Good content is still just good ol’ Good Creative.

We’ve all heard the words: Content is King. It reminds me of the .com explosion. Marketers are running so fast to fill their organizations with content creators, that often they’re not even stopping to remember the universal tools.

Simply claiming “real-time” marketing or living by a content calendar doesn’t cover it. Once we get past the new(ish) format of social platforms, and buzz words like “consumer connection,” and “stackable content,” is it really that different than what we’ve always done?

And then there’s millennials. Yes, I said it. The mysterious nut that all marketers are trying to crack. Well, we know that 62% of millennials report their brand loyalty is driven by good content. So we know our focus needs to be on the quality of the content itself. The question is, how do we produce good creative that allows our audience to participate, influence and own? And how to we avoid blending into the sea of other calendar planned <St Patricks Day> posts? Well, lets start with remembering how we always did it before. Before content. Before digital. Before the internet of things:

Ideation: Shocker, the actual ideas still come first. I can’t tell you how many times I see creative (and social) teams go straight to the execution when developing content. Believe it or not, its more important than ever, to do research, plan, and sketch (remember pen and paper?) and arrive at a big idea that people believe in. It needs to have substance, say something worth talking about (insert buzz phrase: “storytelling” here,) and not too cheesy. (Ok, nothing new there.)

Create: Create and curate the ideas into a structure and format strategy. Your content creation will be driven by your plan and your big idea (to avoid the matching luggage effect.) Weather we call it a campaign, like the old days, or a content calendar, it still needs to have the consumer’s overall experience in mind. (Check, nothing new there either.)

Test: Was it memorable, was there a value exchange, and was it shared? (Yes, we still care about results.)

So let me get this straight, in order to produce good content (that yes, even people under the age of 35 can get behind,) we need good creative thinkers and a well executed plan?

Got it. I think we’re good.