Content Marketing Strategy From The Beginning 101

There are many ways businesses are producing content, from small business owners writing or speaking about "what they know" to mid-size businesses assigning junior level employees the task of continually writing blog posts about what they do, to enterprise level multi-staffed departments dedicated to full-time content production.

One thing all of these businesses can benefit from is putting a systematic content production process in place.

Recognize that content marketing is an extension of the sales continuum, with multiple executional tactics that has the purpose of pre-selling. And recognize that pre-selling never sells, pre-selling informs and warms, it never sells.

A content marketing strategy is the guiding roadmap for at least one year's worth of content marketing. The strategy is the document that contains all the different sub-plans that you are going to use to plan, create, produce and deploy your business content throughout the web.

Why this is important:

The content marketing strategy provides a high-level roadmap...
...to reach one of four outcomes: to accelerate or maintain growth, to hold market/mind share, to reenergize growth, or to launch new products.

Primary/Secondary Content Marketing Concepts

The main concept to grasp is that the pipeline needs to be replenished constantly - that content marketing is an on-going activity occurring over time and has no actual end date.

The secondary concept to understand is that the content marketing pipeline is a process that is to be measured and adjusted and tweaked over time to increase conversions throughout the pipeline.

For your content to have maximum utility in the marketplace and differentiation, the goal of the content marketing strategy is to take the business positioning and branding, and incorporate each into every element of the yearly plan. Doing so ensures a unique voice and perspective for your content that cuts through the content clutter, and differentiates your content as useful, engaging and valuable.

The basics covered in this level 101 strategy are:

• desired destination - a)business outcomes; b) how measured;
• ideal customer - characteristics and background;
• ideal customer - online habits;
• ideal customer - needs and wants;
• findability strategy;
• getability strategy;
• production responsibilities in-house/outsourced;
• campaign requirements mapped to business outcomes/objectives;
• campaign scope and tactics;
• campaign editorial schedule;
• how campaign elements relate to buy cycle and buyer personas;
• production schedule.

Desired Destination

The content marketing strategy is your detailed plan for the upcoming year of where you need to get, compared to now - describing the actual mechanics of how to move ahead and achieve the business goals and objectives in a practical, methodical way.

I like to think of the content marketing strategy as a marketing pipeline. That way you can better visualize that the pipeline needs to "pump" and transport people from a state of not knowing about your stuff to being a loyal customer.

The marketing pipeline metaphor also makes it easier to visualize the content program as an active thing in and of itself, that requires constant updating, including more traffic at the top of the pipeline to keep your numbers up as individuals move through the stages of the pipeline and are disqualified.

Ideal Customer - Characteristics

I think you can only have an on-going process for disqualifying prospects and leads if you understand deeply who your best prospects are and how warm/qualified your leads need to be for your particular business. Without understanding who your leads are and what their wants and needs are, it's going to be difficult to produce what is generally recognized as "engaging" content.

I think the fastest way for Marketing to understand more about current customers is to ask Sales about them, and ask them directly. By understanding your current customer, you can weed out the "B" and "C" level ones and concentrate on the "A" level whom responsible for probably the top 80% of your sales and revenue.

Ideal Customer - Online Habits

Find out by asking, or getting Sales to ask. You need to have a rough idea where these suspects and prospects are on the web so you can approach them with appropriate messages.

It's also vital to figure out how your best customers found you, what they were looking for, and what it is about your business that made them select you.

Through interviews and contests and quizzes you can perform long tail keyword research, sometimes also called keyphrase research. These will eventually become the focus of on-page SEO and also provide an editorial schedule for content creation.

Incorporating keywords in your blog posts and webpages and video descriptions which appear in organic search results is a core principle of content marketing and the reason you need to add a minimum of 1 new page of relevant and engaging content every week.

Ideal Customer - Needs & Wants

Needs and wants are often vastly different, and your content marketing must reflect that reality, and still attract new individuals (create traffic) to begin moving them through the marketing pipeline.

As an illustration, I may need a hole to help me fasten a shelf to the wall - though I may want to buy a deluxe DeWalt(TM) electric drill rather than use a hammer and nail to make the hole. Big difference in approach to content and ways in which to make that content engaging.

The best place to find out more about these needs and wants is directly from all your customers, not just your "A" level ones. By getting out and interviewing Sales and customers, you'll gain some understanding of what really drives your business. And you may find that the needs and wants of your "C" level customers don't align with what you're doing. If so, you know exactly what terms to subtract and avoid from your content production efforts.

Making The Business Findable

You will have a road map describing the efforts required to make the business findable on the web. Your plan will include a mix of SEO, organic search results, social media and possibly a PPC campaign. Each of those activities will likely be a tactical element of a larger plan based on moving people through the marketing pipeline towards Sales.

