Good content strategy requires risk-taking

Sara Bennison, marketing director, Barclays and Lionel Benbassat, head of marketing and brand, Eurostar discussed how their organisations had embraced content strategy and the changes that required within their departments at ISBA’s annual conference yesterday.

“Content marketing is not radically different, the basics still apply,” said Benbassat. “What’s the objective, what’s the purpose? You want people to engage so you need a great insight. The new mindset is to be willing to take a risk.”

Bennison explained that in the days when most marketing involved expensive TV ads, the shear cost limited the ability to experiment.

As well as learning how to take risks, knowing what to measure is also vital. Benbassat explained how he did it at Eurostar.

“Look at content for engagement and advocacy. There are two sets of metrics we use; for engagement how did people interact on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn and YouTube and we look at which has performed best on awareness and engagement (such as likes, shares). It’s a very quick indication of what works,” he said.

In the social media environment the need to be nimble is essential but for Barclays Bennison explained that there were different types of crisis it had to deal with: “There’s operational bad news like ATMs being down versus reputational bad news – these are two different things to understand and manage.”

Ensuring all elements of a content strategy worked together they talked of the need to “join the dots”.

“You have to be clear on your purpose – why do we need it, what’s it for? On social media we have to think about how we service people,” said Benbassat.