Thinking content? Think big.

“You musn’t be afraid to dream a little bigger, darling.”

It’s my favorite line, from my favorite actor, in my favorite movie. And it’s something I try to apply daily to both my personal and professional life. The film is Inception, written and directed by Christopher Nolan, and the actor is Tom Hardy playing the supporting role of Eames. The premise of Inception is about as complex as you get: a team that performs corporate espionage using an experimental military technology to infiltrate the subconscious of their targets and extract valuable information through a shared dream world.

I know, right? Outrageous. And what does this all have to do with content? You see, success for the team in the movie really comes down to how well they can construct their dream’s landscapes, and they do this by employing best-practice dream architecture. Likewise, success for your digital content strategy also comes down to how well you lay out your content architecture.

Ensure the customer journey through proper content architecture Too often marketers fail to see the bigger picture, and get fixated with an idea or a story and conveying that as best they can in individual pieces of content. And while the quality of individual pieces of content in capturing the attention of your target audience is critically important, linking these individual pieces of content and taking your audience on a seamless digital journey is just as important.

Ask yourself: in today’s world – whether it is B2C or B2B – is a purchase decision ever actually made after consuming just one piece of content? I think you will find the answer is rarely, if ever. It takes multiple touchpoints, consistent messaging, and the right push, at the right place, in the right time, to ensure the purchase. An individual social media post on one of your channels isn’t going to turn a potential customer into a purchaser. Nor is the landing page on your website. Nor a blog post. Nor a single product/service description. A purchase decision can be made by consuming all of these things, at the right point in the customer journey.

Almost all marketers know and preach the importance of the customer journey, but many fall short in the implementation phase. They fail to see the entire architecture, usually because of a hastiness to go and start creating individual pieces of content.

Content architecture and customer journey first, individual content pieces second So next time before you rush off to create that next piece of awesome content, take a step back and try to visualize the entire customer journey, map your content architecture out to align with that, and make sure that everybody who is responsible for individual pieces of content understands where they fit in the grand scheme of things.

Because when you dream a little bigger, big things start to happen.