Ok, let’s be honest for a second: 9 times out of 10, the content found on corporate blogs is abject trash. No, I don’t have any actual statistics to back that up, and I am absolutely speaking from anecdotal experience, but nonetheless, the observation manages to ring true: Most content is fluffy, redundant, non-essential, and sporadically timed. Even worse, some of this poorly crafted content comes from firms that are literally trying to sell content marketing as a leading service. This isn’t to say that there aren’t corporations out there that create incredible pieces of content—there are. And while companies such as Nike, Adidas, The North Face, Vayner Media, and IBM all excel at doing this well, by and large, most small, medium—and even large—businesses deal in content that falls far short of their value-generating expectations.
Why is this? The simple answer is that creating content is hard. But if we unpack this answer, another question quickly arises: why is creating content hard?
In my time working with people who have had an interest in creating content, rarely is this question ever asked. Part of what makes it complex is that the answers to this question are almost entirely subjective. Logically, creating content is difficult because of factors such as scheduling, candor, topic, niche, and audience. But operationally, these factors will affect you in different ways depending on what your situation is.
Most crucially, however, content creation is difficult because many times people do not know what to say, and most importantly, how many times they should be saying it. Something typically left unmentioned in discussions pertaining to content creation is that topic and candor can be, and usually are, two inextricably linked things. For instance, the speed with which you are able to create a piece of content, many times, will hinge on what the topic of that content is. After all, because the topic determines the scope, research, and brevity of the project, it also determines how much time must be spent on creating that project, and most importantly, how much time would need to be spent in the event that a similar project would need to be created.
For example, if establishing a posting candor of one YouTube Video, and one featured blog article per week is your goal—but it takes you a week of committed time to put together your article—then something in your content stack is difficult to scale because it is eating up all of your production time. And sure, while removal is always an option, many times, that option is ideal theory. People put time, effort, planning, and money into the development of certain channels, and scrapping them is not always the most judicious use of resources. So what does it mean when a piece of content is difficult to scale? Instead of thinking that it means the content is unsustainable to create, re-frame this to the actual reality: these line items are unsustainable to create every week. If content creation is a priority, especially for individuals and small teams, we need to evaluate ways of creating blog content that takes less time to assemble, is value-generating—and is more respectful of a small organization’s desire for agility.
So, what is “Procedural Content,” and most importantly, why do I need it?
Procedural content is value-generating media designed and structured to have a literarily predictable beginning, middle, and end, paired with an interchangeable topical focus. Put another way, Procedural content is content that could easily be created and re-created by applying a diversity of focused topics to the same literary structure.
For example, a recipe is a literary structure: it is a hierarchical style of writing information so as to produce formulaic, predictable cooking results for the end-user. What we plug into this literary structure, because it is structured, must be a topic that is respectful of that structure—hence the necessity for the implementation of a focused topic. In the context of what this looks like, if a recipe is a literary structure, then “vegetarian meals” might be a good example of a focused topic. Under this topical focus, a vegetarian cooking blogger can have a theoretically infinite number of posts that are as easy to scale as the blogger is willing to cook and document their work. In the end, if the cooking blogger is able to streamline the production processes for her cooking recipe posts, then the time spent making these posts will still be significantly less than the amount of time spent trying to research and write long-form vegetarian lifestyle articles.
So why do you need it? Most of you are probably running operations that are a little bit more complicated than your run-of-the-mill cooking blog. But having a few procedural topics on your content strategy will give you more room to scale your content creation operations. The reason why is because procedural content is designed to be value-generating, systematically produced, at scale, and sometimes all at the same time. In having easy to create, value-generating content that is batched for deployment, all that you as the executor have to do is queue each piece of content for execution. It takes very little time to have everything scheduled, and once you do, you never have to look at it again until it is time to create and upload new content.
Additionally, this structure of generating content can have positive SEO-related implications as well. Because it is easier to create scalable content due to a predictable structure, it is also easier to hammer on harder-to-rank keyword groups over time, such as “Vegetarian Recipes” by regularly using procedural content that uses the same keywords.
It is also worth mentioning that procedural content is not necessarily confined to the written word. Pictures are some of the easiest forms of procedural content, and they regularly resonate with viewers. Additionally, short-form video can be a form of procedural content as well—as evidenced by the litany of YouTube product reviews that seem to almost always take on the same structure. All of this is said to suggest that at the end of the day, the most important piece to procedural content is that it is able to scale effectively around your operations—whatever they currently may be.
Drawbacks of Procedural Content
Like all things, however, this style of building and planning content has one fairly obvious limitation: Content that is easy to scale is by design, repetitive by nature. So, as much as I hate to break it to ya, focusing most content strategies exclusively around procedural content is a recipe for disaster. Sure, you may be creating content and lots of it, but guess what? YOUR BLOG IS STILL BORING.
Now, in all fairness, certain types of websites can get away with this: recipe websites, review websites, and other volume-intensive topics such as fashion and music. For most corporations, however, volume-intensive topics are irrelevant. Additionally, I would endeavor to say that a volume-intensive content strategy is not necessarily conducive to fulfilling the marketing operations of a small business, and most large businesses think they have better shit to do than turn their blog into an online magazine or—fuck it—a movie studio.
The point that I am trying to make, however, is that if you are not operating in any of the aforementioned industries that I listed, you probably cannot lean exclusively on the generation of procedural content in order to captivate your audience. Does this mean that you are barred from using lots of it? No: Just don’t make all of your content procedural. If you do use lots of this type of content, be sure to have different procedural structures available so that there is some variation in the content your customers are experiencing. Finally, intersperse it with unique shit! Yeah, do that lifestyle article you always wanted to do. Wax poetic about the systems that you manage. Share your knowledge about the esoteric topics of your field. These are the things that will keep your blog feeling flavorful, unique, and reflective of your brand’s distinct character.
Conclusion
At the end of the day, procedural content is very much a “take it or leave it” type of thing: It is still just another tool in a content marketer’s arsenal and is still a far cry away from being the silver bullet that can save an endangered content strategy. No, you don’t have to generate procedural content to have a successful corporate blog or content strategy, but I assure you, your life will be made easier for using it—and you will have room to focus on other things.
Because one of its strengths is that it is not confined to the written word, consider all of the channels that procedural content can be generated on, and pick one. Most importantly, however, don’t pick a channel based on what you think you have to do: pick a channel based on what works best for how you communicate. In the end, procedural content can be a huge asset to building a brand, advertising a business, or even informing the public. Just remember the golden rule of creating this content for yourself: repetition is key. (Photo Credit: Charisse Kenion)
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