 Hi there. Welcome back to my YouTube channel. This is Daniel Rosal here want to talk just for a few minutes today about what's become one of my most detested words in the English language is the word I have a very uncomfortable relationship with. And it's this word content. Now you may be thinking what's this guy talking about? Everybody's talking about content right now. And that's actually part of the reason that I have an issue with the word content. Now I realize I'm not the first person to talk about this. There are some really interesting blogs up there on the internet. There are some videos on YouTube. This won't be the first. Now I don't actually have an issue with some uses of content. Content marketing has become a pretty well-defined field. My problem with it from a marketing perspective is that it's a very, very vague and squishy term. Now the way I'm seeing it used at the moment, I just checked out a YouTube channel I discovered this morning, some funny sketches. And one of the comments was love your content. And that always makes me think, what is content? Why can't you just say love your videos? Even YouTube in their YouTube studio now has a button instead of videos. It says content. Now my issue basically from a marketing perspective, I talked about video audio text and how this is actually a brilliant era to be exploring different channels of delivery, different formats. So if you've traditionally just done blogging, you put blogs out there on the internet and you want to mix it up a bit, you want to start investigating, can you put out podcasts? Can you put out YouTube video, video blogs or videos? Then this is a great time to do that because it's never been easier to access these different formats. But if you want to do it well, you also need to do what I call honoring the format. Now what I mean by honoring the format is that let's say this, if you have a blog post and you want to convert that into a podcast, then ideally what you should do is take that text post and edit the script for audio delivery. You should have a person, a podcast editor, someone with experience in audio editing, ideally editing that recording just to polish it up, make sure the levels are right, all these things. If you just take your text post and get a text to speech bot to narrate it, the output is probably not going to be that great and not that list level. So at a very bare minimum, you're going to want to edit your written content in order to deliver it via audio, but you should do that. Now my big contention with marketing is that the content consumer of tomorrow, the consumers we're trying to reach today are going to expect that brand content, brand journalism, as it was once called, is going to be accessible however and wherever they want to consume it. So if they want to listen to a podcast in a gym, if your blog is not available as a podcast in audio format, you've just missed an opportunity to connect with the potential customer. If they're looking to watch video, they're in the back of a taxi flicking through YouTube and you don't have any video blogs. You've again reached missed a potential customer. So therefore right now it's kind of thought of as advantageous if brands can expand from text and into audio and video. Tomorrow it's going to be the norm. And if you are not leveraging these channels, you're going to be thought of as backward. However, in order to do this well, you need to once again, honor the format, whether you're producing audio or whether you're producing video, you need to understand what's unique about that. What are the advantages? What can you get across in video and audio that you can't get across in text? What are the limits? How are people expecting that content to be delivered? So when I hear about people saying, let's create content when I have conversations with clients about content marketing or thought leadership, I don't tend to use the word content for a deliberate reason. I've never described myself as a content writer. Now, at some point you do have to use it. It's a bit like walking into a store and asking for wheat slices instead of bread. No one's going to understand what you're talking about. Therefore, communication has failed, but I always encourage clients to look for replacements for the word content simply because the more descriptive you can be about what you're trying to create and why you're trying to create it, the more impactful it's going to be. You could be creating infographics. You could be creating persuasive blog posts for conversion. You could be creating audio podcasts to try to build up and humanize your brand voice. These are all different objectives brands currently have. But no, we're not just talking about throwing out content. That's really my sort of issue with it is that it's become this kind of, I don't use the word lazy, but surrogate, catch all for all forms of marketing was the idea that if we just make more content and push out more content, we're going to somehow get more leads. And there's already enough bad to mediocre content floating out there on the internet that that's not going to work. We've moved past a point of content saturation and as more and more content, audio, video, text continues to proliferate. There's going to be a crunch. There's only so many people in the world. That's the problem I see with all these AI tech AI content generators. The idea behind the premise is, well, let's more quickly create more content. The question is, well, you're going to be creating more content. Who's going to be reading this mediocre content created by AI bots? So the solution, in my opinion, right now is not, let's just create more content. Let's get more content out. There's going to be a crunch towards quality. And if you want to be on the right side of that crunch, then what you need to be doing is thinking about how can we create compelling products in audio and video that people are going to want to listen to and watch respectively. Thanks for watching. If you'd like to get more videos from me, follow this YouTube channel.