You want to produce amazing content, unleash your creativity, write blog posts that change the world, edit videos..but you have little or no time. Instead, you’re probably copy-pasting text from one box to the other. Updating your website in ten different places with the same information. Painstakingly browsing the interwebs to find a few good articles to stick in your company newsletter. Hours. Wasted.

No more! There are ways to simplify the content creation process on a tiny budget in most companies. And if you’re a writer, then there are robots that will probably do your job soon. Read about that further down.

1. Content Ideation: quickly finding great ideas that can be commissioned

You need ideas in order to successfully keep your content platform or newsletter current with relevant and interesting pieces. Lots of them. Here is one simple way of capturing ideas in a structured way:

– Set up a Slack channel where anyone with access can simply post a link to an interesting article that might inspire your own content.

– Connect the article data from that Slack channel to a spreadsheet via a Zapier integration. You need to define a trigger that sends an article from Slack to your spreadsheet, for example by staring them.

– Write the elevator pitch along with the Slack link. Why are you posting this?

– Set up weekly or bi-weekly editorial meetings and go through each idea in the spreadsheet. Decide what to do with them. Commission as a blog post? Repost as a third-party post? Create a video or a podcast episode based on it? Do something visual? Not do anything?

– Create an account with Feedly, an RSS-reader. It has a free version that lets you find content sources related to whatever industry you’re in, and automatically add them to your feeds, so that you don’t need to manually check every single source to find inspiration.

– If you don’t use Slack, you can set up a simple online form where people can enter their ideas, a link and their elevator pitch. This form should also be connected to a spreadsheet.

2. Content Creation: do you want to be a thought leader or use natural language processing?

For straight-forward stories that don’t require an analysis, publishers and companies are already turning to AI writers. Some newsrooms are using machine learning tools to do some of the news gathering tasks traditionally done by humans. Forbes have an advanced Content Management System called Bertie, The Washington Post have Heliograf and Bloomberg have developed their Cyborg.

San Francisco-based company OpenAi have trained an unsupervised language model to produce paragraphs of text. Like this one here below.

Technology has come a long way, and if you want to produce short news snippets that are straight-forward, or fill your blog with content, it is definitely worth exploring the options of natural language processing.

If you want to become a thought leader and create more high quality content, then tools such as BuzzSumo, Crowdtangle and HeadlineAnalyzer will help you refine and target your content thanks to data from thousands of websites and influencers.

If you don’t have your own writers at hand, consider paying freelance journalists to help you create at least a backlog of content. You can find cheap and good writers via UpWork or Facebook groups. You should also comb through your network of clients, contacts and former employees. Ask them to write an article for your platform, give them a specific topic and angle or ask them to pitch ideas to you. Some might do this for free, and you are on your way to building your own army of content contributors.

If you don’t have your own writers at hand, consider paying freelance journalists to help you create at least a backlog of content. You can find cheap and good writers via UpWork or Facebook groups. You should also comb through your network of clients, contacts and former employees. Ask them to write an article for your platform, give them a specific topic and angle or ask them to pitch ideas to you. Some might do this for free, and you are on your way to building your own army of content contributors.

3. Content Curation: syndicate and repost

Your blog will grow only if it follows these four basic criteria;

– It features interesting content

– It is regularly updated with fresh content

– Written posts are SEO-optimized

– Content is promoted on social media

The first two criteria are the most time-consuming. Unless you have a big content marketing budget and lots of writers and video editors on your team, it’s not going to be easy to generate only interesting content and produce lots of it, all the time.

That’s where content curation and syndication come in as your knights in shining armor. Keep your website dynamic and fresh by automatically pulling in carefully curated articles from third-party sources.Only display the headline, featured image, and the meta description, linking to the original article, to not violate copyright. Once your developers have installed this, you can either set to auto-publish every time your third-party source publishes something new, or you can moderate the content in the CMS before publishing it.

You can take it one step further by identifying possible content partners. Reach out to them and set up a content syndication agreement: we get yours, and you get ours. Aspire to have agreements in place to fully repost—copy-paste basically—their articles or videos on your platform, linking back to their website, and vice versa. As long as the canonical URL is set correctly, you will gain more content without having to write it, and publish your content more widely on respected platforms.

4. Content Promotion: Make social media scheduling as easy as possible

I have seen many teams still use elaborate spreadsheets or project management tools to schedule, update and keep track of any social media activity. Whilst it’s good to have a general content plan around any campaign, event, or launch, I wouldn’t recommend it for your general social media scheduling.

