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In journalism and police work the five Ws — who, what, when, where and why — amount to the framework of investigation and the building blocks of a story or case. This also applies to just about any content-creation initiative you can name. The order of the questions may be different but the same regimen applies.

For example, a product launch or a major re-branding campaign might call for support materials, a web site makeover, an update to existing content and a variety of other deliverables.  Each piece will have its own objective but still be seen as part of a larger effort that should be greater than the sum of its pieces.

Making the whole exceed the sum of the parts requires a plan. Specifically, it requires asking these questions up front:

1. Why are we engaged in this effort in the first place? A product launch typically doesn’t necessitate a new web site but a re-branding would.  A major acquisition might call for something else entirely.  You may want to consider how to re-purpose existing material consistent with new messages along with creating something entirely new.

2. What is the objective or mission we want to accomplish? Giving reassurances to existing customers is not the same as acquiring new ones.  New versions of established products require descriptive material that is subtly different from the content created for an entry into a new market or an altogether new product.

3. Who is the target of this effort? An purchase influencer might respond to a very different appeal than the outreach you make to the actual buyer or the key decision maker. Once identified, “who” you are pursuing will tell you what it will take to get this target to act.

4. Where is the source material on which the content will be based?  Content creation is not the same thing as as creation of the underlying product or marketing strategy.  The content articulates the product’s benefits.  But those benefits were the outcome of rigorous efforts made earlier in a far different process.

5. When is the trigger event for delivery of the content? You may want to use the content creation process as an ingredient in preparation of the strategy – as a way to prompt ideas and new thinking. All assumptions should be challenged as a way to ensure validity and consistency with the current environment.  Best of all, it’s a good measure of how well prepared you are to embark on your initiative.  Better to know this in advance, than to find out “in real time”.

Success is based on asking the right questions at the right time. Ask the wrong questions, get the wrong answers. Get the wrong answers and you mobilize the wrong effort and waste a lot of resources.

What’s your process for content creation?  How do you create and prepare source material to generate compelling marketing content?

To the extent your customers are readers today, you are a publisher.

“Marketing content” and “riveting quality” are rarely spoken in the same conversation.   Indeed the latter is typically invoked disparagingly, as in “The content isn’t exactly riveting”.  At Write Angle we’ve been at war with flat, yawn-inspiring content for years.  But this isn’t about us, it’s about you and your mission to deliver content that attracts, engages and retains visitors to your site and converts them into users and customers.  Marketing content can be more than good, it can be downright engaging, which is what you should be striving for at all times.

But there’s another quality right up there with engagement.  More is better today when it comes to getting found online and upping your rank on search engines.  And speedy delivery goes hand in hand with volume.  While “good” is good, when it comes to content good and fast is even better.  Says Kyle Monson, a former editor at PCMagazine now at JWT, “a company’s ability to speak honestly and quickly to its customers, fans, and detractors is a huge competitive advantage”.

Step one: recognize and embrace the publishing mandate of your enterprise which is the imperative of Web 2.0.  Back in late ’80s and early ’90s as technology pulled companies into the age of networks it meant that many of them were suddenly in the telecommunications business as much as the business of their category. Today, in the real-time world of Web 2.0, you’re in the publishing business.  Your customers and prospects are your audience.  How are you building, engaging and growing this audience?  How are your “ratings” right now and what can you do to improve them?

Although it’s been said many times many ways (apologies to Mel Torme), most marketing content-related projects call for answers to at least a half-dozen questions.  And all members of the team should weigh-in.  As simplistic as they may appear, questions not unlike the ones below can reveal information that makes the difference between a worthwhile end product and an endless cycle of revisions and finger-pointing:

1.  Objective: What is the purpose of the proposed document and/or web content?

2.  Target: Who is the reader?

3.  Message(s): What are the key take-aways or leave-behind messages you want to create in the reader’s mind about your company and/or its offerings?

4.  Differentiation: What are the core, competitive differentiators of your offering(s) that you want this  particular content to convey?  How do they differ from competitive offerings and what is significant about this difference?

5.  Features/Benefits: Relative to the differentiation you describe above, specify the features that make it superior and explain the corresponding benefit(s) of each.  How to they “benefit” a buyer?

6. Substantion/proof points: What evidence or field results illustrate the validity of your claims (e.g., customer testimony, metrics, competitive superiority, etc.) ?

Is this exercise part of your own preparation today? What other questions would you ask?  What did we miss?

The most powerful marketing content today, the content you should be striving to create, is the stuff that creates the right discussions in the right context among the right people.

If your content is all about your company, your brand and your products, you’re missing the point of what makes today’s marketing content more effective and memorable.  In other words, you’re not getting what you’re paying for.  If your outreach is basically driven by cultivating a few opinion leaders and staying in control of your message, you’re not making the most of the new landscape and the new tools available to you.  Worse, you’re likely losing ground to competitors who are.

To Bob Duffy, senior social-media strategist at Intel, it’s not about controlling the message so much as providing the context in which information is exchanged and interpreted.

