When I was a kid, I loved to play the Mouse Trap game! I was Rube Goldberg for the afternoon, imagining and then building fascinatingly complex and elegant ways to perform what seemed like a simple task.
Content strategy: Use complexity as a competitive advantage
In order to continually provide the right content to its audience, TechTarget has a very complex, elegant and effective machine that ensures it serves true technology research needs. It’s majesty of synchronicity, a sequence of capabilities working in perfect harmony. And it’s anything but simple.
While the cliché of “keeping things simple, stupid” is thrown around as if no other option could be smart, logical complexity in content strategy is an advantage. It promises high engagement with your content, regardless if it’s editorial content or marketing content. If you need to convince constituents you’re being smart, not stupid, visualization of complex content strategy can quickly convey its beneficial logic.
How to get your audience to value your content (and think you’re smart)
- Use audience intelligence to drive content your audience wants, which is most likely not what your colleagues think is the right content.
- Allow new ideas to spawn from your content strategy during its implementation.
- Continually feed your content machine with new insights to keep it relevant with audience interests.
So, how does the TechTarget machine work?
Knowledge drops a lever, the content ball rolls, activity intelligence builds momentum, even more accurate targeting happens…
The TechTarget content machine is continually fed with knowledge that tells us what very specific topics are of interest to technology pros, which informs the editorial calendars of our hundred websites. How the resulting content is consumed allows us to compile activity data that in turn is used to target very specific content to the right users, develop successful campaigns for our advertisers, and ultimately provide our customers with rich, valuable information about their campaigns and active technology projects. What's learned at every step is fed back into the machine so TechTarget can continually develop more useful, relevant content for its audience.
What’s the final step of this Rube Goldberg machine? Well, there isn’t one, because new mechanisms will be added as TechTarget develops new ways for the machine to add value to its relationships with its audience and with its customers. And the same should be true for any content strategy.
Originally published on TechTarget's Mktr2Mktr Blog.