Content Flow: The “Melodic” Fix for Your “Broken” Content Marketing Strategy
by Simon Penson
In a world now overflowing with ‘content,’ standing out is critical to breaking through.
And while almost all digital marketers are aware of the challenge that presents, the solution chosen simply extenuates the very issue it was 
designed to fix. Unfortunately, too many people see the answer to standing out and achieving reach as becoming a ‘shout louder’. But that’s an approach that misses so many critical strategic objectives.
Maturing markets, as the ‘content market’ now is, require subtlety of approach and refinement. A campaign plan based on an unconnected series of ‘big bang’ content is unconnected from the very audience for which it was really designed to attract and retain.
The answer to this disconnect lies in something I call ‘content flow’, or ‘content dynamics’, and this post is designed to share the concept to allow you to give it a go.
What is content flow?
“The whole is greater than the sum of its parts.” – Aristotle
This quote eloquently ‘sums’ up the true value of content strategy. Your content marketing strategy is not hundreds or thousands of connected stories. It’s one story with a lot of scenes.
The only way of creating any kind of long-term connection with your audience is to introduce variation into your content strategy and connect those important bigger campaigns, or pieces, together using smaller pieces. The best way of visualizing this is to imagine the smaller ‘everyday’ content pieces you produce as ‘whispers’ that keep the campaign alive in between the larger, campaign-led ‘shouts’.
The music of content flow
To understand how to create the variation any good content strategy needs to work, we should look for a moment to some of the greatest content creators to have lived: classical music composers—the masters of the concept of ‘whispering’ and ‘shouting’ to create impact.
Listen to any ‘great’ piece and you will immediately notice that it has quieter periods followed by great crescendos, utilizing something called dynamic note velocity to create an absorbing ‘journey’ through the composition.
We can clearly see this is we look at the sound wave profile of such a piece. Below is a Beethoven composition with clear crescendos and diminuendos that make the piece so absorbing. This is why classical ‘songs’ can go on for so long without losing your interest.