Duffy told Social Media Explorer that brands, not unlike Intel, are doing a lot of what the traditional media (and industry analysts) have always done: publishing what they learn from developers, for example, revealing best practices and creating connections between different tech players. Like his counterparts at other technology brands today, Duffy is creating the context for important discussions in the industry that will ultimately pay off down the road for his employer.

The takeaway for today’s marketing pros? Reach out to anyone who could be part of your community and jump-start the discussions you want to be part of.  Discussions to which you can add value and build your reputation as somebody who’s worth engaging on a long-term basis.  Just keep in mind that you have to stick to the subject matter of the discussion and not be a shill for your brand.  Your community is street-wise.  It is more than capable of connecting the dots. Do as Duffy does: “We don’t try to control the conversation or message, we just want to provide the context.”

What are you doing as a marketer to instigate industry discussions and engage your communities?  What are you learning from, and sharing with, the people who matter to your brand?  What kinds of connections are you creating among them?  How are you measuring it?

By now, the importance of creating your own content and publishing it online via all social channels should be pretty obvious, but in case you missed the latest metric on social-media marketing here it is: HubSpot just reported that nearly two out of every three social-media messages today is a link to published content.

In other words, people pointing out to personal friends and business associates the material published by someone else amounts to a substantial majority of the information flow in social media.  The implications for marketers have never been clearer or more urgent: brands, whether B2C or B2B, are as much in the content publishing (and distribution) business today as they are in the business that generates their revenue stream.  Indeed, the publishing element of their business has become central to growing this revenue because it drives the visitors to your site who generate the leads that convert to $ales.

Moreover, whether people are sharing links to your content or embedding it into social networks directly, an overwhelming 96% of the sharing that happens online is of content, not websites.  The take-away: creating fresh content that encourages sharing  amongst your prospects, customers, partners and market influencers, specifically the stuff that addresses issues of keenest interest and urgency to them, multiplies their interest in you.  You’re in the conversation, which is the precursor to being in consideration.

Superior marketers have come to understand that pushing content drives in-bound marketing.  Fresh content — the more frequently published the better — facilitates online “find-ability”.  It’s  not enough to update your site once a quarter and step back to await the deluge of visitors clicking through your multiple calls-to-action.  Plant your content seeds in social media and get it shared among the right people on an ongoing basis.

What is your content strategy today?  What are your content publishing tactics?  How often do you publish the content your prospects and customers can’t resist sharing?

Start-up companies are not alone in making the missteps we continually see from folks who run marketing and sales today. Too often, established brands fall into the same avoidable traps. The caveats as we see them:

1. Most conspicuous is the knee-jerk tendency to putting the 20-somethings in charge of social-media marketing strategy and tactics. “Hey, they’re the digital natives, they eat and breathe Facebook and Foursquare, let THEM drive this!” sounds like an epitaph on a departmental gravestone. Rule of thumb: if you wouldn’t put total greenhorns (read: an intern) in charge of sales support or customer service, do not anoint them keepers of in-bound marketing. It’s far too elemental to the revenue line and becoming more central all the time. Make the youngsters part of the team, not the captain.

2. Obsessing on competitors to the point of aping their every move. This isn’t competitive analysis it’s competitor envy. If every time someone sends you an “FYI” describing a piece of content created by a competitor you stop what you’re doing to automatically follow suit, your company is being led by that competitor’s tactics, not your own content strategy. Monitor competitive material closely, of course, but appraise it through the prism of your own objectives and customer requirements. What are the current needs and expectations of your own users? Where do you believe your market is headed? What is most central to your content strategy? The answers to these questions will best advance your mission.

3. Asking “how high?” every time an investor screams “Jump!” Satisfied customers make satisfied shareholders. Resist the temptation to force-fit every idea or suggestion put on the table by board members and investors. Acknowledge their interest with a customer-driven response but never forget that they are advisors, not cue cards.

Good marketing and branding have always been about creating word-of-mouth, stories, and legend. Today with word-of-mouth spread so quickly and easily it’s more powerful than ever. Companies with the marketing gene, like Apple, have elevated WOM to an art form. The trick is, there has to “there” there. Your brand’s underlying value proposition, especially in B2B marketing, has to consist of a product benefit greater than the sum of the product’s adoption cost plus its price. The bigger the delta, the more compelling the value proposition.

Still, just as every generation wants to believe that it invented sex, new marketers assume that a brand “identity” or brand promise is something you can go out and buy and put on like trendy shoes. They soon discover that their brand is not their shoes. It’s their feet. It’s not the belt, it’s the waistline. It’s not what you put on your head, it’s what’s inside.

A brand’s value proposition isn’t a pitch, it is whatever is most relevant and compelling to a buyer. Think of a brand as a product’s or a company’s character. It has to stand for something. Which means that it cannot stand for everything. If it tries to, it will stand for nothing. This is part of the reason why great, leading brands, not unlike great people, are rare. There’s a natural inclination of the heart to be liked. To be everybody’s everything so as not to offend or alienate anybody. Your brand must stand for something…or nothing at all. What does your brand stand for? How do you know? How you convey it?