The internet has forever transformed how we access facts and process information. Yet many marketers still produce content based on the assumption that there is value in merely curating information and facts. Sorry, but if content is to succeed today, it has to be a lot more than just factual.

Occasionally, my daughter will do something that reminds me I’m a dinosaur. Hazel has grown up with Google, Wikipedia and millions of other websites providing whatever information she wants with a few clicks. As a result, she’s developed a very different relationship with purely factual information.

When we’re watching films together, I will still go to my brain first when trying to remember where I’ve seen a particular actor before. But while I’m struggling with my memory, Hazel’s already got her smartphone out, opened the IMDB app and rattled off the actor’s entire filmography.

I have the same app on my phone, but using it still isn’t my first instinct. Instead, I go to my brain first, treating the internet as a safety net when my memory (increasingly) fails. I’m still conditioned by decades of having to think and memorise and make decisions without instant and ubiquitous access to information. Reaching for the smartphone feels like an admission of defeat – that my grey matter failed to retain or retrieve the necessary information.

Meanwhile, Hazel’s brain already defaults to the internet. She doesn’t see the need to retain random facts in her memory because the internet can retain it for her, while Google can be a far more reliable retrieval system. The internet has become an extension of her brain. Marshall McLuhan would most likely feel simultaneously validated and horrified.

If you’re over 30, you’re probably like me. We are the last survivors of an age that seems increasingly prehistoric. Our instincts, attitudes and behaviours were formed before the internet smashed a meteor-sized crater into society. Such pre-internet thinking will eventually become extinct.

Your 20th-century linear mind has been rewired into a 21st-century lattice.

Douglas Coupland: The Age of Earthquakes (2015)

The pre-internet brain

I’m still a fanatical buyer of dead trees, particularly non-fiction and reference books. Knowledge is, for me, best represented as a packed bookcase, not a mouse. Of course, I use the internet for research all of the time. But many of my habits and attitudes were shaped in the BG era (Before Google) when information and facts weren’t so easy to come by.

When I was at university in the late ‘80s, I quickly learned to sit close to the door when assignments were handed out. As soon as the lecture ended there was always a race to the library to grab the relevant books necessary to research the assignment. As the library usually only had two or three copies of each book on the reading list, and there were a hundred or so students on the course, delay could be costly.

Those of us who missed out would have a few limited options. You could bargain with someone to allow you to photocopy the relevant pages or collaborate on a study session (beer was a popular currency). You could hope that one of your housemates was a faster runner (which wasn’t an option for those of us flat-sharing with students from other courses). Or, as a last resort, you could hope the university book shop had a copy that wouldn’t blow your weekly budget.

Our access to information was limited by geography, availability, economy and the technology of the day. In many ways, information was its own economy—full of haves and have-nots, gatekeepers, curators and transactions.

By the time my daughter researched her first school project, search engines were available to help her. Facts were no longer locked away in small print runs but were instantly and freely available. Where once it took effort, time and money to learn how to make a perfect soufflé or discover the population of Nineteenth Century London, now it takes almost no effort, time or money at all. Ask Google (disclaimer: other search engines are available …) and numerous web pages will compete to give you the information you seek.

You may ask, “So what?” Doesn’t that prove content marketing is only going to increase in importance? Provide information to feed this hand-held digital brain extension and reap the benefits of a generation who are even more reliant on the internet for answers.

That appears to be the thinking behind much of the unremarkable content currently filling our search results and social media feeds. Most are probably commissioned and managed by marketers from the same pre-internet generation, hanging onto the outdated belief that merely providing access to curated factual information has a value. How many articles do we need on social media image dimensions? Is it really helpful to have hundreds of web pages repeating minor variations of the same straightforward “how to” advice? Does it add anything to the consumer’s experience to add yet another predictable used car buyer’s checklist to the thousands already indexed by Google?

As a result, content marketing has begun to eat itself. Far too much content is researched from Google, recycling information from the plethora of similar articles already out there, without adding anything new of genuine substance or insight. The only way such a content approach can succeed is by hoping the content somehow manages to be incrementally better than the source material that preceded it, including the competition. Surely, it’s insanity to chase increasingly small incremental improvements within the same topic area and with the same source material as hundreds of other marketers. Add in the usual pressures to continually optimise costs as well and it becomes unsustainable.

