In a recent conversation, a professional acquaintance bemoaned the fact that her team leader was addicted to what she called “random acts of content.”
As a phrase, that’s pretty catchy, and to a large extent it sums up the quandary that marketing leaders often wrestle with. The fact is, when it comes to your marketing, strategy is context and content outside of that context can waste valuable time and money, and derail achieving your goals.
At MarketSmiths, we’ve been creating strategic content for our clients for more than 15 years. Here’s what that experience has taught us about why you shouldn’t use every content idea you have, right when you have it.
Your content calendar is there for a reason.
There’s a reason brainstorming sessions happen before, not during, a marketing campaign. Individual ideas can be powerful, but interconnected ideas are far more likely to produce results. Your campaign isn’t a thrown together collection of whatever content is close at hand — it’s a Swiss watch, built by skilled experts from precision-crafted gears.
The purpose of your marketing plan is to build momentum, and all the components have to mesh together seamlessly if it’s going to accomplish that. If you start swapping out parts in the middle of a campaign, you’re likely to gum up the works.
Then you can kiss all that beautiful momentum goodbye.
Arbitrary is the enemy of agile.
A good marketing team has agility, able to adapt on the fly and innovate in the service of their brand. So why isn’t it okay to drop a new idea in their laps mid-campaign and see what they can do with it?
Because advanced planning is what allows teams to be agile. Tossing random content requests into the mix and imposing short deadlines for that content? That’s a disruption, not an innovation. It not only disrupts the flow of the ongoing campaign, but it distracts the marketing team from what’s next: the next campaign, the next quarter, the next product launch.
It’s a momentum-killer and a confusion generator—both for your marketing team and your audience.
Be responsive and opportunistic, but never random.
Of course, there can be exceptions. Sometimes an idea is so good that it makes you not only sit up and notice, but wonder why you didn’t think of it during the early stages of planning. Or something happens in the macro landscape or your industry, and the opportunity to leverage it in the moment simply shouldn’t be ignored. Drafting off a fast trending event or action can help with SEO in the short-term.
The key to distinguishing these responsive ideas from random acts of content lies in the way they have an evolutionary impact on the ongoing campaign. If a new content idea serves the goal of building momentum and creating results, it’s a worthy candidate for consideration. This is akin to the agile approach used so successfully by tech developers. There’s a foundational roadmap based on objectives and milestones, with frequent, regularly scheduled reviews after each sprint so that you can adjust short-term actions in light of the bigger context.
Again, this all comes back to the fact you have a plan, a framework. Random ideas—however good they are—don’t necessarily slip neatly into place. If it’s a good idea, whose time hasn’t yet come, save it in a content repository so you don’t lose it. It may be more of a case of: not that it isn’t right, but more like, it isn’t the right idea for right now.
At MarketSmiths, nothing we do is ever random: from helping our clients develop content calendars to our phrasing to our process. It’s all strategically structured and executed. Ready to build your brand through purposeful content creation? Let’s talk.
