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What makes content great?

Neha Sampat●May 10, 2023●3 min read

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"You're not just competing with other brands. You're competing with every other piece of content on the internet." That was a mic drop from Juliette Olah, senior manager of editorial at Booking.com, during a recent “People Changing Enterprises” episode.

We get so confined in our worlds that often we're just asking ourselves: How can I do better than what I did last time? But shouldn't we ask ourselves how we can be the best in our niche?

For Olah, that niche is travel. That means at any given time she's competing with everyone from Travel and Leisure to Airbnb, the Travel Channel, and Drew Binsky, a YouTuber with over 3.7 million subscribers.

Consumers have endless options. That's why we need standards to ground us on what makes content great. These are my suggestions:

Elements of great content

Overarching, unique angle

Listen Notes estimates that over 3 million active podcasts exist today. Of those, about 350,000 list "business" as their genre, which is where Contentstack's “People Changing Enterprises” sits. We could have produced a Composable DXP podcast since we are the category leaders. 

Instead, we focused on who we wanted to build relationships with: enterprise technologists and marketers. We made them the heroes as they share their learnings and stories of triumph every day. 

Our unique angle? Successful transformation stories from within enterprises. 

Drenched in POV

Once you have your overarching angle, make sure every individual piece of content has a POV. Google clamped down on SEO-driven content for a reason. Its top 10 ranked articles tied to any search query all sound the same. Raise your hand if you agree!

You can avoid that by applying some challenger brand techniques: Lighthouse your beliefs with each piece of content. Or, drench it in POV, as I like to say. This works no matter the channel. On LinkedIn, you'll never not know where CEO of Refine Labs Chris Walker  stands on marketing attribution. Here's an example of when I spoke a hard truth — entrepreneurs come from anywhere, not just Ivy League schools — on the same platform.

Be helpful

This doesn't mean that it must be a "how to." It does mean that your audience must find it helpful in some way. 

Your content could be inspiring, make them think differently or save your audience time. Your content might be helpful simply because it allows them to lose themselves in storytelling after a busy week. (Thank you, New York Times Sunday Read.)

Make it visual

This can be as simple as making something easy to consume with white space, bullets and pull quotes. But video, infographics, original photography, memes, cartoons and VR storytelling work, too. With tech, the visual sky is the limit! 

You'll rarely see a single-spaced, dense article get mainstream play because we simply don't have the attention spans anymore. In an omnichannel content world, play to the strengths of each channel you're active in. 

Or do something entirely visually unexpected. Postmark, the email delivery service, created a series of comic books poking fun at common email problems like churn and getting stuck in spam folders.

Prioritize speed

Admittedly, this one isn't as "creative" as the first four elements. But it's   what unlocks your competitive advantage. You can excel with the first four, and if someone beats you to it or your target audience simply moves on from a trend, you've lost an opportunity.

Some retailers were able to move quickly promoting their versions of the Zara pink slip dress that went viral on TikTok. Most didn't. Our research shows that 78% of retailers say it takes them two weeks or more to execute a standard marketing campaign, and 63% struggle with the ability to update content. Speed is non-negotiable, so I'd recommend removing any barriers to achieving it.

Booking.com's Olah said, "Remain open-minded that there's always going to be changes on a micro or macro level. You have to enable the ability to flex and adapt your approach." When you get the first four principles right — and wrap your entire process with the ability to move quickly — you can compete with the best content out there. You really can. 

If you don't believe me, listen to “People Changing Enterprises” for more examples of regular people accomplishing unimaginable things within their organizations.

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Aug 25, 2023 | 3 min. read

The world is your oyster: using AI to support your content ecosystem

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Aug 09, 2023 | 3 min. read

There is no growth without support

We hire people because we believe they can do the job and help our organizations grow. And, yet, often, managers fall into the micromanaging or the no-managing-at-all trap. On the one hand: "I'll tell you how to do it and when." On the other hand: "Welcome and good luck!"I don't like to think about leading as "managing" at all. I think of it as "supporting." As leaders, our number one goal should be to support our team to reach their full potential and, in turn, enable the company to achieve its goals.There is no growth without support. Here are the three areas where I focus my support.Giving clear directionYour team can't row in the same direction without knowing where the company is headed and why. If the company aims to be the most beloved solution in the category, then a strategy might be prioritizing customer service. Every person across sales, engineering, marketing, partner development, and more should have a plan for how they contribute to that goal. But a step comes before that: ensuring your team is aligned on the values.Your people need to be clear on how they are expected to show up in the communities they serve. Without this, you may find your team achieving goals in a way that creates friction. The behaviors might ultimately work against the North Star, like the high-performing salesperson who is a nightmare collaborator or that leader who rules with fear instead of empathy. Remember that identifying people who will model the core values happens before you hire them. Review company values with potential candidates upfront and ask candidates which resonate with them and why. Also, consider including interview questions about how candidates get through challenging situations or help people succeed and about their community involvement to go beyond a simple values "gut feeling."Greenlighting the right toolsTools are table stakes when it comes to support. There are inevitably things your team will need to accomplish the goals at their highest potential. It could be an e-commerce solution or a collaboration or analysis tool. Often, it's department-specific.As a Solutions Architect for REI's content and experience management platform, Jason Greely oversees a team of engineers. In a recent episode of our People Changing Enterprises podcast, he said he looks for "established solutions that have robust SDKs and APIs, are well documented, and can tackle our capabilities." That's because he's responsible for a team of engineers and prioritizes tools that allow them to experiment and be "happy."I loved this extra layer of evaluation. Yes, tools should help people get the job done. But the sometimes uncredited benefits that come with them – like user happiness – can be even more potent as they lead to increased effectiveness, productivity, and innovation. Some studies show happy employees are 12% more productive, but that number is downplayed.Jason's colleague Kat Valdre, engineering manager for REI's platform organization, added: "Developers are happiest when they get to explore. Just having the possibility of flexibility is what most developers want – freedom. Also, managers who encourage that exploration."One tip from the REI team: make sure the end users of the tool are involved in evaluating the potential options. In Jason's case, as they considered new content management systems, the engineers "contributed their criteria and assessed based on the proof of concept they built. Without end-user involvement, expect a disappointing tool onboarding and acceptance process down the line.Building trust through autonomyMy leadership philosophy is essentially: hire great people and get out of the way. While it may seem counterintuitive, the "getting out of the way" part is one of the most significant ways to show leadership support.Part of that is encouraging that exploration Kat mentioned. Another aspect is showing your support for a project publicly. This executive engagement also involves unblocking as needed. As a leader, you've illuminated the goal, your team paves the path to get there, and you support them by removing the roadblocks. Sometimes, those roadblocks require an executive's touch as they can involve tricky conversations with other executives. Here's the catch: Leaders don't have to necessarily agree with the path to get out of the way. If my CMO wants to do something, my job is to enable her to do it and only raise a flag if I believe it may conflict with our values. Autonomy is an important show of support because it builds trust. And trust keeps the engines running.If I had to boil the concept of support down to one question, it'd be: How can I help my team be successful? It's about giving clear direction on values and end goals, providing the tools to make the team work smarter and not more complex, and letting people run with their skills and ideas. With these elements in place, growth follows.

