The Trees and the Forests

Content and communications strategy - Why? and why work with us? -

Our approach We believe that a content and communications strategy should be both an instruction manual and a set of directions that tells you how your brand communicates with your market.

It’s a concise, logical, practical and actionable document. We try to keep them simple.

We also frame our strategic work within a broader context.

Your content and communications exist in a media environment that’s often driven by social media – so when we talk about content and communications we talk about the ‘conversation’ you have with the market.

This is interesting, because it means your content and communications strategy can be part of a much broader digital and social media strategy.

While there’s often a lot of theory and research involved, we try to remain focused on the underlying simplicity – strip the theory back and it should reveal a simple logical structure: why, who, what and where.

So instead of presenting a series of process flow charts and diagrams and models, let’s look instead at that underlying structure.

It gives you an understanding of what we do and a very clear understanding of what makes our approach particularly interesting.

Why This is your mission and purpose –why are you communicating in the first place?

Informing your ‘why’ can be many things, for example:

- Your long-term play

- The tactical opportunity

- A business imperative

- A competitive hedge or imperative

- Search and SEO leverage

- Brand building, awareness or differentiation

- Supporting a campaign in market

- Nurturing or developing leads or relationships for short, medium or long term conversion

There are many ways to determine your ‘why’; during the process we’re really defining two important things:

- Desired objectives

- Defines outcomes

Who When you know your ‘why’ – your objectives and your outcomes - it tells you who you need to be communicating with: your ‘who’.

It’s logical – ‘to achieve these objectives, you need to talk to these people’.

Here’s where we look at your market and start segmenting them. There are a number of criteria for identifying and defining your segmentation, here’s 4 of the key ones we use:

- Yield

- Influence

- Cost

- Opportunity

What When you know why you’re speaking, who you’re speaking with, then you know what to say – the ‘what’ determines the deliverable.

Again there’s a simple logic to this: You need to target the right segments with the right communications to produce the right outcomes.

There’s a lot of strategy and research to be done here and there are two important things we look at:

-What is the natural conversation?

-What is the appropriate way for your brand to participate in it?

Where When you know why you’re speaking, who you’re speaking with, what to say, you need to understand where to say it – this is channel identification and media.

For social media, this can be really important, it can ‘make or break’ a campaign.

We mentioned the ‘natural conversation’ before. Where is this natural conversation happening?

Competitive landscape

Considerations This is the ‘why’, ‘who’, ‘what’ and ‘where’ - four simple things.

In getting to these simple things there can be a lot of technology, theory and process – a lot of this is proprietary, so we won’t go into too much detail at this point.

There are also some ‘critical considerations, let’s look at a few of these:

What your competitors are doing; you don’t want to be doing and saying the same things in the same places.

Natural conversations

We’ve touched on this a few times - around any category of product or service will be a range of different natural conversations that are happening naturally and organically in social media.

A company can waste a lot of money writing, blogging and talking about things that the consumer really isn’t interested in, when you identify natural conversations the consumers are having with each other, you can identify how you can integrate yourself into that natural conversation.

The ROI is a stronger, deeper, more cost effective and lasting engagement with the market. Our focus on this is perhaps what makes us different.

Brand

You have to resolve everything you do, back to your brand; it’s the brand that provides coherency and congruency. We look at content and communications as a brand exercise.

What do the conversations you have, say about your brand? We think carefully about this. Not many people do. It’s perhaps another one of the key differentiators of our approach.

Value

We also think about value. You need to give something in order to get something and that’s what we’re asking – for a consumer to give us their time. How do we make it worth their while? How do we create value?

Communicability

In time where nearly 75% of the population rate word of mouth as the most persuasive influence in their purchasing behaviour you’ve got to do four things:

- Create reasons for advocacy

- Develop sharable content

- Develop intrinsic or extrinsic reasons to share

- Create mechanisms whereby things can be heard

In developing strategy, we can deliver specific recommendations in these areas.

Search and social

We know that links from social media channels and platforms can affect search performance and efficiency, we also know that ‘long tail’ content can increase search performance. Our content and communication strategy is developed with regard to this.

Some of our clients also have ‘perception management’ issues perhaps an adverse event in the past, perhaps dissatisfied or disaffected customer commentary in social media.

If required, we can develop strategies that will mitigate these things.

Our team Our strategy team is led by our Senior Strategist, Ravi Prasad. Ravi has worked for agencies including Sapient Nitro, Leo Burnett, FCB, Ogilvy and Mather, Wunderman, One Digital, Tribal DDB and John Singleton Advertising. He was former Head of Copy and Content for Euro RSCG Digital in Australia, former Senior Strategy Planner for Sapient Nitro in Australia and most recently a Senior Strategy Planner for Clemenger BBDO.

He has worked for some of the world’s and Australia’s most powerful and successful brands including Sony, Dell, Intel, Gatorade, Mercedes Benz, Tourism Australia, IBM, Acer Computer, HSBC, Westpac, Nike and Virgin.

Over the years he’s been a finalist in or won awards for his work including at AUS Trade, ADMA, APMA, W3, AIMIA, the Asia Pacific Advertising Festival and the LACP in Los Angeles.

This is us There’s a lot we can do with content and communication strategies. Every client is different, so we don’t work to a ‘template’ we work with you collaboratively to define a strategic framework that delivers the results you need.

What we deliver is a straightforward, practical actionable document.

Strategies should be ‘working’ documents, they answer problems, they deliver results that can be measured – and this is what we aim to deliver.

If you’d like to find out more about us, our team and what we can do, please call Kresant Mahilall on 0410 502 829.

Or, if you’re specifically interested in the social and search implications of content and communications strategy, you can contact Ullash Tiwari on 0433 785 846.

Thank you... www.thetreesandtheforests.com.au