The Four Pillars of Recombinant Content

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Now more than ever, content must be recombinant. This means a critical component of content strategy is the ability to rapidly dissemble, reassemble, reuse, repurpose, and remodel discrete elements of digital content.

Consumers live in a multiscreen world that’s becoming more complex and multifaceted daily. Laptops. PCs. Tablets. Smart phones. Phablets. Smart watches. Google Goggles and other forms of wearables. Digital signage and digital television.

Like hummingbirds, they flit from message to message, channel to channel, screen to screen. Sixty-seven percent touch two devices daily, while 30 percent touch four devices. Regardless of how many screens, touch points and channels, 60 percent of consumers expect a consistent experience when interacting with brands.

Got that? The bottom line isn’t channel, device, or media strategy. It’s experience.

This grazing, snacking, multimedia, and multiscreen behavior is in hypergrowth mode — digital screens are now in taxis, stadiums, and retail outlets. As digital becomes less coupled with the concept of “online,” consistency of experience, of voice, tone, look, and feel are essential.

Otherwise, how are customers to recognize a brand as they (and it) travel across all these devices and media?

Advances in advertising push the envelope further still. Facebook’s revamp of Atlas, announced last week, means advertisers can achieve hitherto impossible targeting and frequency capping, regardless of the device or channels in which an ad appears. Whether an in-app in-game message on a phone, or a display ad on the web, the messages — and the creative — can be kept in sync, appropriate for the device, channel, media, as well as the consumer receiving the message.

The technological ability to connect messaging across devices and channels is a clarion call for recombinant content. Marketers require both the tools and the strategies to create content that works in multiple media and channels, that can be displayed across the ecosystem.

There are four fundamental pillars of recombinant content in this brave and fast moving new world:

Content strategy

Content strategies must be devised with a view toward the reuse, repurposing and redeployment of content. Every message must be viewed as a bundle of component parts that can be broken down and rebuilt in myriad ways. Think Lego set. Can you change the headline? The copy? Turn it into a video, a podcast, an infographic, a display ad, or a PowerPoint? You’re on the right track.

Content agility

This is part of strategy, but agility needs its own call-out. Content must be modular enough to be quickly broken down and reassembled to respond to a real-time (or near real-time) marketplace. Creation, too, is often rapid and reactive. This requires training and empowerment of stakeholders, as well as cross-functional and departmental coordination.

Content tools

All these content assets and content demands cannot be wrangled by hand. Recombinant content requires publishing tools, a digital asset management system, and a myriad of other content marketing software. Content marketing, you’ll remember, is nothing new. It’s technology that makes it accessible.

Connected technology

Content tools must work in a connected fashion to create and deploy assets across channels and media. This doesn’t just apply to owned and earned marketing channels, but also to paid media (advertising). We’re not quite there yet, but when the content technology stack starts talking to the ad stack (this will happen in about two years), it will be the real dawn of the era of recombinant content.

This post originally published on iMedia

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