The "Wine & Cheese Rule" of Content Marketing

The connect between Wine & Cheese and Content Marketing might seem a bit weird; but when I had first thought of this analogy, it made perfect sense to me. 

This analogy, is in fact, the perfect way to understand one of the most important facets in Content Marketing, creating relevant, interesting, and valuable content. 

So let's cut to the chase and discuss: Why Wine & Cheese? Why not Milk & Cookie or Tea & Scones?

As we all know, wine ages well. The longer you keep it, the higher are the chances of having an expensive, vintage wine on your shelf, years later. To me, it somehow compares to knowledge. Over the years you gather more, you gain better perspective and experience of things around you.

Knowledge and wine both age well. 

Research and understanding is an extremely important aspect when it comes to content creation. For every piece of content you generate to fulfil the requirements of your content marketing calendar, you should also keep in mind that it should also add to the learning of the person reading your blog or watching your vlog.

Continuous reading, learning and never forgetting what you learnt in the past will help you figure out the right content for your content marketing efforts. So, that's the wine part of it.

However, content marketing is not just about words and copies. There is another vital aspect to it: images, graphics, designing. These are the things that actually pull your audience to the content. Once they are there, your content does the rest of the job.

The design part of content marketing, is much like cheese. You let it sit out for too long and it goes stale. Internet has given us such great resources, like ready access to Pantone shades (which too comes up with a color of the year, every year), fonts galore, themes, templates and so much more. If you are not playing with these resources and mixing and matching them up to create something new, your Instagram feed or visual posts on Facebook and Twitter might be having a tough time catching eyeballs in the sea of fresh design ideas and posts popping up in the same space. 

Just like cheese going stale, the same design, the same color scheme, and font for each and every one of your posts might be killing your follower's ardor to follow you anymore. Don't let that happen. Keep the surprise element alive when you are designing each and every post you create.

It is always a good idea to A/B test not only your mailers and landing pages, but also your posts from time-to-time. Use the same content but change the design, layout, color scheme and font. Not all of them at the same time, but whichever factor you feel will make a bigger difference. 

I must add that there are indeed some amazing Instagram feeds that seem to be following a set color and font pattern, but their content and the way they plan their posts creates such a beautiful effect on their entire feed, it is simply remarkable. 

Being open to design ideas opens up the world to you. You never know what kind of design thinking your audience might like. Keep a close watch on social media analytics and you will know. 

Coming back to the wine and cheese rule of content marketing, always remember that knowledge is old and wise, build on it and use it likewise. Design, its younger counterpart is more into fun, frolic and all about catching eyeballs; make it fun and delightful. 

Though this post has been created keeping content marketing in mind, the same rules apply to all sorts of marketing and advertising. 

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