Your must-have content check-list
Your must-have content check-list, our first AI video, what colour is a tiger, and a great example of how to challenge your audience
To give yourself the best chance at effectively communicating with your audience, you need to pay attention to the science of publishing.
Before you plan and publish your content, go through the following checklist.
Check you have covered each point, and crucially, that each step is aligned with the next.
Almost all mistakes people and organisations make when communicating or publishing content are due to a failure to properly address one of the following:
TARGET AUDIENCE
You must know who you are telling a story to. Ask yourself: who is your audience? Who are you trying to reach and why?
EDITORIAL BRIEF
Do you have a strapline? This doesn’t need to be audience-facing but you should capture the overall ambition of your editorial endeavour, put as simply as possible. This can set the tone for your output, and provide clarity around what your content and stories are hoping to achieve.
EDITORIAL CONTENT
Before you begin, think about what you are commissioning, from yourself or others. The stories, formats or campaigns you are planning to produce.
It’s important you know what type of stories you are telling, the volume and why you are publishing your content.
Once you’ve established the format, decide how to best structure your story, rather than listing information.
STAFF
Consider the personnel required to produce your content. These may be internal staff, freelancers, partners, external consultants, or your audience creating user-generated content.
Stories can’t be told without storytellers.
You need the requisite number of staff to produce your expected content output. They also need to be skilled storytellers, able to contribute to the required media.
BUDGET
Content production takes time and resource, which usually translates into budget. It’s crucial to know the resources required and available for storytelling.
PLATFORMS AND CONTENT PRODUCTION SYSTEMS
Where and when will your story publish, and which platform can best reach your audience? You need to know this before you create your content. You also need to know how to use any content production system used to make stories and publish them to your platform.
PUBLICATION SCHEDULE
How often will you publish your content? Audiences appreciate knowing when they can expect to hear from you, and how often. As a content publisher, you will also need to know your schedule so you can plan resources and budget.
PROMOTIONAL ABILITY
You must let audiences know your story exists. You cannot expect audiences to actively seek out and find your content. You must promote it, so have a plan for how that will happen.
PUBLISHING TARGETS
Set publishing targets or metrics you can use to gauge performance. Unless you measure the impact on your audiences, you will never learn, improve or know if you have achieved your publishing goal. So will you check how your story will be received?
When you communicate, start by going through this editorial checklist, and plan not only what you want to say, but how you will say it, and how audiences will receive your message. If you don’t, you’re setting yourself or business up to fail.
For example, you may create engaging content but publish it to the wrong audience, or on the wrong platform.
A marketing department may conceive a wonderful campaign, but fail to allocate enough budget to its creation and execution.
Or leaders may fail to provide their teams with the training and equipment needed to produce the content they want to send clients.
A company may produce an informative conference report, but not address how to promote and distribute it to delegates.
Or set up a social media team, but not create a publication schedule, and plan ahead how often they need to publish to be heard by audiences.
You can learn more about this in our Factual Storytelling School module The Science Of Publishing.
First AI video
Remember a few weeks back, when we said this:
“A stunning new way to produce animated video may be just around the corner.
Pika.art has just announced Pika 1.0, a new tool that uses AI to turn your ideas into visually astounding videos. Pika converts text to video, images to video, and even video to different video, as well as allowing users to resize videos and expand their canvas.”
Well, the tool is already available to selected users, and we at the Factual Storytelling School have had a play.
Above and below are three short animated videos, produced by Pika, generated in JUST MINUTES. We asked Pika to create animated clips of Pixar characters as storytellers, using a typewriter, a hurricane at sea, and a tiger.
Keep subscribing, for more future updates about how we can help you use such remarkable new technology to tell your story, and that of your organisation.
What colour is a tiger?
Which leads us to another related question: what colour is a tiger?
To you, a tiger likely appears orange. But to a tiger’s audience, a tiger does not appear orange. To a tiger’s natural audience, prey mammals such as deer and antelope, a tiger appears a very different colour - it actually appears green.
To find out more, and why this insight is so important, explore our Factual Storytelling School course module Know Who You Are Talking To, which covers all aspects of how you should think about audiences.
Challenge your audience
Finally, we want to highlight a brilliant marketing campaign, that should be an example to us all. For what is says, but also how it says it.
Not only does it convey an important public health message, but it’s a good example of how you should consider using counter-intuitive content, editorial contrast, juxtaposition and inversion in your message design and communication.
Each is related to the other.
Counter-intuitive content is self-explanatory, but one of the best ways to engage audiences is to start your content by sharing an insight that challenges your audience’s world view.
Think about how you might add editorial contrast to your designs. A really effective way to do this is to use imagery that stands in contrast to your words to make a point, or in contrast to other images.
Juxtaposition is the placing of two things near to one another with contrasting effect - in this case the images of happier-looking people being identified as those actually silently suffering depression.
Inversion, is the concept of challenging your audience’s preconceptions, communicating the opposite of what they may expect.
We cover these within our lessons on Types Of Engaging Introduction, Techniques For Creating Content and The Importance of Contrast.
When you use any of the above, you will stimulate your readers or viewers into paying you more attention.
All credit for the images, design and campaign goes to The German Depression Aid and Suicide Prevention Foundation and its Germany-wide network German Alliance against Depression. Read more about their work and campaign here.
The website is in German. But here’s another tip: use the web browser Microsoft Edge, and it will automatically convert the website into English (Google Chrome will also translate websites, if you click Translate to the right of the address bar, as will Safari if you click the Translate button in the url bar.)