The Google brain

Increasingly, Google will answer purely factual queries right there in the search results, scraping the web to provide the most accurate answer it can without all of that messy clicking around. Ask Google “How did George Orwell die?” and a box appears at the top of the search results with the unmissable heading “Tuberculosis”, accompanied by a paragraph scraped from shmoop.com. There’s no need to click through to Shmoop, or any of the other websites containing biographies of the great writer.

Depending on your query, Google will even provide a quick cheat sheet of background info. Search for “King Alfred” and the right-hand column offers up a short bio, a summary of key dates, his family tree and a handful of images. School projects done in no time.

This is great for anyone looking for quick answers, but it is a potential nightmare for anyone whose content strategy relies on using that factual information to drive web traffic.

Last year, Joe Pulizzi said: “To put it simply, you can’t trust Google. It will stretch ‘fair rights’ usage as much as possible – so people can avoid having to visit your site as much as possible. Google is making it easy for the world and, in the process, diverting traffic away from your site.”

Yes, but only if your content doesn’t offer anything more valuable than otherwise standard factual info. Joe suggests Google is “making it easy for the world”. If our content strategies are in opposition to that goal, I suggest we’re on the wrong side.

But wait; there’s more.

Also last year, Google followed up the widely announced mobile-responsiveness update to its algorithm with a number of other adjustments that weren’t so public. Some websites noticed their rankings changing. This phantom update was later confirmed by Google as an adjustment to how the algorithm ranks various quality signals.

Hubpages noted that the phantom May update appeared to target informational or How to … content, but while some had noticed as much as a 22% decrease in search traffic, others reported an increase.

What’s going on? Google won’t get into specifics (no surprise) but a previous post on the Google Webmaster Central Blog following the Panda update in 2011 may offer some clues to the direction in which Google is heading.

The post lists a number of factors that Google considers when looking at quality signals, including:

• Does the article provide original content or information, original reporting, original research, or original analysis?
• Does the page provide substantial value when compared to other pages in search results?
• Does this article contain insightful analysis or interesting information that is beyond obvious?

There are many more quality signals, so I recommend reading the whole post. But the common theme is whether the information offers MORE than what is already commonly available. In short, does the content go beyond regurgitating basic or non-proprietary facts that are already freely available? Does it provide deeper insight, a new context or fresh ideas?

Maybe we’ll finally see an end to the flood of listicles and other production-line content that continually repackage the same information under the mistaken belief that this somehow qualifies as thought leadership.

Whenever Google has changed or evolved, businesses and marketers have complained that it is somehow being unfair. After so many blows, surely we’ve learned by now to never get too comfortable trying to low-ball our content for a quick Google boost.

Fresh Ideas, Not Stale Facts

Anyone can provide straightforward answers in response to straightforward questions. So we can forget any hope of extracting a benefit from purely curated information and aggregated facts. Forget the generic How to’s … and repetitive listicles, digests and handy guides. If that’s all you’ve got, the internet is full.

We should no longer expect to be rewarded for simply providing access to information. That’s old world thinking: BG thinking. Instead, we need to do more than churn out facts already well serviced by the internet and easily accessed by Google.

If information is knowledge, then wisdom comes from how we use it. Instead, produce content that expresses fresh and more complex ideas, offers deeper insights and genuinely leads our markets with new and original thoughts.

After all, isn’t that what thought leadership is supposed to mean?

Just because you’re telling stories on behalf of a brand doesn’t mean the rules are any different than if you were telling fairy tales to young children. There may be more complex ideas and a little less fantasy, but for any story to work, it must still adhere to certain principles. While they might seem arbitrary, these principles are central to how good stories tap into our natural thought processes, sparking imagination, conveying meaning and resonating long after the final line.

Some stories have lasted for centuries in one form or another, constantly being retold to new audiences, who in turn will also pass them on to another generation – usually with a few new twists to keep them fresh. But while many elements of a story can change, in every new adaptation the core elements will always remain the same.

One classic example would be Little Red Riding Hood. This tale can be traced back as part of a storytelling tradition throughout the centuries and across many different cultures around the world. In Africa, the wolf might have been a hyena, in East Asia a tiger. But such things are window dressing. While names, places and other elements change, there is a central strand that can be traced back through the generations like DNA.

In recent years, the story is regularly adapted and reinterpreted for book, film and stage as a comedy, horror, satire and more. My uncle Simon Bor – himself no stranger to adapting fairy stories as the producer of cartoon TV series Wolves, Witches and Giants in the 1990s – recently published his new book Hacked, which tells the same tale of Red Riding Hood entirely as a series of smartphone messages, news reports and apps. The hood is now a hoodie!

