Escaping the cult of content

Go to any marketing conference these days and you might think there’s a new religion in town: the cult of content. Everywhere you look, consultants are telling you how important high-quality content is for your website to succeed.

On ArtsProfessional earlier this year, we learned why your website content should be “less like marketing, more like journalism.” On the Spektrix blog, Melissa Ragsdale tells us that “good content marketing isn't about the hard sell, but providing people with something which is genuinely interesting, shareable and attention-grabbing.” On her Cultural Content substack, Georgina Brooke says, “Digital Content Strategy is part of Audience Development Strategy today, you can’t do one successfully without the other.” Look on the Ten4 website from a year ago and you’ll even find me claiming that “content is king.”

We specialise in the arts, so that’s where all these examples come from, but you see the same pattern in many other sectors too. Indeed, the idea that content is important for websites verges on dogma these days. So maybe it’s time for some heresy, too.

Certainly it’s true in a very broad sense that content is important for websites. But the truthiness of that general statement leads to a whole bunch of unfortunate muddling up of what “content” means, what “important” means, and heck, even what “website” means. The result is that a lot of websites end up with a really gargantuan content strategy that is unfit for purpose and overwhelming for staff.

So let’s unpick these three key terms and see where things end up going wrong. In the process, we’ll hopefully reassure you that even if you don’t have any long-form journalistic content on your arts website, you can still have a really strong, really effective content strategy.

Right out of the starting block, we run into a problem here. “Content” obviously has a very common-sense meaning, which is something that can be consumed as an end in itself. This could be a newspaper article, a blog post, a YouTube video, a Netflix show, etc.

But the word “content” is also used in phrases like “content architecture,” “content strategy,” and “content marketing.” In this context, content means something slightly different. Often, it can still be a blog post or a video, but it’s consumed as a means to something else. When you ask “what’s the website content strategy?”, what you’re really asking is “what content do we need on our website in order to achieve our website goals?” But just because everyone needs a “content strategy” in that sense, doesn’t mean everyone needs a lot of “content” on their website in the literal sense.

Like I said, I’ve been just as guilty as anyone of being sloppy with the distinction. In my “Content is King” article, for example, I shared the story of how the New York Times gradually built up their base of paid subscribers by first seeding out free content. Their content strategy was about building a habit for readers of doing the same thing over and over again — reading a New York Times article — until they were eventually willing to pay for it. The implication being, if your business can also seed out high-quality, free, journalistic content, then eventually the people reading it regularly will start to give you money for… something.

This works for the New York Times, because the high-quality content is the same content they want people to pay for, and it’s content as an end in itself. But if you work for a theatre or museum, the content on your website is ultimately content as a means to something else; the real content you want people to pay for is a show or an exhibition.

But just because I enjoy reading articles on your blog doesn’t mean I want to see your new play or come to your museum. Indeed, I might live in an entirely different country from your theatre or museum and there’s no chance of me ever visiting, no matter how much I love your blog.

So certainly, you could invest a lot of time and money creating high-quality journalistic content for your website, in the hope that the right people will find it, and will be so impressed that they’ll decide to come visit you in person. But that’s asking a lot of time and effort for a pretty hazy pay-off. It’s easy to see why arts marketers feel overwhelmed and overworked as a result.

An easier and simpler proposition — and a better comparison to the NYT’s strategy — might be giving target audiences free or discounted tickets to one thing, in the hope that they like it so much they’ll pay to come to the next thing. But that doesn’t really have anything to do with a content strategy except insofar as you’ll need a page on a website to tell people that those free tickets exist.

That brings us to the different meanings of “important.” Some content strategists may object that what I’ve said so far is overly simplistic. Of course it’s still “important” to have lots of high-quality journalistic content, they’ll say, because that’s the content that best engages digital audiences these days. And engaged audiences are more likely to stick with you in the future, whether they’re already loyal customers or just discovering your website for the first time. Investing in content is playing the long game.

This sounds like a good case, and I don’t disagree with it — and I’m certainly not trying to disparage the work of the many fine content strategists out there, including the ones I name-checked in the first paragraph (who are all brilliant).

