What makes good content? Q&A with Susi O’Neill, Head of Digital
This article by River Group’s newly appointed Head of Digital and Content, Susi O’Neill, was originally featured in .NET magazine in April.
What makes good content?
Content marketing isn’t new – content has always driven communications online. Good content is informative or entertaining, and always engaging. Make your content purposeful: what problem will you solve for your prospective customer? What call-to-action will they take? Use that eye-catching infographic to move your audience further into your engagement programme or sales funnel.
The challenge of the ubiquity of content in content marketing
Can you imagine going to a restaurant and ordering some food? No, actually ordering, just ‘food’. Then maybe ordering some ‘drink’.
Perhaps when you go shopping you like to buy some general ‘clothes’? Your next major purchase might be a ‘car’ or perhaps your Saturday afternoons are spent shouting with thousands of other people at a couple of ‘football teams’?
Content matters: the purpose of content marketing
it’s no surprise that content marketing has come to the fore. Content is by and large self-selecting. It is also immersive, emotive, and the customer gets to choose when, where and how often it is consumed.
Darwinism in Action: adapting to survive in publishing
The greatest civilisations eventually fall. So goes the accepted wisdom. Actually whose accepted wisdom it was I can’t recall but it does sound very wise indeed. Although perhaps not as wise as Darwin’s proclamation that “It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change.”
Future Proof: five predictions for the future of content
I love writing about the future. It’s the one way I get to say whatever I like and you are only allowed to disagree with me in the mildest fashion. This is because you are not Doctor Who.
So I predict that in 10 years we will be able to invite holograms of our dead relatives to dinner and converse with them as if they we really there. Don’t believe me? Then watch the first episode of the latest series of Charlie Brooker’s ‘Black Mirror’ and think again.
The challenges of magazine cover art in the digital age
You can’t judge a book by its cover.
And if you do, you have no idea just how 19th century you are.
Whatever the origin of this pithy aphorism (widely attributed to Mr Tulliver in George Eliot’s The Mill on The Floss, saying how beautifully bound a book was), judging a book, a magazine or a person, by their cover is what we do all the time. Yet in this age of digi-everything, the challenges of making your cover art dazzle are greater than ever.