This DNA is extremely resilient, and can be summed up with three fundamental questions. If the DNA of your brand story or content is to have the same resilience and power to entertain, influence and be remembered by your audience, it needs to answer these three questions, clearly and unambiguously.

1. Who? The Hero

It is very clear who is the protagonist or hero of Little Red Riding Hood as it’s right there in the title. There may be other characters in the tale, but we only encounter them when they directly help or hinder Red’s journey to her clearly stated goal of getting to grandma’s house. And every hero has a clearly stated goal. Everyone and everything else is irrelevant, except in how they impact on the hero and the goal.

Sometimes, the “Who” of your content will be obvious: in a case study, you’re telling the story of a specific customer on their journey to achieve something and how your brand or product helped overcome certain obstacles (impacts).

However, sometimes, your content puts the reader in that role, talking directly to them about a particular stage on their journey towards a particular goal, with advice, actions and relatable scenarios. While a step-by-step tutorial may not be a story in the classic sense of “once upon a time” to “happy ever after”, each step can still be analogous to a scene. And to give each scene a relatable context, you need to write the content with a specific customer persona in mind.

For example, a wide range of writers, marketers and curious visitors arrive on my website every day. Yet this particular post is written specifically to appeal to the content marketer eager to improve the quality of their branded storytelling. Sure, it means this post may be less relevant to non-marketers, but writing to appeal to everyone only ever results in generic, less insightful and less relatable content.

In short: focus your content by considering the narrative of a specific customer persona.

Note: the story is never really about your brand or product, even when it is. Paradoxical, I know. Each is merely a character – ideally the trusted mentor and not the bumbling villain – or prop in someone else’s tale.

In all cases, you want the reader to recognise him or herself in the content, either by proxy (“This case study describes someone just like me”) or more directly (“This tutorial has helped me take action in my own quest”).

2. What? The Central Message

The central lesson of Little Red Riding Hood is a warning. “Don’t be tempted from the safe path, or wolves might get you.”

For centuries, children were told variations of this tale when there was a real threat from wolves and other nasties hiding in nearby forests. But as children would often lack personal experience of these dangers (if they did it was probably already too late) they would have little understanding of the consequences of disobeying their parents’ warnings. Adults just want to stop kids having fun, right? The safe path is booooooring.

So tales like Little Red Riding Hood helped children to imagine the consequences of deviating from safety. On hearing these stories, they would hopefully develop a greater respect for sticking to the rules and heeding the advice of parents.

Kids today have less reason to be concerned by wolves; never mind witches and giants. So to keep the central message clear, modern adaptations often reinterpret the wolf either metaphorically or literally as a more human predator. Stranger danger. Either way, the central message remains the same. Heed the warnings. Stick to the safe path. Trust your parents.

Your message needs to be equally clear and simple to express. Your content may include oodles of information and complex advice, but you should never leave it up to the reader to interpret its significance. Each piece of content should lead to one clear conclusion. If you want the reader to take away one thing above all else from the story, it is a central message that should resonate and motivate, inspire and inform.

When planning your content, always have this clear message or conclusion in mind. Then, when reviewing your content, try to cut away anything unrelated or that detracts from this central point – even if you think it is interesting or entertaining. You don’t want the audience to become distracted or reach a different conclusion. Your key message allows you to refine and improve your content with much greater focus and precision. This clarity of message is what people will remember.

3. Why? The stakes

Why should we care about what happens in your story? In Red’s case, because people can die as a consequence! Before the Victorians decided to give the story a happy ending with a convenient woodsman, the original tale saw Red’s misadventure lead to the bloody death of both her grandmother and herself. The stakes very clear: Wayward children cannot rely on luck and a passing woodsman to save them.

Marketing is all about trying to convince people that our products or services can meet a particular need (the central message), backed up by the consequences of not doing so (the stakes). Not every story is a life or death proposition, but the bigger the stakes, the more persuasive and motivating the message. The more trivial a story feels, the less likely we are to see it through to the end. So choose your stories wisely.

Happily Ever After …

Who, what and why: three simple questions that your story cannot survive without.

When preparing your content, spend a little time jotting down your answers to these three questions, or add them to your briefing template when commissioning writers. Not only will these three questions help you structure and produce your content much quicker by focusing your thoughts, they will also ensure each piece of content is clearly aligned with your strategic goals.