4 “E” Model

Creating content for SEO

Feline Quanta design, develop and produce exciting and engaging content that supports a digital content strategy. We help our clients publish this content across all their digital channels, including social and email.

Moreover, we work with  our client’s marketing and communication teams so that they begin to operate as publishers of content. And we provide tested methodologies, tools and support to produce and publish great content across all media – and thus help drive SEO and search ranking.

Content drives SEO through word of mouth.

Content drives SEO through word of mouth.

 

Here are some examples of content, that can be shared across all channels and drive an organisations digital content campaign.

Articles. We develop, write and produce articles that explain their science and technology to a wide audience.

Interviews. We conduct and produce interviews with top management and key researchers, in print and in video.

Webinars. We organise, produce and facilitate webinars.

E-books. We produce e-books that explain an organisations’ science and technology.

E-debates. Producing and facilitating debates on the web.

We can help integrate ideas such as the above into interactive  newsletters and digital magazines that can be distributed on mobile devices (iPad, etc.), and connect with potential customers and other stakeholders.

We have working collaborations with animators, infographics producers and web designers, and we can cover all of our clients’ needs across all digital content types.

Brand is the emotional signature of an idea

pepsiThe Pepsi Challenge has shown that Pepsi tastes better than Coke. Nevertheless, Coke consistently sells more than Pepsi. Neuroimaging studies have revealed why this is so: Coke evokes a stronger emotional response in the hyppocampus, the part of the limbic system in the brain that forms long term memories. Long term memories are formed thanks to stories. This is why we humans love narratives, and that is why we can memorise them so well. For millenia, and before the invention of writing, generations of human beings passed information through poetry to their young. Sometimes this poetry was several hundreds of thousand lines long; think of the Iliad or the Mahabharata, or Popol Vuh.

We connect with ideas, not facts. In the context of branding, and idea would be a product, a service, a country, a person, anything. If that idea creates a positive emotional signature to its audience, if we feel good when we see or hear or taste that idea, then the brand is strong. If we feel nothing, or feed negative, then the brand needs to do a lot of work.

But what is an “idea”? It is not the product, or the service, or the country, or the person. Ideas form from stories people say about the object of interest (product, service, etc.). As marketers we aim to create and encourage story-telling about the brand we want to promote. If we achieve that, and these are good stories, then we have achieved a positive emotional response (or “signature”) every time the brand is talked about. And that should be our goal.

Digital media provide us with interactive ways for engaging with people. Successful digital branding is all about telling and sharing stories about the brand.

Story-telling and digital branding

skills-cover4The art of story telling is as ancient as our species. Neuroscience has shown that our cognitive systems are wired for stories; indeed that it is through stories that our memories function. When we see something, or hear, or smell, or touch, or taste, our memory retrieves contextual information about the stimulus and builds a “narrative” about it. This is how we get to recognise and categorise what the stimulus is all about, and decide how to respond to it.

We can reverse engineer this cognitive process and ask ourselves how can we build recognisable brands that make people want to relate to them. Let me explain here that by “brand” I do not necessarily mean a commercial brand. It could be a charity, a scientific research organisation, a political party, a country, or a person – or anyone or anything that desires to be identified in positive terms by society at large. The key to building a brand is story-telling. If one can weave a compelling, emotive story around their brand, then people will react to it in a positive way. They will be able to identify with it. Importantly too, they will be able to “tell the story” to their friends, and therefore become links to a long chain of word-of-mouth.

But how do you build a story around a brand? This is where literary theory comes into play. Putting together the right words, creating excitement through a plot, sketching the main characters; all these are tools that can be used in putting together a compelling brand narrative. Starting from a stakeholder analysis and an organisational values analysis, the next step would be to compose representative and compelling vision and mission statements. These statements must somehow capture not only the keywords and the spirit of the brand, but also the narrative “yeast” to be used in putting together derivative narratives. Such derivative narratives, like stories within a story, could then be used to communicate the organisation across all channels and for every campaign.

Thus one does not need to keep inventing stories from scratch. The brand that possesses a strong narrative is a source of inspiration for any campaign; in advertising, lobbying or fundraising.

If you want to build a story for your brand, contact us!

The basics of content marketing

Content marketingContent marketing is a buzzword that seems to have taken over the world! There are two main reason for this. Firstly, the demise of traditional media: newspaper, book and magazine publishers, as well as radio and television, have seen their advertising revenues dwindle. Many have gone out of business or running for years in the red. Secondly, there has been a blurring between content producer and content consumer thanks to social media becoming part of mass culture.  Following the wise saying “if you cannot beat them join them”, advertising and marketing agencies embraced the new content producer: the consumer. But although this paradigm shift was impressive when it happened, it is less so nowadays.  Today we live in content deluge. There is so much content available that it clutters almost every interaction between businesses and their customers.

Content marketing has to be redefined in very specific terms if it is ever going to bring return on investment. What content is appropriate for which target publics? When should the organisation publish and engage? How can marketing executives prioritise actions in their strategy? A simple, but very powerful, model is the one shown in the graph.

I have put content right in the middle because this is where any content marketing campaign should begin. Content can be of three categories: own, curated and contributing. Own content encompasses a suite of formats such as webinars, white papers, presentations, videos, infographics, etc. that the organisation develops across its own channels in order to engage with their customers on the basis of the “4E Model” (“Educate”, “Engage”, “Excite”, “Evangelise”). Curated content is content produced by others which is relevant to the organisation and the organisation adopts it and re-publishes it in its communication channels. Contributing content is any contribution the organisation makes in other’s content; e.g. comments in influencers’ blogs. Together these three categories of content drive social engagement, create inbound links to the organisation’s website, and thus drive SEO.

Once the organisation has a good publication calendar in place, and social engagement and SEO have began to kick in, then it is the right time to expand in actions such as PR, Paid media, Offline (e.g. events) and Email campaigns.