Don’t worry too much around timing – even if you publish something at 9am your time to Facebook, you don’t know when it will reach the feeds of your audiences. Same thing with Twitter and LinkedIn. Instead, keep the social engines fed, dig around your archives, and re-promote content that did well, or link to third-party sources. On social media, it matters more to be relevant and to build your unique brand voice and message, than being strict about publishing only your own stuff.

Use scheduling and analytics tools like Buffer and HootSuite, that both have free versions. You can even set up a feed between your CMS or website to pull in the metadata of your published content automatically, so that you can manage social posts solely from your tools, rather than having to copy-paste.

And abandon your scheduling spreadsheet!

5. Content Team: Tight workflows and processes

Apart from tools, you also need to have a clearly defined workflow in your content team. By streamlining the process of ideation, creation, curation, and promotion, you will save significant amounts of time. Don’t have too many cooks in the kitchen, set clear goals and deadlines, and aim to have regular meetings and a regular content output.

Building in as many integrations, automated workflows, and streamlined processes will save you and your team a lot of time when creating content for your platform. Everytime you sit with a repetitive task of copy-pasting, start searching for tools that could do that for you.

It will give you quality time to focus on growing your brand and your audience instead, generating more leads, more readers, and more fans.

THE BEST IS YETI COME

One Sunday morning, lonely and coveting a friend’s LEGO Yeti that had stolen her heart, Chrissy found a consoling thought: at least she wasn’t as lonely as a yeti, growing up alone, with no one to help it find its way. She found herself thinking of her childhood — spent in the company of books and of never fitting in — and her heart became full. She went home, took to her desk, and did what she knew best — writing stories. A story about a young, sweet yeti, alone in the Arctic snows, embarking on a quest to find himself.

The LEGO yeti had belonged to Teresa Ong, then chief illustrator at PaperplaneCo. Often feeling as shy and as awkward as Chrissy had created Norman to be, the story of the bumbling yeti tugged at her heart. She brought out her pencil and inks, and putting her head together with Chrissy’s, sketched and painted in painstaking, delightful detail, the story of  The Abominable Norman.

Panel by panel, 243 frames of childlike imagination and artistry brought Norman’s journey to life. Adorable and instantly relatable, Norman found his way into libraries, online stores, and children’s book festivals, and ultimately into the hearts of the young and the young at heart.

While Norman’s story ended there, PaperplaneCo’s had just begun.

The digital economy had arrived. Companies were looking for storytellers, someone who would find a way to cut through the noise and help them speak to their customers’ hearts. It was SAP who we first worked with, and as word grew, more followed.

Just like Norman, PaperplaneCo too has been on a journey of discovery, finding meaning in the relationships we’ve built with our clients, and the customer relationships we’ve helped them build.

Every story requires change to move the plot along. Change is what keeps the readers—as well as the characters—on their toes.

The PaperplaneCo story is no exception. We are on the brink of change, but before we look ahead, let’s revisit the past to understand what led us here. 

Stories for a New Generation of Children

PaperplaneCo was born shortly after the iPad in 2011.  We were so excited by its potential that we built a business around it.

What we saw in this new medium was an opportunity to create stories that read, and played, like games and would encourage kids to fall in love with reading again.

Our first products were interactive storybooks designed from the ground up for the iPad. They told tales of quirky and unique characters, beautifully illustrated, with animation and interaction woven through the pages. We embedded mini games throughout each story to work with, instead of distracting from, the storyline.  We brought each story to life with colour, sound and play.

PaperplaneCo quickly grew into a full-fledged business. We released four story apps in our first two years, all of them made it to the iTunes’ New & Noteworthy, with one story making it to the Top Ten charts.  

Stories for a New Generation of Enterprise

At the time, “storytelling” as an approach to marketing was also gaining momentum within enterprise.  As our reputation for storytelling began to grow, so did requests to take on commercial commissions.

There was substantial demand for our brand of storytelling based on truth, authenticity and human insight.  Social media was changing the marketing landscape. Brands were being held accountable for their claims. Customers were finding their voice and for the first time, brands were compelled to have dialogues instead of monologues, with their customers. 

Forward-thinking companies were responsive of this shift and started to tune their communication accordingly.

Prior to PaperplaneCo, Chrissy Lim, our founder, had been working with software giant SAP on enterprise mobility initiatives.  They also began to commission us for corporate storytelling. One of the first videos they commissioned was designed to move the conversation away from the practicalities of what their technology could do, to how it could help their customers.  The video was called “Connections” and you can read the impact story here. SAP still play the video to this day.

