Driving a Successful Media Strategy for Your Product
Media and advertisements are omnipresent today. Whether or not a business is a media company, investing in and implementing a media strategy has become inevitable in creating a space for a business in the marketplace.
Given the importance of such a strategy, what factors are behind the scenes in creating a successful media plan? Is it the company’s brand, the platform, the content, or the authors who create the content? All four are collectively important and are interdependent to a great extent.
An organization may have a great and compelling product, but unless the end users know about it through the right media messaging and content, a consistent brand image is difficult to build. Creating the content itself can often be a very daunting task because it does not stop with just content development; there are aspects of content verification as well that need to be considered.
Similarly, even if the content is rich, articulate, and precise, unless the platform to deliver it to end users is usable, dynamic, and abundant in features, the audience reach will definitely be limited. This is a platform that helps with not just taking the content to end users but also with analytics to understand usage patterns and gather data about overall messaging appeal, interest, relevance, and the platform’s usability. Many social analytical tools are available today to help with this exercise, but the core platform has to integrate well with such tools in disseminating the required data internally.
Think about the stickiness factor end users have to a certain author, writer, or speaker. Once users have developed a liking for an author’s style of writing and his diversity in content, chances are very high that they would follow him wherever he goes. Yahoo, which is trying to rebuild itself as a media company under Marissa Mayer’s leadership, is doing just this through revamping its content strategy with its most recent hire. Katie Couric, from ABC News, will be the new face of Yahoo News.
While Yahoo has believed in the author stickiness element, AOL seems to be taking a different route; it’s banking on platform investments making all the difference in establishing itself as a successful media company.
In Your Brand: The Next Media Company, author Michael Brito talks about how every business should look at becoming a media outlet if it wants to expand its user base and catch people’s attention with not just its product but its content too.
We live in a social world where a great product may miss seeing the light of the day with poor branding and an unsuccessful message, while a substandard product can win a decent market share through its effective media presence. We have to ensure that our brand, the platform, the content, and the content’s authors are working together to make us visible in the marketplace.
