Undoubtedly, without planning, content marketing is, to paraphrase Blackadder, like a broken pencil – pointless. Going purely on gut feeling can be as much a result of a bad choice in the staff canteen as an instinctive decision. Planning gives clarity to your work and means that strong copy has a platform on which to flourish. Illogical sequencing and non-responsive steps stifle a marketer’s ability to communicate. Successful implementation comes from an awareness of the stages necessary in order to create an effective plan, and not skipping some of them just to suit your mood.
There are two initial stages that are critical to observe if you want to fulfill this. Firstly, consideration of what you need to ultimately achieve, and secondly, those steps that will get your there efficiently and without losing the focus of your content, either during the process or afterwards.
Final Safety Checks. Before we press the big red button and launch this interstellar marketing mission, let’s go through a few safety checks first. There are three things that are essential to keep in mind before going head first into planning content marketing.
Keep on topic. This means coherent idea creation that is both easier to understand and less “salesy”. Never losing sight of your audience and what makes them tick guarantees that you are creating topics that matter to them. Ask yourself:
What questions prevent your audience making a purchasing decision?
Is this topic sales-oriented or does it describe a problem and how to solve it?
Set out your goals. Focus on what you want to achieve. Do you want to promote an event or generate new leads? Be clear about current problems and the way in which content marketing should solve them.
Stylistic guidelines. Enabling you as a writer to craft purposeful, high-quality content, with a seamless editorial process makes your writing more accessible. Adopting the correct voice and formatting content appropriately keeps content marketing on-brand.
Commencing Countdown, Helmets on
1) Content marketing – just the basics
Align sales and marketing to determine your target audience to help create a content and editorial plan of relevant topics. Don’t forget to produce content regularly that is fresh, relevant, timely, and audience-optimized.
2) Get your strategy straight
To create a good content strategy, it helps to research the landscape and look at discussion forums, social media, do web searches and visit blogs to understand what your audience’s interests are. Also, consider what the action is you want someone to take as an outcome of engaging with your content. Remove the gap between brand objectives and audience desires.
3) Content marketing – let’s get more advanced
Develop personas to understand your customers better and create a map that identifies the process of information each of your personas need at all points during the buying process. Providing website visitors with the ability to socialize and amplify content using Twitter, Google +1’s, and Facebook Likes, means you are building your backlinks for better SEO to ensure they contain high quality, relevant links.
4) Optimize your content marketing
Review data to better match the right communication to the right customers, and review and produce content based on the keyword phrases that are driving your organic search traffic and conversions. Continually review lead scoring and criteria to provide the most accurate score possible and re-imagine content in different forms (blogs/whitepapers/webinars, etc.)
5) How will the content be created?
Once you create the strategy, next determine how you will execute it. Make sure the right people are producing the right content, and if necessary, hire writers. If you don’t build the content, people won’t come.
6) Content that hits the sweet spot
Make sure you get your message in front of the largest and most targeted audience possible. A wide audience means more people know about you, and when you target effectively, it means you are reaching your potential buyers. Developing content specifically produced for your customers brings buyers back to your website.
7) Provide precisely the kind of content your customers need
Avoid making that a simple yet fatal mistake. Don’t write content only about your business. Most customers don’t give two hoots about your company; their only concern is themselves. Content marketing is about massaging egos and providing content that customers want and need, and value enough to give you their attention.
8) Promote, promote, promote
Good content needs a good syndication and promotion plan. Consider paid and owned media options. Use social networks to spread the message and integrate social media sharing into the design of your content, and don’t make it an afterthought.
9) Dump the rubbish!
Like all marketing activities, when you set goals for your expected outcomes, sometimes you’ve got to get ruthless. When it doesn’t work, get rid!
10) Be like Frankenstein on steroids.
Finally, don’t be afraid to experiment with new ideas continuously, expand and optimize and shake things up a bit.