From Things to People

One of the reasons the SAP video “Connections” was so successful was because we shifted the conversation from things to people. This shift was fundamental. Traditional advertising had been all about things. Things that would make up for deficiencies in our audience. They weren’t good-looking enough. Thin enough. Successful enough. And this thing would fix it. 

This ad is a classic!

Today, our clients have conversations with their customers. Sure, they still talk about their products and services. They always will. The difference is: their messages don’t patronise people. They can’t get away with it anymore.

“Connections” also recognised another fundamental shift: customers weren’t a homogenous group of people with the same needs, desires and characteristics.  They were individual and unique, and expected to be treated as such. 

We learned so much from this experience and will always honour our first clients – Jamie, Nicholas and Johann –  as well as the agency partners we collaborated with – Possible Worldwide – for the courage to take this chance with us.

The Ten Commandments of Storytelling

In the last ten years, we have started dozens of conversations that connect brands with their audience for organisations like Magento, The World Bank, Bayer, Ping An and Clear.

We’ve come to realise that there are 10 Commandments of Storytelling based on the founding principle of having honest conversations with your audience:

Be Real
Be Human
Be Relevant
Don’t Be Boring
Be The Expert
Respect Your Audience
Feel Their Pain
Solve the Problem
Keep It Simple
Prove It

We’ll explore these principles in detail in a future post but take our word for it – when we stick to these 10 Commandments, our messages hit home.

From Starting to Sustaining Conversations

We’re fortunate to have great clients and relationships that are very collaborative. We’ve created so many wonderful stories together, and started some great conversations with their customers.

But relationships aren’t built over a single conversation. Understanding your customer enough to start an engaging conversation with him/her is just the first step.  To create a lasting connection, the conversation needs to be sustained over time because what your customer needs changes over time.

We’ve all heard of omnichannel and customer experience (CX).  CX is not about closing a sale faster or at a lower cost. It’s about creating value for that customer in a way that feels personal and relevant. It’s about being helpful, being useful and being of service.

This is often a moving target since customers don’t stand still. They are inundated with information coming from every device and media source. That’s why we think it’s important to tune in to what they need at a specific point in time, and address it then and there.  

Every touchpoint is a stepping stone towards building a lasting relationship, and we help by creating meaningful content every step of the way.

The Importance of Relationships

Over time, we’ve found that there are certain values that resonate. Long-term relationship building is at the top of that list. It doesn’t matter if it’s between client and customer, or client and agency, or agency and employee.  We’re happier in long-term relationships.

Research agrees – acquiring a new customer can cost between five to twenty-five times more than retaining an existing customer.

We’ve always worked as an extension of our clients’ companies. We are partners. We are invested in their success.  Just as we believe that brands exist to serve their customers, we believe that our purpose is to be of service to our client first and foremost, and their company by extension. 

We serve people, not companies.

We feel the same way about our creative partners too. We are invested in their success because we firmly believe that a great business is built on the happiness of the people who support it. We strive to provide our partners with security, community, purpose and mutual growth.  In return, they invest their genius in the work. And it shows.

You can learn more about our values and our team on our new website.

A New Chapter: Creating Content for Effective Customer Journeys

Telling great stories will always be close to our heart and this will never change.  But a tale is only as good as its plot, so we’ve added new products and services that will enable us to tell better, more meaningful stories.

We have designed a new Customer Journey mapping workshop to uncover new pathways to your commercial goals and identify the stories that matter to your audience. Using proprietary tools and an innovative whiteboard game, we bring company departments together and break communication silos down with play. 

We conduct content audits (think mystery shopping for content) across your customer journey for a specific audience segment to identify gaps that need to be plugged.

Then we take these insights and craft narratives that illuminate your brand by connecting your purpose to your customer’s. 

Using powerful, visual storytelling techniques, we bring this narrative to life in magical ways that will delight customers across any channel and any format. 

Finally, we continue working with our clients to track progress, learn, and grow towards repeatable, measurable success.

A New Crew

Saving the best for last – we also welcome a new core team of wonderfully talented individuals, all experts in their field, to serve and inspire the companies that we work with.

We believe in hybrid vigour and the excellence that diversity and open innovation brings.  We have 27 partners from 15 countries with a 46/54 % male/female split across a global value chain.

We don’t believe in hierarchies and are building a new workflow that will place power in the hands of those closest to the job, instead of those closest to the top.

All this means a nimble, incredibly agile, happy and fulfilled workforce. 

Because the happier we are, the better we are.

We look forward to introducing all of you personally to the team, and working on many more exciting projects to come!