But in the grand scheme of commercial success for a theatre or museum, in-person visits are the directly, existentially “important” part: you need to have a lot of people coming through the door, buying tickets, making ancillary spend, etc., otherwise you don’t have a business at all — no matter how great the content on your website is.

So while it’s easy for us content strategists to sit back and say it’s “important” to engage audiences with a lot of high-quality content, when we do that we risk missing the forest for the trees. If you’re strapped for time and resources, one piece of great journalistic or video content might cost you the same as ten dull pages that answer your visitors’ most common questions. But if the plodding FAQ pages directly result in more people coming through the door, they’re the more “important” content.

This isn’t short-term thinking, either. Like with the New York Times example, you build long-term customer loyalty by building a habit. If your digital content strategy simply makes it painless for people to plan a visit to your venue, and easy to book for something else immediately afterwards, then focussing on the plodding FAQs can also set you up for long-term success. One ticket purchase will beget many more.

Again, this is not to say that a good content strategy can’t also include good content, in the literal sense. But a good content strategy might also mean something as simple as reorganising your website to make your event pages easier to find, or writing more compelling copy explaining why you need donations and what they fund. It doesn’t mean you need to write the next great Pulitzer-winning essay about the dramatic themes of this season’s programme, or film an incredible trailer for next year's big exhibition.

Obviously, this article is focusing on the websites for theatres, museums, and other visitor attractions. But, just as obviously, that’s not the only kind of website out there. To go back to the New York Times once more, it would be ludicrous to say that they shouldn’t have high-quality journalistic content on their website; if they didn’t, what else would they have?

For a theatre or visitor attraction, that’s patently not the case. Even if you sell virtual events on your website — even if you access those virtual events via the website — it’s the events that are important, not the fact that they’re on the website. The website is primarily a transactional tool.

The distinction matters, because if your website’s primary purpose is not to be a warehouse of high-quality journalistic content, then it’s equally ludicrous to say you need high-quality journalism for your website to succeed. That doesn’t mean it doesn’t need a content strategy; it just means it needs a different one.

Museum websites are actually a great example, because they often have a foot in two worlds: they need to sell tickets to visitors, but they also need to provide a repository of rich content for researchers, or to fulfil a more general organisational mission of spreading knowledge. But crucially this is still a different primary purpose from the NYT, and simply seeding out a lot of free long-form content is not necessarily going to accomplish the right goals in the right way.

By the way, I’m aware of the irony of writing a piece of free long-form content to tell you all this — but a digital agency’s website is another kind of website again, and for our purposes this kind of page is a valuable part of the content strategy.

When we built the new website for Ronnie Scott’s Jazz Club last year, we made the very cult-of-content suggestion that they should have lots of detailed pages about the history of the club, and about the different artists who perform there, and about the different genres of jazz they offer. The capability to do all that is built into the CMS. There’s a clear rationale for how it will help engage audiences and increase reach and engagement.

But Ronnie’s, like so many arts organisations, has a small staff who are strapped for time, and none of that content ever got created. That doesn’t mean the website has failed — or that the content strategy has failed, either. Indeed, because the content strategy also included answers to common queries directly in the site navigation, and SEO-friendly event pages that are easy to find organically, the new website has been an indisputable success: conversion rates are up, average order values are up, and so forth.

They (we) did all that with a content strategy, but without much content beyond the purely transactional pages. It’s probably the leanest arts website we’ve ever worked on from a content point of view. But it still works as a transactional website, and it still works as a website where people can discover events they’re interested in. For a website like that, a really tight, user-focused content strategy around boring FAQs is going to be infinitely more valuable than the capability to host a lot of high-quality journalistic content that nobody has time to produce.

To further prove this point, a friend of mine who also has a digital marketing background messaged me recently to say how much he wished there was more of that high-quality journalistic content on the Ronnie Scott’s website. Yet at the same time, he had still bought a ticket and become a new first-time audience member. This is anecdotal evidence, obviously, but clearly even someone who notices the lack of content isn’t necessarily going to be put off engaging with you for the first time, if you have the right commercial proposition communicated in a clear way.

So next time someone’s trying to get you to join the cult of content, take a deep breath, think about what that really means, and decide for yourself if their advice is right for you.

Lead photo by Carl Heyerdahl on Unsplash.

Podcast photo by Austin Distel on Unsplash.