Image Source: Content Marketing Institute

Content Marketing – The How

When you think about content marketing and your content strategy, before you even write a word, you need to answer four questions.

1. Why content marketing?
2. What’s in it for me and my business?
3. Why will my audience care?
4, How will I measure and define success?

You need to think who you are creating content for, who you are helping, which specific personas and how you help them in a way no one else can. Brands and companies use content marketing to build audiences and profit. That’s either increased revenue, a reduction in advertising or production costs, or “better” customers (convert faster or with a higher customer lifetime value) less time taken to convert a sale, more data on existing customers to upsell products or services in the future… Answer “Why?” first.

Develop Your Content Strategy

Your content strategy must include your content origination, publication, resources required and the distribution of useful, relevant content that resonates with your target customers and personas. Content marketing isn’t just about writing loads of “stuff” or producing a video for the sake of it. Your content is the very output of your organisation, your sales teams, social channels, owned and earned media as well as your website. It helps answer the question “Why should I use your product or service?”

Having a content plan and sticking to it is critical in business. Otherwise, you’re publishing without purpose and you won’t know how successful you’ve been or where you went wrong. Your content marketing will be far more effective with a strategy and each element of your plan rollout and implementation will feel less challenging.

Having developed a content strategy for several businesses, there are generally five common elements you need to cover off to be successful. These are your:

1. Business Case
2. Business Plan
3. Audience
4. Story (including emotion)
5. Channel plan

Preparing Your Content Plan

Your content plan needs to be tactical and include:

• How will you execute your strategy? Be specific.
• What resources will you need?
• How is your content strategy being measured?
• Who will be handling each task?
• What does success look like?

You have to build a content marketing strategy before you build your plan. The the key elements are easier to implement such as the key topic areas you will cover, what content you will create, what type of content you will create, how to source content that’s relevant and meaningful for your audience, when and how to share your content, and when to bring in specific calls to action to prompt engagement or progress your prospects down the buyer’s journey. There’s a lot of detail in there… Is your Martech capable of enabling the business to do that? How will all this effort and resource tie into your sales process, database/CRM and enable sales teams to qualify prospects faster, enrich data held and accelerate sales faster?

1. Your Content Marketing Business Case

When you pull together your reasons for content marketing, the risks, the upsides and the downsides, your vision of what success looks like is a lot easier to understand and buy into. Your CEO and board are much more likely to get behind it. It also gives you the time needed to learn on the job and try things out…  You’ll be developing, adjusting and optimising your content strategy consistently over time as new channels appear and certain channels just don’t work for your business. Remember to share learnings and share your content success. What made it fly? Why was it a hit? How do you replicate it? How can you improve on that next time?

2. Your Content Marketing Business Plan

What are you trying to achieve? What goals should you have? What’s going to be the kick-ass piece of expertise that you will offer? What unique value will your content bring? What’s going to make it harder and what resources have you already got internally that you can harvest your content from or generate content with relatively easily? Content marketing goals include:

• Brand awareness and engagement
  This is a strong goal for businesses that may not sell a product online.

• Prospect conversion and lead nurturing
  Your content brings prospects through their buyer’s journey, supports your sales teams and with automation can capture data, nurture leads and create opportunity.

• Customer conversion
  Content reinforces decision-making and turns opportunities into customers.
• Customer loyalty/retention/up-sell
  If you understand your customer personas, you can up-sell, cross-sell and turn customers into repeat customers as well as evangelists, increasing lifetime value.

3. Your Audience, Target Customers + Content

Here you need to be as specific as possible. You need to outline who your audience is, identify what personas they fall into (three or four personas is usually fine), and what their ideal content engagement cycle might be like and over what period and the frequency you should be hitting them. Crucially, you need to understand their buying pain and how you can best solve their problems. Work out what sort of information they’re looking for, the format they like and what content you can create that will help them move along your buyer’s journey so they feel like you’ve helped them, and they’ve not been sold to.

4. Make Your Story Compelling & Interesting

Here, you characterise your content marketing in terms of what ideas and messages you want to communicate, how your messages differ from your competitors, how you see your specific areas of expertise evolving and their world-changing as a result after you have shared your content with your prospects and target audience. (After reading this, I’m hoping you’ll be able to work mine out!)

5. Your Channel Plan

The most important element of your whole content plan (perhaps) is to go where your customers are. Where do they go and graze for information and where do they hang out? This should include the platforms they use and will be the ones you should use to tell your story. Make it appropriate for each channel and set your criteria, processes, and objectives for each channel. Importantly, how will you engage with your prospects when they engage with you?

Share your content marketing strategy

When you have different stakeholders who have bought into your content strategy and your content plan, it means they’re aware of what you are doing and why. Importantly, they’ll be able to contribute to it and more engaged when you ask for content from them!

This is crucial in big teams or large companies, ensures everyone is on the same page and knows what they’re doing and why. It also helps when briefing out content generation requirements to suppliers or team members. They’ll see the bigger picture.

The best news is you can use examples of success to win over your sceptics What do people care about most? This should help you determine which components of your content marketing strategy are most appropriate to share with each team.

Test & Measure – Optimise Use of Your Content

Some parts of your content marketing strategy will stay the same as your program rolls out.  Your strategy, personas and purpose should remain the same. (If they were right in the first place)

Certain elements should be reviewed and will be updated systematically. You have to adjust to keep your eye on your targets, which channels are working, what topics resonate, is the team doing the heavy lifting or are there easier ways to create your content? Review this monthly to be being with, learn what metrics are important, then you review your strategy quarterly and adjust as appropriate.

Content Marketing Tactics

Content marketing includes loads of production but this doesn’t have to be onerous. There are several tactics, you just need to pick one that resonates best with your audience, is easy to produce and adds value to your target audience. These include:

Visual	Text Based
Infographics	Lists
Video	How-tos / Tutorials
Webinars	Polls
Podcasts	Reviews /  Case studies / Interviews
Presentations	Books / Guides
Animations	White papers

Measuring Success – Defining KPIs

So, you’ve managed to execute all of your content marketing plan and are producing brilliant content that resonates with your audiences. Your content is being consumed voraciously, being shared on social media, driving quality traffic and you’ve heard from sales that it’s really useful. You may even have had a “Great content, well done”. But how great? You need to go back to the beginning and look at the purpose of producing your content and the audiences you’re targeting. Here’s where you produce your KPIs. Is your goal lead generation? Lead volume or lead quality? How will you quantify that in your CRM? Is your goal to nurture prospects into a sales-ready buying state? Disqualifying prospects from the sales process to save the sales team’s time? What will they do with that extra time and how will that increase in productivity be attributed to your content marketing and be quantified? Is the aim to reduce the after-sales care time? Encourage repeat purchases or cross-sell and upsell/nudge people to buy other products or services? You need to be SMART with your KPIs and they need to simple and effortless to collate. They also need to be shared across the organisation to ensure you have buy in and teams can see the results you’re delivering. Soon, this becomes a virtuous circle and sales will actively contribute to their content and what your customers need, who in turn, feel like you’re listening better as an organisation and are more likely to recommend your brand and become an evangelist for you.

How many of these tactics are you using and do you have a content marketing plan that makes a difference to your business? Currently looking for a new challenge… If your content marketing isn’t working, or you don’t know where to start, fill in your details below and I’ll get it sorted for you.