3 Reasons You Need Sustainable Content Marketing

3 Reasons You Need Sustainable Content MarketingHave you paid attention to the increase in natural disasters?

This includes increased hurricanes and out-of-control fires. 

What this have to do with marketing?
Because just as we risk depleting natural resources in our lifetimes, you can use up your marketing 

To help you use your resources more efficiently, use sustainable content marketing. It keeps your content visible.

Also your  marketing faces an external threat due to Seismic Content Marketing Shift.

As a result, make your content marketing sustainable to retain the long-term value of your marketing.

Let’s examine what sustainable content marketing involves. And to provide you with a roadmap to accomplish this.

Sustainable Content Marketing Definition

Sustainable content marketing evolved from the need to take care of your limited marketing resources.

Why?
To reduce careless consumption and work with people across your audience, especially those within your business.

It’s based on the UN definition of sustainability and consists of 4 elements:

  • Environmental: Use natural resources efficiently to avoid harming the environment.
  • Economic: Use assets efficiently to maintain profitability over time.
  • Human: Maintain and improve human capital.
  • Social: Preserve services while supporting local communities and society more broadly.

At its core sustainability “meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.”

This provides the basis for the definition of sustainable content marketing.

  • Environmental: Update, renovate and re-promote existing content to remain relevant and visible. This includes related content and business data and information.
  • Economic: Use business human and financial resources efficiently to build business value over time.
  • Human: Reduce duplicate and repetitive work to free employees to be more creative.
  • Society: Contribute to your community and society more broadly by supporting higher level business goals with your content marketing.

Sustainable Content Marketing Definition

Further, as marketers, we must commit to content sustainability!

 

Why Sustainability Matters For Your Content Marketing

In addition to building brand, customer demand and sales, you’re responsible for conserving your business’s value and your resources.

But many brands have polluted their audience’s trust over time. So they no longer believe you because due to “got-you” marketing and “me-me-me” promotion.10 Consumer trust elements and importance - research

To practice sustainable content marketing means being ethical and transparent in both our actions and the results we produce.

Further trustworthy behavior extends across your entire organization and must start at the top!

To be a trustworthy organization, your leadership’s words and actions must be consistent. Otherwise your c-suite further reduces your business’s pubic standing! Edelman’s Annual Trust Barometer Research proves this consistently.

Active Employee Voices

 

 

3 Reasons You Need Sustainable Content

Sustainable content helps you to deal with the challenges of the Seismic Content Marketing Shift.

This seismic marketing shift results from 3 trends:

  • Voice-First Marketing speaks in sentences to find content.
  • Marketing AI requires a data and structure focus associated with content.
  • Content Saturation limits your marketing results due to ever-increasing combination of data, information and content.

Together, these factors have changed the data, information and content landscape.

This massive external content disruption extends beyond your content marketing. It expands your competitive set to include: movies & television, music and online gaming.

With AI, companies like Netflix and Amazon have changed content consumption behavior. So they challenge your content distribution with:

  • Bingeable Content. By seamlessly serving the next episode in a series, viewers have to proactively stop watching.
  • Personalized Content Experiences. They deliver tailored content recommendations based on AI.
  • Part of Member’s Content Inner Circle. They lock out other content and distribution. Instead, they become the go-to option.

70% of US adults used a voice assistant in 2019 (according to Bing Research). As a result, your marketing competes with any content, information and/or data that:

  1. Answers a specific user question based on the person’s wants or needs.
  2. Provides entertainment.

Actionable Sustainable Content Marketing Tips:

  • Create a regular email newsletter to provide consistent content. Help subscribers to develop a habit of consuming your non-promotional content.

 

 

5 Sustainable Content Characteristics

Sustainable content extends beyond content reuse, renovation and re-promotion.

Why?
Because you create it to be evergreen.

5 characteristics of sustainable content marketing include:

  1. Serve a specific business objective with an associate metric. To succeed, make this goal have a purpose..
  2. Meet a specific audience need or want based on their context. (Need help? Use  how to create a marketing persona.)

Micro Moments

  1. Add a story to your content to make it to be memorable. Include a beginning, middle and end to help listeners to remember it. And serve the information based on audience device, platform and user context.
  2. Publish content on owned media first. To associate your content with your data across your business.
  3. Track related content metrics. Include a call-to-action for tracking.

Sustainable Content: 5 Characteristics

Actionable Sustainable Content Marketing Tips:

  • Make every page further engage visitors. Use connected content.
  • Regularly audit content across your organization. To make it easier, schedule content for recurring events in advance. Also plan your audits by topic to support related links.
  • Renovate your existing content to keep it visible. Make  all of the elements of each piece of content findable.

 

Sustainable Content Marketing Conclusion

To compete for attention in today’s information landscape, use sustainable content marketing.

Because your marketing competes against other forms of entertainment and information. 

As a result, the content of AI powered businesses improves. Since their systems learn and gets better at predicting personal audience information needs.

Regardless of the depth of your corporate financial pockets, you compete with Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix and Google.  Also you compete with content titans like Disney. And they have the resources to acquire content, media and technology to control access to their content, data and employees.

BUT—don’t give up!

Instead, adopt a sustainable content mindset to remain competitive.

Before cranking out more new content:
Stop and assess the content across your organization for sustainability.

Where possible work with colleagues across your business to capture, organize and structure your content, information and data. This helps you to get a seat at the data table while saving financial and human resources.

Then, schedule content updates, distribution presentation changes, and additional promotion.

By aligning and improving existing content, you’ll improve its sustainability. And you get rid of redundant activities and waste across your company.

Happy Marketing,
Heidi Cohen

Heidi CohenHeidi Cohen is the President of Riverside Marketing Strategies.
You can find Heidi on FacebookTwitter and Google+.

 

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