I’ve had a lot of discussions recently with clients and potential clients about content. How users discover content. How they consume it. How content can be repurposed and re-energized. How it can be used to help expand audiences and more.

Organizations and individuals create content for a variety of reasons in a variety of formats. That’s why it’s important to think about where that content will appear and how it can be the most marketable.

I don’t believe the Field of Dreams saying, “If you build it they will come.” There’s so much digital content, so many content creators, so little time in the day. Creating content is simply not enough. To have successful content, that content needs to be discoverable too. That’s where a digital strategist comes in. I’ve worked with a lot of organizations throughout my career to help users find and engage with their digital content.

Here are three tactics/projects that I think do this extremely well?

Reinventing the Wheel

Last year I helped the Americans for the Arts create a social impact wheel that encourages users to interact with specific content. This wheel created an opportunity for content and research to be energized and pulled together in new engaging ways.

The project focused on how users engage with content. The wheel is responsive and uses text that can be indexed. It promotes other content including reading lists, related research, other online resources, and downloadable factsheets.

Since launching the wheel at a convention, support for the initiative continues to grow. The Social Impact wheel recently won the Public Affairs Council award for Lobbying Strategy Innovation and has been featured in many digital publications since launch.

Newsletters

I’ve had a lot of conversation with ecommerce organizations recently about adding value and increasing touch points with customers. The thing I like about email newsletters is they are a passive, personal way to deliver content.

It should come as no surprise that personalized experiences see better results than generic ones. Newsletters not only provide personalized content but an easy way to collect data to better understand and create personalized content.  

In addition, emails also allow content to be consumed in a passive way. There are articles written all the time about how to get the best benefit out of you membership to this or what you get with a membership to that. Amazon is a prime example (see what I did there :)). A consistent weekly note to user’s inboxes helps remind them of your organization’s value, while allowing them to take advantage of that value at their will.  

Think about the success of daily or weekly emails like Girls’ Night In and the Skimm. Not only do they provide easy access to digital content, they also help that content transcend the digital world.

Recommended for you

I’ve talked about recommendation engines before. I know they can be super complex, but they can also be pretty simple. I’ve implemented personalization engines of varying complexity time and time again for clients. I know it can seem like a daunting task, but it doesn’t have to be.

Take the one I implemented on reit.com. The first iteration of this was based on a single type of content. It used tags that were manually entered by site admins. This was a great starting point and drove traffic between select content, but was limited. When we evolved this tool we connected it to Google to allow other users to influence the recommendations. In doing this we identified three variables and created a formula that provides the recommendations. In addition, we wanted to nudge users to engage with different types of content, so we included automatic tagging of content across sections. This has not only increased engagement metrics but has helped educate users in a meaningful, efficient way.

You’ve heard me say before that one of the things I love about digital is that it’s constantly changing. There’s always a need to tweak and alter. There’s always the need to learn more. This is especially true with AI and personalization.