Editors, journalists, marketers, sales operations and sales enablement professionals, who curate content for readers to share, should always give it a content header to create value for the receiver.
A content header is an explanatory summary that precedes the content body or link, to help the reader to quickly determine if the content fits their requirement, is useful in other ways, or will work for their customer use-case.
The job of content is to get shared and passed along. A content header multiplies the likelihood that a piece of content will get shared, by an order of magnitude.
A Content Header has 3 Purposes
- It helps the person creating or preparing the content to think clearly about the purpose of the content, the audience and the key themes so it will resonate with the content consumer.
- It helps when requisitioning content from marketers, agencies, and external writers.
- It helps people to deploy the content more effectively, so that it will get shared and read.
When someone creates a piece of content in most businesses today, it may get used once or twice and never see the light of day again.
When content is prepared in a collaborative content ecosystem, it gets created once with a content header, and is available for consumption and reuse by marketing, demand management, sales, channels and support.
Content header enables a fast and convenient, single point of access to enterprise content, regardless of content type or where it is located.
While there are no standards for content headers, this is the one that we use... feel free to use it in your content operations.
Content Header Template:
Thanks to Jim Burns of Avitage for this short content header.
Content Type and Title:
Author:
Source:
Date:
Topics:
Target Audiences (Segments/Roles):
