In the Media & Entertainment (M&E) industry, building and enhancing your media infrastructure is often high-stakes, high-pressure, and every move counts. A solid content strategy is essential to reducing data storage costs.
Putting it into a sports analogy—which I love to do as I am a sports fan— it’s your game plan that leads the team to victory where you have your infrastructure on premises, partially or fully in the cloud. But what exactly does a content strategy entail, and how can it help address broadcasters’ performance and data storage cost concerns?
Much like a well-coordinated sports team, a well-crafted strategy not only attracts, engages, and retains your target audience, but also drives your business goals. Essentially, it delivers the right content to the right audience at the right time while maximizing your storage usage.
Here are five key steps to develop a strong content strategy tailored to your audience and content lifecycle:
First, read the room to define your audience.
Understanding your audience is the first step. For example, a news broadcast’s audience might include casual viewers, ardent news junkies, advertisers, influencers, partners, and the press. You need to conduct research and analyze engagement to gather insights into your audience’s demographics, interests, and pain points. This information will help you understand the content types, topics, and channels that will help you best reach your goals and reduce data storage costs. There are many simple ways to do this.
- Social Media Insights: Platforms provide detailed insights into audience demographics, engagement, and interests. Use polling features to quickly gather opinions.
- Website Analytics: Tools help understand visitor behavior, popular content, and user demographics.
- Viewership Data: Nielsen ratings and other systems can track which programs are most popular and among which demographics.
- Surveys and Focus Groups: Gather direct feedback from viewers to understand their preferences and pain points.
Second, use tailored tactics to score big with personalized content.
Once you lock in your audience, it’s time to bring your A-game with personalized content and data optimization techniques. Data analytics can reveal patterns in engagement and media performance. This helps create content that truly resonates with each audience segment, enhancing their overall experience. The result? Optimized content (and data) that lands with ALL audiences cutting down unnecessary costs by delivering what viewers and business partners really want through the right channels.
Review your existing content to determine what’s working as well as identify gaps and opportunities. Analyze quality and whether your content reflects what’s most important to your audience segments. Then, use that information to inform which direction you take next, such as the kinds of content and topics that are gaining traction, plus any content gaps and opportunities you discover. Don’t forget to streamline content creation with collaboration tools to ensure all team members are on the same page.
Third, reuse content for maximum impact and minimal waste.
A master playmaker knows how to utilize every player to maximum effect, ensuring no move is wasted. Similarly, for broadcasters, reusing content strategically can maximize impact, minimize waste and pave the way for cost effective data storage. Just as sports teams adapt their tactics to counter different opponents, your content strategy should be modular and adaptable. This lets you make precise changes to meet the needs of each unique audience without losing quality, accuracy, or compliance. Think of it as having versatile players who can switch positions seamlessly.
Identify the types of content to create and choose the best distribution channels based on your audience’s preferences and where they spend their time online. Experiment with different formats and channels, then measure their effectiveness before deciding on your ideal mix. Remember, it’s all about keeping the audience engaged.
Tailor content to different segments such as casual viewers, loyal watchers, news junkies, and social media influencers. This approach avoids redundancy and maximizes the impact of each content piece, much like a well-executed team strategy on the field.
With audience proliferation, content should resonate with diverse global demographics. Consider content that speaks directly to regional viewers, international audiences, and niche interest groups. To truly engage a global audience, you must adapt your content to suit the cultural norms, preferences, and sensitivities of different regions.
To maximize global reach, consider leveraging content delivery networks (CDNs). CDNs store cached versions of content on servers located across the world, helping to reduce latency and improve load times for different regions. Integrating CDNs into your content strategy can provide a smoother and more enjoyable viewing experience for global audiences.
Sports teams analyze past matches to identify successful strategies they can reuse. Broadcasters should do the same with their content. Look at historical pieces, cultural stories, educational segments, and narratives featuring heroes and villains. Utilize these elements in new ways to keep your content fresh and engaging.
Today’s audiences expect content to be available across multiple devices and platforms. By adopting a modular content strategy, you can simplify the complex task of delivering tailored content to diverse audiences without compromising on quality or compliance.
Fourth, an ounce of retention: Defining your storage tiers.
Modern software storage solutions allow businesses to build precisely what they need when they need it. This customization ensures companies can expand or contract their operations without sacrificing performance or incurring unnecessary costs, ultimately reducing their average cost of data storage.
Consider the game-changing release of Atlas (version 2.8), the M&E industry’s first composable software-defined storage platform. Atlas tailors the storage game plan to fit creative workflow requirements rather than just storage capacity. This enables clients to allocate their resources more strategically and only pay for what they need, while having the ability to scale-up (or down) as necessary.
When defining your storage tiers, what needs to be on the front lines? Establish a retention policy that allows you to move your data into a lower-cost tier as it becomes less relevant. Identify the content that needs to be readily accessible, closer to the creators, editors, and producers—your star players. Your retention policy will help you manage the team and control costs effectively.
A good strategy is to categorize content into ‘hot’ (frequently accessed) and ‘cold’ (infrequently accessed) tiers. Store hot data in higher-performance, more expensive storage, and cold data in lower-cost storage solutions to significantly cut down on storage expenses.
Just as celebrated players’ past glories still hold value, archived content can be monetized. Develop strategies to make money from this content, such as licensing deals or compilations of significant, memorable moments. Recaps or celebrations of an event’s history can turn a storage expense into a revenue stream.
Different groups within an organization each have unique needs and workflows. Flexible storage solutions should cater to these varying requirements effectively. Consider a modular architectural method that allows you to choose the components you need without being saddled with unnecessary features.
Often overlooked but crucial, scalability is critical in data storage. Ensuring data integrity and up-to-date information is paramount for business continuity, just as a well-developed youth system ensures a club’s future success. By mastering your storage game plan, you can ensure your team is always on top of its game, ready to adapt, and always aiming for victory.
Fifth, score big with cost-management tools.
Think of your content marketing strategy as a sports match. You’ve got your star players (audience personas), game strategies (relevant topics), playing field (distribution channels), and hard training (content creation). Now, it’s time to keep an eye on the score and make those winning adjustments.
Use analytics tools and native social media analytics to track your content’s performance. Adjust your game plan based on real-time data to stay ahead of the competition. AI tools act as your assistant coaches, offering a unified view of your content distribution across all channels—linear, digital, social media, streaming, and more.
And if you are leveraging cloud, regularly monitor your cloud storage usage and costs with analytics and reporting tools to ensure you stay within budget while maximizing efficiency. Proprietary and agnostic tools alike can help you evaluate the performance of your current content. Identify top-performing content types and use this data to guide future content creation.
The cloud technology landscape is always evolving with new features, pricing changes, and innovations. Staying informed about advancements allows you to achieve storage optimization, reduce storage costs, and improve performance.
A comprehensive content marketing strategy helps you allocate time, budget, and manpower more effectively. Knowing what type of content to produce and the best distribution platforms helps you focus on activities that offer the highest ROI.
Use data analytics and data optimization techniques to identify engagement patterns and content performance. Just as soccer teams use advanced technology to analyze player performance and optimize training schedules, leverage AI and machine learning tools to analyze data usage patterns and automate data lifecycle management policies. These tools can help you optimize storage usage by automatically moving data between tiers based on access patterns, further reducing costs.
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Treat your content strategy like a well-planned match to score big with cost- management tools and achieve lasting success. By following these steps, you can optimize your storage to drive your business goals.
Ready to revolutionize your content strategy? Contact us to see how our Atlas composable software-defined storage platform can help you achieve your business goals beyond expectations. Break boundaries. Be unlimited.
