The November content panic and why your brief deserves better

There’s a particular kind of content brief that seems to appear every November.

It usually arrives with a certain urgency, a vague sense that somebody should probably have thought about this a few months ago, and instructions that can be boiled down to something along the lines of “Can we get something up before the end of the month?”

I’ve seen variations of this brief plenty of times over the years.

Sometimes there’s a topic attached. Sometimes there’s a keyword. Occasionally, there’s even a rough idea of what the finished piece should achieve.

We’re not always that lucky.

The interesting thing is that the content produced in this mad dash will probably go live sometime in March.

It might still be sitting on the website the following November, too, quietly representing the business to anyone who happens to stumble across it.

By that point, the person who commissioned it may have moved on to three other priorities, the original brief will be buried somewhere in an email inbox and nobody will remember why the article was written in quite the way it was.

The article, however, will still be there. Content has a habit of outliving the circumstances that created it.

And that’s where things get interesting.

Content has a rather long shelf life

One thing I’ve noticed is how often businesses approach it as though it’s a short-term marketing campaign.

There’s a deadline, a budget, a publication date and a vague expectation that something positive will happen once the thing is published.

Then everyone moves on to the next item on the marketing calendar.

I understand the thinking. Advertising works like that. You run a campaign, measure the results, close it down and move on. There’s a reasonably clear beginning and end.

Website content is a different proposition.

A decent article can sit on your site for years, attracting visitors, answering questions, supporting your sales process and generally earning its keep without requiring much attention.

A not-so-decent article can sit there for exactly the same amount of time, too. It just won’t be earning quite as much.

I’ve come across plenty of older content that makes you wonder what the original thinking was.

The writer might have done a perfectly reasonable job with the information available. The problem is that the information available wasn’t particularly useful in the first place.

This is one of the reasons I think the brief deserves more attention than it often gets.

You’re commissioning something that could represent your business for years. Giving it twenty minutes of hurried thought and hoping for the best seems a slightly odd way to approach that.

What a November brief tends to look like

There’s a familiar pattern to these last-minute requests.

The audience is described in fairly broad terms. “Small businesses”, “marketing professionals” or, my personal favourite, “everyone who might be interested”.

The objective is usually to get something published. There’s a keyword somewhere in the instructions, perhaps a couple of competitor links and a request to make the content sound like the rest of the website.

That last one is particularly interesting because websites aren’t always brilliant examples of the tone and personality a business wants to convey.

Sometimes they’re a collection of pages written by different people over several years, with varying degrees of editorial supervision.

Telling a writer to match that can be a little like asking a decorator to recreate the previous homeowner’s questionable wallpaper choices.

Of course, a professional writer will get on with it. That’s what we’re paid to do. We’ll research the subject, make sense of the available information, find an angle and produce something that reads reasonably well.

It might even be very good.

But there’s a limit to what anyone can do when the thinking behind a piece hasn’t happened.

Without a clear audience, a useful objective or any real sense of what the business wants to communicate, the writer is left making decisions that probably should have been made before the brief landed in their inbox.

The result is often perfectly competent content. It covers the subject, includes the relevant terminology and ticks the SEO boxes.

It also has a habit of sounding remarkably similar to the other twenty articles on the same subject.

The missing ingredient is usually an opinion

If there’s one thing I’ve found makes a difference between content that gets the job done and content that people actually remember, it’s having something to say.

Not necessarily something controversial. Nobody needs to start an argument about the correct way to write a product description.

Just a point of view.

It’s surprisingly easy to produce an article that explains a subject without adding anything particularly interesting to the conversation.

You can research the topic, pull together all the usual talking points, organise them under some sensible headings and end up with something that’s technically sound.

I’ve written enough content over the years to know that getting all the information into the right order is only part of the job.

The more interesting question is what you think about the subject.

• What’s your experience?
• What do you see happening in your industry?
• Is there something customers consistently misunderstand?
• Have you noticed a problem that other businesses seem to overlook?

Those are the details that give an article some personality and make it worth reading.

They also give a writer something to work with.

A brief that simply says “Write about the benefits of content marketing” leaves an enormous amount of ground to cover.

A brief that explains why your business approaches content marketing differently, what you’ve learned from working with clients and which misconceptions you’d like to challenge gives the writer an actual starting point.

There’s a world of difference between the two. There’s also a good chance the second article will be considerably more interesting.

November is actually a good time to get your content sorted

I’m not suggesting that every business needs to spend November locked in a room discussing its content strategy.

There are probably more enjoyable ways to spend the month, and Christmas decorations are already appearing in shops, so there’s quite enough to contend with.

But if you’re thinking about commissioning content before the end of the year, there’s an opportunity here.

Rather than rushing to get something published simply because there’s a gap in the content calendar, it’s worth spending a little time working out what you actually want that content to achieve.

In my experience, a useful brief doesn’t need to be a twenty-page document with enough background information to qualify as a small novel.

It needs to establish a few things:

• Who you’re talking to. A reasonably clear picture of the intended reader makes a huge difference to the language, examples and level of detail.
• Why you’re publishing the piece. Are you trying to attract new visitors, explain a complicated subject, support a product or service, or demonstrate your expertise?
• What you want to say. This is where your experience, opinions and knowledge come into play. Give the writer something that makes the article yours.
• How it should sound. A couple of examples and some explanation of your preferred tone are much more useful than a blanket instruction to “make it engaging”.
• Anything that matters. Particular points to include, claims to avoid, terminology to use or information the writer needs to understand.

That’s usually enough to get a productive conversation started.

A good writer will ask questions where something needs clarifying and some of the most useful ideas can emerge during that discussion.

It’s also a lot easier to do this when nobody is breathing down your neck asking whether the article will be ready by Friday.

Think about the article you’ll still have next November

The thing about content commissioned in a hurry is that the deadline eventually disappears but the content doesn’t.

You might forget about the article a week after publication. Your marketing team might move on to a new campaign. The person who originally requested it might even have left the company.

Meanwhile, someone searching Google will find it six months later. A potential customer might read it before getting in touch. Another business might share it with a colleague.

They won’t know it was commissioned in a November panic. They’ll simply assume it represents the quality of your business.

That’s quite a responsibility for something that started life as a hurried email with a subject line containing the words “Quick content request”.

I’ve spent more than 20 years working with businesses on their content and one thing remains consistent.

The quality of the finished piece is heavily influenced by the thinking that goes into it before anyone starts writing.

A little more time spent getting the brief right can save a lot of time correcting, rewriting or quietly wishing you’d approached things differently later.

And if you’re going to invest in content, it makes sense to give it a decent chance of doing something useful.

If you’ve got content on the agenda and would rather have someone else take care of the thinking, writing and editing, get in touch.

I’m always happy to have a chat about what you’re trying to achieve. No lengthy briefing document required. At least, not for the first conversation.