points of a ‘channel-first’ approach – and the alternative solution.
If you’re part of a large organisation with complex team structures, segmenting work across channels, from site to social media, may seem like a natural way to cover all your content bases. But this is when comms operations start to get fragmented – and silos emerge.
Say one team is responsible for managing your brand’s LinkedIn channel, led by a conductor well-versed in creating content for that specific platform. Dedicated to driving success for their team, they will feel inclined to prioritise LinkedIn above other channels. They might measure the performance metrics of their output alone, or even try to keep story ideas to themselves.
When team members are stuck in these silos, the risks and pain points of the channel-first approach start to appear.
For corporate comms executives who attended the webinar, insufficient use of resources was voted the biggest issue arising from this approach. “If you've got two teams that have been given a similar strategy from whoever is responsible for dictating the business narrative,” George said, “they're interpreting the brief on their own channels, in their own teams and with their own ways of working. What you can find is these people are working on similar stories or deliverables, but if they're not communicating, they don't know that they may be duplicating effort.”
Whether it’s duplication of effort across teams, inconsistent messaging and quality, or ineffective data measurement and analysis – relying on a channel-first approach can leave your team (and, more importantly, your audience) feeling out of sync with your content output.
There is a better way.
Creating content harmony
How can comms teams keep their operations in tune? The answer is simple but essential: abandon the channel-focused silos and adopt a ‘content-first’ approach.
Think back to the orchestra. This time, think of the conductor standing up front: they are responsible for delivering the musical composition, shaping the overall piece and keeping the instrumentalists aligned. Without their expert guidance, the concert will go awry very quickly.
A content-first approach is like an orchestra with one conductor – where an editorial strategy is implemented by a coordinated team of experts.
Instead of having several different channel-focused teams producing and publishing their own content ideas, a managing editor leads the way. The managing editor guides your brand’s corporate narrative. They lead the planning, development and review stages of your organisation’s content on one editorial calendar and through a single, consistent process – delivering a much stronger message in every story.
One webinar attendee wanted to know whether the managing editor role could succeed alongside a traditional organisation structure where social/website teams are often separate. George indicated that to effectively integrate this role and establish a content-first approach, the managing editor or chief content officer must have oversight of the entire operation.
“The structure is adapted so you have someone that's overseeing the actual content production and planning organisation – potentially with their own specific team,” he explained. “But for that approach to work, they have to sit above channel teams.”
Of course, this doesn’t mean that content can’t be tailored for each respective platform. Channel-focused teams and their expertise will be just as crucial as the strings, the woodwinds, the brass and the percussion sections of a symphony orchestra. They know best how to optimise content for their audiences – and their skills will shine through in a content-first approach. The difference is that they will have a coordinated strategy behind what they publish.
Performance measurement is also central to a content-first approach to corporate communications. Instead of patchy channel-specific data that only indicates how posts perform across individual platforms, a single dashboard will offer a complete picture of how a content package lands as a whole.
Results that sing
A regular cadence of output, consistent quality, optimised effort and cohesive measurement – the results of a content-first approach are unmistakable. “You end up with a motivated team and, of course, happy stakeholders,” George concluded. “Who doesn’t want that?”
We’ve seen the results first-hand here at Speak Media. Take it from us: keeping your content operations in tune doesn’t have to be a struggle. Replace your channel-first approach with a strong content-first strategy, and your brand’s corporate communications operations may just flow like music.
‘One Brand, One Voice’ – Speak’s head of content, George Wright Theohari, recently hosted a webinar on coordinating your content operations, aimed at corporate comms executives. The session shared insights into why the channel-first approach is ‘broken’ – and how a content-first approach can remedy its pain points. The full recording is available on LinkedIn.
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We know that overhauling your content strategy may seem like a daunting task – but that’s what we’re here for. To learn more about how we can help you find and tell the stories that matter to your audiences most effectively, get in touch with us on LinkedIn or email gabriellebridle@speakmedia.co.uk.