[VIDEO] Future Proof Your Enterprise Content Program with Advice From SAP’s Amisha Gandhi

Keeping up with the pace of change in how consumers access information is no simple task. Whether you work at a five person company, or a Fortune 50 tech giant, your customers are insanely distracted. By the time you finish reading this paragraph, nearly 3 million Google searches will be performed globally. The sheer volume of content being shared in a single minute on the internet is both staggering, and growing at light speed.

In response, some marketers are turning to artificial intelligence and new technology, while others are doubling down on high quality content and process. In our own content planning research, we found that 72% of the most effective marketers report they have a thoroughly documented content planning process.

But drastic changes in content are just part of the broader digital transformation picture. According to many analysts, as much as 75% of the S&P 500 will be replaced by 2027 due to digital incompetence and an inability to adapt to changing technology.

Let that sink in for a minute. By 2027, 375 huge companies could go the way of the candlestick maker.

As a software provider and consultancy, SAP sits at at the center of helping organizations adapt and survive digital transformation. In fact, a full 87% of Forbes global 2000 companies lean on SAP to enhance their software and process footprints.

While helping organizations adapt to this digital evolution is certainly a tall order, we found SAP’s  Amisha Gandhi very much up to the challenge. Amisha is the Senior Director of Influencer Marketing at SAP where she helps connect the dots between content, influencer marketing, and digital strategy. We were keen on finding out how her team deals with the many challenges we face today in content, technology and much more.

In the following video, she weighs in on how to learn from previous campaigns, listen to your target audience, recycle social media content, and build bite-sized content pieces that draw in an audience to a major content asset. She brought a wealth of knowledge to our conversation in everything from influencer marketing to content repurposing.

Enjoy!

Ready to go big with content planning and strategy? We just published a free content marketing strategy guide featuring insights from 12 top content professionals that will help you build and refine an effective content marketing strategy. If you’re ready to build out your process, this is a great place to start.

And for those of you who didn’t get enough of Amisha in the video feature, here are 3 additional takeaways from our conversation.

Combine Emerging Content Types FTW

“Video content can be very engaging. Interactive content can be very engaging. But if you bring those two together? That’s more powerful altogether.”

As content professionals, we’re usually asking ourselves what kind of content does our audience really crave? Maybe instead of reaching for a single silver bullet format, we should take advice from Amisha and combine two, or even three emerging content types. Just like Starsky and Hutch, eggs and bacon, milk and cookies, or even Han and Chewy, combining two complementary content types can result in magnetic appeal for your content program.

And with that, we now have a good reason to drool over this…

Here are some tasty combinations to test out with your next content initiative.

Blog & Audio

Ever arrived on a blog post to find that the author has included an embedded audio version of the same text? For some of us on the go, having the audio option means we can listen instead of read whenever it’s convenient. Ultimately, it’s the same content delivered in two fashions. Give it a shot by recording an audio read through of your blog content and embedding it for your audience right in the post. It doesn’t have to be perfect, but it will increase your user experience dramatically.

Interactive & Video

We all spend hours in front of screens each day. But the average static web experience has grown a bit boring for many consumers. The norm for nearly any popular website is to have at least a handful of videos available for viewers to interact with. The next time you create an interactive ebook, microsite, or online calculator, consider pairing it up with an explainer video or animated series. This will add a real punch to the experience and keep users interacting with your experience longer.

Social & Live Event

For many B2B brands, nothing can replace meeting prospects, customers and colleagues in person. It should come as no surprise then that combining social media content with your live event experience can be powerful in bringing cohesion to your content experience. Consider covering your next industry event by sending someone who is dedicated to capturing the experience via Twitter or Facebook Live.

Don’t Rule Out Virtual or Augmented Reality

“It’s immersive, interactive, and of high value. Now people can experience your product maybe even before they touch it, which is powerful. If you’re not selling something tangible, you can still deliver an experience through VR or AR.”

Virtual and augmented reality seem far fetched for many organizations. With the likes of Google and Sony Playstation leading the charge with gaming, AR and VR can appear to be for entertainment’s sake, and little else. But according to Amisha, we shouldn’t ignore this technology. It may soon play a big role in everyday life for your customers, which means the time is now to get familiar with the technology.

Here are a couple low-barrier-to-entry projects you could try.

Build a YouTube 360 VR Experience

Instead of going all in on building a VR application or massive piece of content, start with networks like YouTube that are already accommodating 360 degree video. Buy a 360 degree VR camera, shoot a relevant piece of content, and test it out! Whether you offer a 360 degree factory tour, or an executive interview doesn’t matter. The main things is to shoot something relevant and get comfortable with this new video technology.

Also note that YouTube 360, or even Facebook 360 videos are viewable as regular content, so you won’t be jeopardizing the experience for anyone who doesn’t own 3D glasses.

Whiteboard Your Future AR Experience Ideas

While creating VR videos is well within reach for the average content creator, Augmented Reality requires some additional coding skills. This technology is quite literally compositing images onto reality via your smartphone, which is tricky to say the least. Companies like Ikea are using the technology to allow customers to superimpose furniture in their homes. L’Oréal, on the other hand is using augmented reality to help consumers see what their hair will look like in different styles. What would your customers want from augmented reality? Have some fun and jot down a few moonshot ideas.

Don’t Evaluate Influencers Based on Their Number of Followers

“It doesn’t make sense to categorize influencers into macro, micro or celebrity influencers. An influencer is an influencer. Don’t minimize someone by calling them ‘micro’ when they might be reaching an incredibly engaged audience for your brand.”

As influencer marketing becomes a more common tactic among content professionals who struggle with low organic reach, understanding the nuances of this discipline takes time. And understanding the true value of target influencers to your audience is the first step.

Influencer marketing is not synonymous with attaching your brand to someone who is internet famous.

As Amisha points out, influencer marketing can be a hugely valuable asset, especially when co-creating content with influencers, or leaning on their subject matter expertise.

But as you think about which influencers matter to your brand, you’ll need benchmarks to evaluate whether they would be good to partner with. And please, don’t go after anyone who is internet famous, unless you are a high end fashion brand.

Instead, try the following:

Reach

As Amisha brings to our attention, having influencers with millions of followers will not solve your problems. The more important aspect to reach is whether those target influencers are reaching your audience. Whether they have 500, or 5 million followers, perform significant research to understand whether those followers are the ones you also want to reach.

Resonance

Your brand and organization have values, a style of content, and subject matter that should resonate with executives, and customers. It’s important to evaluate whether your target influencers resonate with that message, and align in at least a few areas. If the influencer simply reaches your target audience, but takes a completely different line or opinion than your brand, you won’t be a match.

Relevance

The final litmus test when it comes to selecting influencers is to gauge whether your influencers are relevant to your shared or desired audience. If they have thousands of followers but none of those followers are engaging with their content, they likely don’t offer the relevance their audience is after. Seek influencers who are highly relevant to your audience. Relevance can be directly correlated with how engaged that influencers audience is with their content.

Are You Ready to Future Proof Your Content Planning?

Thank you for joining us in our video journey over the past several weeks. We hope you found this series as insightful and helpful as we did in producing it! You can also gain full access to the entire Future Proof video interview series for more insights from some of today’s top content marketers.