In today’s digital age, companies are seeking to secure and improve their online presence to increase their revenues. And individuals are searching for their preference of products and services to maximise their utility.

The Middle East has its pin on the digital map ... its youth has been named the ‘Arab Digital Generation’ due to the emerging online penetration rate in this region and the thirst to send and receive content through different social media and content platforms.

Companies, on their part, are investing to build brand identity by creating content that is necessary to shape their brand image and increase their market share.

But are content creators truly reaching and inspiring their audience? Aren’t some of them just delivering redundant hashtags, photos and videos that lack an inspiring and relevant story? Has content become perishable?

What about companies? Are they adapting their strategy to maintain market share and attract new customers in this digital world? Ultimately, are we creating content just for the sake of content?

To move away from this, we need to realise that content development is a consolidated solution that should integrate brand stories with personal relevancy and commercial performance. The way it has been approached in the past has been built around the pursuit of award-winning creative.

But as we move into the era of ‘performance content’, we need to start creating content differently as our clients are looking for cost-effective solutions that deliver return on investment. This means that just producing the content is not enough; we need to constantly monitor its performance, optimise it regularly and feed this back into the evolving content strategy — whether the latter is yearly or campaign-based.

Of course, all of this makes sense on paper. But once the content is produced, how do we effectively measure its performance?

To start with, you need to have set out clear objectives for the content in the first place. For instance, are you trying to get leads or simply reach as many people as possible? Once you are clear on your objective, you can look at what channels are going to deliver against it.

We need to be acutely aware of the role of each platform to be able to do so. While we won’t go into each one in detail, the rationale is rather simple: you shouldn’t be pushing the same content on Facebook that you would on Twitter — or even on your website.

As the content goes live, real-time insights and monitoring will be able to measure how it is performing, allowing you to tweak and adapt it as per the feedback. This needs to be an ongoing process with testing and constant optimisation so that the content is delivering on the objectives.

This integrated approach is why we believe that design and delivery cannot no longer be separated.

Understanding consumers, cultural behaviour, and tech assimilation are the pillars of content creation. And this is exactly what we believe in developing content that is designed for people, delivered to the individual and ahead of market speed.

— The writer is the Head of LiquidThread MENA, the content division of Starcom MediaVest Group MENA