Creative teams are on the hook for supporting a content landscape that gets more massive and complicated every day. But in the rush to efficiently and cost-effectively create content for dozens of channels and sometimes millions of customers, Creative Teams often feel like they’re forced to sacrifice creativity and quality. And without a shared idea of what “quality” means, the waters get even murkier.

In his presentation, Matthew outlines 4 “Big Shifts” that need to happen so that creative teams can produce content that is transformative, useful, and engaging.

1. Great content is a product, not a commodity. Teams need to start by defining what it is, exactly, that they want their content to do for them. If the goal is simply to generate a large amount of leads, then the content is simply a transactional commodity – prospects receive a whitepaper in exchange for their contact information. While this approach may generate a large volume of leads, those leads are not necessarily going to be high quality.

However, if the goal is to generate high quality leads and market engagement by providing content that has intrinsic value to customer, then teams must begin to think of content as product.

2. You create great content with questions, not answers. Start with these three questions:

1. What are you trying to communicate? (Message)
2. When and where will the message be most valuable? (Distribution)
3. How do we deliver our message in the most valuable way? (Execution)

Once these questions have been answered, you can continue to develop your content plan by identifying the Target Audience (Message + Distribution), Form Factor (Distribution + Execution), and Story (Message + Execution).

3. You have to prioritize creativity, not efficiency. At this point in the presentation Matthew took a moment to remind the inMomentum attendees that this process should be happening for every piece of content, He pointed out that if you start with a focus on quality and creativity, you can always still achieve efficiency. But, if you start with the primary focus on efficiency, you can’t guarantee quality. Matthew emphasized that process has to be updated to accommodate quality and creativity-led content. Matthew recommends following the “5 Ds”

1. Ditch the waterfall
2. Define
3. Develop
4. Design
5. Deliver

4. Content is customer experience, not marketing. Modern customers (including future customers) are constantly coming in contact with your brand, to the point that customer experience is as important, if not more important, than the actual product. For this reason, content should not be an afterthought. Content is your customer experience; it is the interface through which customer experience your brand.

You can read more from Matthew on Medium and connect with him on LinkedIn.

Elise Hauser is a product and content marketer with a passion for telling brand stories. She has produced inMotionNow’s annual In-House Creative Management Report for 3 years, webinars, content sessions for major industry events reaching audiences of 1,000+, and of course, countless blog posts. When Elise isn’t writing about the marketing and creative industry at inMotionNow she is teaching economics and hanging out with her cat, Tucker, at her home in Raleigh, NC.