Reduce, reuse, recycle
 
A rhyme we are all used to now and one we won’t forget.  It is also something that can be easily applied to marketing content.
 
Churning out acres of content can be time intensive, wasteful and often creatively challenging.  So how could you reduce the time you take to create content, but continue to create powerful content?
 
You need a content strategy plan that will allow you to be creative while also scalable.
 
How do I start?
 
First you need to understand your communication platforms and the audiences you are looking to reach. There are many platforms available - from mainstream media and trade press to social media, from your own corporate website and intranet platform to client newsfeeds - each platform has a different audience and with it a different style of writing.
 
Next you need to keep the communication rolling.  In order to keep ahead of the competition and remain in front of clients, colleagues and prospective customers you need to keep creating content. To keep storytelling. We need to be inundated with words.
 
But don’t keep reinventing the wheel.  Apply the eco-message of reduce, reused recycle to your content strategy and be creative when repurposing and scaling content across the different channels.
 
3-Eight’s Founder and Director Lisa Gingell discusses how a strong and solid content strategy plan is key when it comes to B2B marketing:
 
Be creative
 
Every business and every product has its own narrative. It also has its own style, a way of speaking to our audiences.  We take this narrative – the story – and the style and design creative, informative and influencing content for your audiences.
 
Know your audience as well as your narrative. What influences your audience? What do they read and follow? What problems do they have that you can solve? What are they saying?
A creative content strategy considers the platforms and the audiences – so you target your message, narrative, style to each and every audience and each individual platform.
 
Knowing what your audiences like, read and are talking about allows you to start to have a dialogue with them. Content isn’t just about ‘saying something’ its about creating a connection and connections come from speaking and listening – in essence it is creative storytelling. You need your content to be relatable and simple and ‘speak’ to your audience.
Know your marketplace and its narrative. For your company and products to fit in the market space you need to talk the same language to get the connection. You understand your marketplace and it understands you.
 
Be scalable
 
Content marketing is at the heart of digital marketing and still a valued feature for marketers – quality and content are king, but these take time.
 
The content you create needs to be re-used and re-used time and time again in a variety of forms and on a variety of platforms. Turn a press release into a blog, a blog into a white paper, a white paper into a webinar, a webinar into a powerful sales presentation. How you scale up content you are creating drives the message further and across more audiences and in more narratives for your business or products. You take one message and re-hash it a number of times to suit each and every one of your audiences be it both external and internal to your business. This is where the opportunity for businesses to recycle and repurpose content without starting from scratch each time. Also saying similar things across different platforms on multiple occasions widens your reach and boosts your SEO.
 
However, it takes on average almost four hours to write a blog never mind a full content strategy, LinkedIn article, whitepaper or social post. This is time that isn’t readily handy to many businesses, which is why many B2B businesses outsource content creation activities to those that have that a quick creative capability to turn their news or story into powerful content.
 
Guess who can help with that…
​
We can.  Please email [email protected]

Businesses are sitting on a wealth of data – fully immersed and often even overwhelmed.
 
From energy metering data through to information from building controls and IoT / smart devices and systems, or data from access and security systems to data on carbon emissions. 
 
The sheer volume of data at your fingertips is powerful, but if not managed correctly it is useless.
 
The good news is that all of this data is a valuable resource for businesses as we drive towards NetZero 2050.
 
The big question is what do we do with the endless rows of data sets?
 
Data is more valuable than oil, YES really, but only when you interpret the data and create stories:

• Value is in the interpretation of the data and the actionable insights, not the individual streams of data themselves.
• Value is in the analytics and the combination of multiple data sets into a single source of insight.
• Value is in the actionable insights these data sets provide; the stories and advice they provide for your business to make changes.

 
Let’s look at data as if it were a set of letters, that in the right order form words and with the correct writing skills, tell stories. For NetZero to work, we need to take those sets of data to form words, stories and plans. To advise and quantify on the opportunities available to business to journey towards NetZero and reap the rewards.
 
In my previous role I would spend a great deal of time analysing data, interpreting and creating the stories that delivered business benefits to my clients. I would then in turn help those clients communicate their ‘data-stories’ to their colleagues and stakeholders.
 
Why did we need to communicate ‘data-stories’?
To engage and generate buy in. People – our colleagues, customers, partners, suppliers – our stakeholders are important.  They too are also providing valuable bits of data and their actions and reactions are just as valuable to the NetZero journey. They have a part to play so an informed stakeholder is a powerful addition to the NetZero team.
 
Bringing this up to date we need to focus on the fact that data drives the NetZero agenda.
 
Communications experts as well as data scientists can work together to interpret and understand the data, deliver insights that form the business journey to NetZero. This data then communicates the journey to the teams to gain buy-in and get them to help in the NetZero goals. To ultimately change their behaviours and demands on businesses, buildings and transportation.
 
Communication to create change not just in the building controls and the business processes and operations for energy efficiency and carbon reduction but change in the way people behave and their impact on carbon emissions and environment.  For this we consider behavioural intent data – what makes someone do something and how can we influence a change for the better?
 
Communication professionals can help create the strategy and storyboard the journey to NetZero.
They can communicate to those who will change up the business processes and operations, building performance and resulting carbon impact. They can communicate to the colleagues and stakeholders and finally can communicate to the wider marketplace to promote and raise brand awareness.
 
The route to NetZero is a story and each business has a different story to tell.
 
We are all on a journey for carbon reduction and energy efficiency, how we get there may differ and the stories we tell may differ, but each is also driven by data. But don’t forget…data without a story is just data.
 
Collect the data, write the story, communicate and engage, influence and showcase – shout about it and celebrate your successes. The data then comes back round and helps you to evidence you are well on your way to NetZero – don’t forget to communicate that too.
 
If you’d like to know more about how 3-Eight can help your business, please get in touch: [email protected]