People say content is king. There have been multiple books written about it, and definitely a lot of blog posts, articles, and podcasts. Today, there’s no shortage of content or content creators. Here’s the thing about the content you have at your fingertips: you literally can learn anything you want on the Internet. You don’t have to go to school for it, you just have to put in the time, the research, and the work. Lots of it.

THERE’S A NEW KING IN TOWN

Ask me, and I’ll tell you content is no longer king. Instead, it’s just available, it’s everywhere, it’s there. If you’re a content creator and you produce material what’s more important than the content you’re creating is the context you deliver it in.

Let’s say you’ve got an end user, a viewer, or a listener. What you need to do as a content creator is deliver that piece of content to them with focused context. What that means is, whether it’s a Facebook ad or an email campaign or digital advertising campaign, you need to create your buyer persona and deliver your ads to them at the right time, at the right place, and with the right call-to-action.

CONTEXT IS THE NEW RULER

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This is where context is important. You can be on Facebook and as you’re scrolling through, you’re seeing everybody does XYZ, and there’s no shortage of service providers and no shortage of people making “this” particular product or offering “this” specific service. Content isn’t an issue at all.

What is an issue, though, is connecting to that consumer in a relational way that makes sense to them. It goes back to timing and location and the delivery method. So, if you’ve got a product that’s geared toward, say young people, like really young people, and you’re advertising on Facebook, but you’re trying to reach a 17-year-old and try to sell sneakers to them, Facebook’s not the place to do it, because there’s no context there. 17-year-old kids aren’t using Facebook like they used to.

 

DELIVER CONTENT IN WAYS THAT MAKE SENSE

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Instead, what you need to do as a brand or a company, is develop a social media marketing strategy around something like Snapchat and Instagram and deliver your content with context on those social media platforms that are more suitable for your intended audience. If you’re doing paid ads, it’s the same thing: creating messaging strategies that speak to that person, that give context to what you’re doing, and delivering it at the right time at the right place on the right platform.

So that’s kind of the big difference between content and context… 

People say content is king, but that’s no longer true. Context is king. 

If you have average content but you can nail the context, you will win. Somebody who has the best content but doesn’t know how to deliver it at the right time to the right person? They’ll continue to fail.

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