Why New-Age Storytelling needs a Powerful Publishing Platform
The information explosion has led to audiences worldwide becoming increasingly selective about the content that they are consuming. Static content pages have gone the way of the dodo. Discerning readers want more than just a story. They want an experience that blows their mind. In a digital space where everyone has access to information, publishers need to focus on presentation, not just to grab eyeballs but to keep them too.
A run-of-the-mill story vs a new-age digital story
With just a headline, a few images, social buttons and the main story in conventional paragraph formats, the traditional digital story is limited in its scope. However, augmented with embedded tweets, gifs, videos, polls, infographics and so much more, a new-age digital story is only as limited as it’s creator’s vision.
While journalists may lack the time to make their stories more stylized, a versatile publishing platform ensures that great content reaches your audience in great style.
Here are 8 reasons why you need a versatile platform for your business:
1. Quick deployment of stories
A flexible publishing platform shortens the editorial cycle. With timely alerts for due dates and pending tasks, editors can now review and publish content on schedule. It allows for easy template-based customization which is as simple as typing a word document. You no longer have to be dependent on third-party web development companies to update and edit your website content.
2. Personalisation of content
With the plethora of content that is readily available for any topic online, it is important to get your audience to revisit your website.
An advanced publishing platform capitalizes AI to serve your readers with relevant stories at the right time. This keeps the audience tuned to your offering and ensures mindful and quality user engagement.
3. Image Optimisation
A great picture may be worth a thousand words, but is not a great investment if you need external parties to help you leverage it. A competent publishing platform eliminates the need for device-specific cosmetics provided by third-party services. Features like setting the focus point (to deliver optimised images based on user device) help you set the bar for a competent publishing platform. Ideally, you should be able to edit and tool images within your platform, without having to rely on complex and expensive image editing software.
4. Create once and publish everywhere [COPE]
Technology has advanced to make content available to any device - mobile, website, web apps, IoT devices and even to the latest upcoming technologies. The platform makes sure that your content reaches your target audience as and when you want it to reach them. It even sends notifications to Google in order to index the new content available and notifies your users of the same.
5. Distribution across channels
According to a new report from Pew Research Center released in December 2018, social media has surpassed newspapers as the preferred source of news for American adults. For better reach, you need to have your content shared across social channels, content aggregators and media channels. A versatile publishing platform with integrated social capabilities allows you to automatically publish any content from the platform directly to any number of networks.
6. Make your content discoverable
Your content is the protagonist of your business strategy as a publisher. However, great reach helps leverage great content. While strategizing your content calendar may keep your current audience engaged, new traffic is built only if your content is discoverable.
To elaborate, News Sitemap, Schema, AMP are a few indicators that are mandatory for your stories to rank on the top pages of Google’s SERP. The typical online audience, though invested, is not patient, and it is hence important to readily supply information, on the basis of intent.
7. Analytics and Performance
Every competitive media house would love to see how well their stories are performing. It is essential for any publishing platform to have a dashboard to view top performing stories, topics and authors for a specified period of time. With the help of in-built analytics systems provided by publishing platforms, you can get easy insights into user engagement without having to access other website tracking applications.
8. Adapting to new technologies
Digital storytelling technology is constantly in flux. Within a matter of a few years, technologies like text-to-speech, virtual/augmented reality, 3D viewing, AMP stories, etc. have pervaded the mass market. An ideal platform should be equipped to evolve and integrate new trends on the go, allowing you to reap the benefits of these trends at their peak.
Harnessing the power of technology for superior storytelling
Investing in a unified publishing solution that can efficiently handle multiple functionalities goes a long way in putting you ahead of your competitors. Accessible to even non-technical minds, it allows you to control your content and marketing strategies. As a result, you can better monetise and maximise the productivity of your resources quickly, efficiently and most importantly, on your own terms.
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