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Jul 21, 2023 | 3 min. read

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Jul 19, 2023 | 3 min. read

The power of documentation for innovation

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Jun 14, 2023 | 3 min. read

The beauty of a composable digital experience platform: It can be whatever you need

Have you ever tried designing a website from a template? It can be challenging. First, there are so many options to scroll through (that all somehow look the same) your head will spin. When you do pick a template, you have to build it the way you want, meaning a lot of customization. When that doesn’t work — because inevitably, you always hit the end of what the template can offer — you have to puzzle your way through custom code. That can become a tangled web very quickly.Imagine that process for an established enterprise like Sephora or even a fast-growing start-up. Think about the manual process of integrating each tool needed for e-commerce or inventory management. You think you are “done” building,  but wait — the market is evolving and you need to start selling on a new-ish platform like TikTok or BeReal.A traditional legacy CMS environment is tricky: Change one thing and you risk the entire machine stalling. The beauty of composable architecture is that your website can become whatever you want, whenever you need it — easily. Jurre van Ruth, digital strategy consultant at PostNL, came on our podcast, “People Changing Enterprises,” to discuss how the company took that concept to heart and made their composable DXP work for them. But to make it work for your company like PostNL did, we need to level-set definitions and expectations. There’s a lot of confusion in the market about composable architectures — like what is a “composable DXP” in the first place — that I want to clear up. What is a composable DXP?I like how van Ruth said it in the podcast: “We see [composable] as an ecosystem of technologies that aim to create and offer a consistent digital experience for all our customer segments across all digital touchpoints.” I specifically love the word "ecosystem" he uses. CMSWire describes a composable DXP as providing “integrated, consistent solutions that are modular and tailored to microservices and yet connect the gaps of digital experience. This is a unified and seamless approach that eliminates siloed user experiences and all-in-one solutions.”To further flesh out that picture, I often describe composable architecture as a Lego tower: Each block is a tech tool and they each function together to make up one, larger tower, aka the customer’s digital experience. However, unlike a sculpture — or legacy enterprise suites — you can more easily change the look and function of the entire tower by swapping out each block within. For example, if your next marketing goal is to target potential consumers with more personalized advertising and content, those tools are easier to plug into a composable environment than traditional suites. Creative teams get to pursue the digital experience platform of their dreams, and there is much less frustration, less custom code and fewer heavy integration requirements for IT to handle on the back end.Then where does headless — AKA a headless CMS like Contentstack — come in? It’s simply a cornerstone block in your Lego tower. For a marketing environment, the headless CMS acts as a foundation. Every tool — like e-commerce, automated translation, or SEO tools — can integrate into it to make content the central hub of your ecosystem.Moving beyond one-size-fits-allEvery enterprise is different, which means that the capabilities they need will also be different. However, when it comes to traditional legacy martech systems, it tends to be one-size-fits-all. The problem is that one size actually doesn’t fit all, and those environments are slow and difficult to change. It takes extreme customization via code, contacting multiple vendors for help, and a lot of inter-dependencies that aren’t always caught until something breaks.  One of the best benefits of composable is that integration is much easier and more natural with APIs inherent to a composable environment. Like clicking a Lego into place, that tool is now part of the environment. For PostNL, they invested in tools for headless content and digital experience analytics, which were easily plugged into their composable environment.An e-commerce enterprise can integrate all the tools they require, whether it’s an online storefront platform, a product catalog with elements like descriptions or visual assets, or any personalization tools it might need. But, for example, a hospitality service will need a different set of tools, and they can have them inside a composable environment.Enterprises are no longer satisfied with a one-size-fits-all approach. The beauty of composable architectures is that, in a market that changes like the wind, organizations’ digital experiences can also evolve just as easily.

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