If your immediate need is more traffic, then the traffic campaign will be designed around the timeline for getting that traffic. If you need traffic now, then starting with a PPC campaign based around a valuable offer is most likely the quickest way to get prospects into your pipeline. In this instance you'd be:

• doing keyword/keyphrase research about your stuff;
• asking Sales about the same;
• interviewing existing customers about the same;
• based on the keywords - brainstorming an engaging free offer;
• creating and testing a PPC campaign highlighting the keyword-rich offer;
• building a landing page for the offer;
• building a download/thank you page for the offer;
• (optional) creating an email campaign to protect these leads from your competition

Making Your Content And Webpages Getable

When webpage content does not speak directly to your customer and what they need and want, that webpage represents a waste of time and resource - and a missed opportunity to help someone.

Being getable is more about speaking to people about their stuff in their terms than about making the complex simple. Here's the trick as I see it: using the web and visiting webpages is an experience. It is, there's no denying that. So, I think the webpages and website that presents the best experience to me is the website I'm going to come back to.

I focus on talking about experiences, because before you can have a relationship with these people, you have to start with experiences. Lots of positive experiences. How you define 'positive experiences' is going to vary widely from business to business. The point is to begin defining and thinking about your webpages as experiences. How easy is it to "get" what you're trying to say? Your webpage is a television commercial and offer combined.

Production Responsibilities

Content production can be simple or complex, depending upon your business complexity and specific objectives. What cannot be ignored is the fact that content has to be produced, has to be judged to a criteria, and has to be placed somewhere by a person. People make content, not machines or software.

Within your business, someone must take responsibility for overseeing the content marketing function. Committees don't work. Complete outsourcing doesn't work. You need an employee familiar with the company to be responsible for content marketing creative, production, deployment and merchandising. They probably aren't going to be doing all that, but they will be the point person with the greatest span of knowledge about your content marketing strategy and activities.

It's also very helpful to have a list of point/contact people at your vendors and Agency. Knowing who is responsible for specific tactical elements can help improve the flow of information back and forth, and even speed up the approval process.

Campaign Requirements Mapped to Business Outcomes/Objectives

You have a list of keywords and keyphrases - you have the prioritized objectives of the business - and you have a handful of tactics. Now it's time to match all three together in as efficient a manner as possible.

Your business outcomes/objectives will determine the overall direction in terms of which kind of campaign will take priority. Knowing which kind of campaign you will be focusing almost predetermines the tactics you'll use to reach your objectives.

You will most likely be running a number of different campaigns concurrently and this section of the strategy helps to keep content production targeted on your main priorities.

Campaign Scope and Tactics

As a subsection of the above, the description of the individual campaigns keeps the creators and producers adhering to a keyword strategy and makes keeping on track manageable.

The scope of a campaign really is the number of individual content elements required to reach the objective of the campaign. The tactics can vary from webinars to emails, as required. When this subsection of the road map is completed, writing individual briefs for each content campaign becomes a streamlined process.

Keeping all the campaigns you intend to run together here in the planning stages lets you see where you have overlap, and helps determine when, for example, there is a natural continuation and fit between a traffic campaign that morphs into a lead generation campaign with similar content aims and intentions.

Campaign Editorial Schedule

This section represents the high-level view of all your campaigns and each tactical element, and when those elements are to be produced, published and merchandised. It allows you to pinpoint where the holes or overlaps are in your planning.

Provided as a road map to the business as a whole, the editorial schedule can provide inspiration to your employees, and may even get some of them enthusiastic enough to start participating in your content marketing program. This map also provides advance notice for brainstorming and scheduling.

How Campaign Elements Relate to Buy Cycle and Buyer Personas

As we are at the 101 level in this introduction, we'll leave out many of the details on how to map and attach certain campaigns and tactical elements in those campaigns to the stages in the buy cycle and also to the various buyer personas that may be involved in the purchase of your stuff.

It is probably obvious to you that to generate traffic, the traffic campaign is moving people from unaware to aware - and moving them into the website. The goal of the cumulative traffic campaign(s) is to get prospect information so we can link visitor behaviour to an individual name, ie convert strangers into known people we can track. Lead generation campaigns work in a similar fashion, though they may only begin when triggered by a specific webpage activity that moves the prospect further through the marketing pipeline with the goal of obtaining their personal data.

Much like customer needs and wants potentially being vastly different in scale, segmenting your targeted market into distinct buyer personas can help you produce material appropriate to the task required by that person. Considerations for advanced content material could include information on how to purchase your stuff including things like TCO (total cost of ownership). You might include very basic, generalized buying material, or high-level material targeted to the C-Suite. Only the nature of your busiess will dictate what kinds of elements are required to create highly-qualified leads, ready to be handed off to Sales.

Production Schedule

Probably included as an appendix to your content marketing strategy will be a production schedule. It's really a practical variation of the editorial schedule that backdates all the production and approval stages needed to get your content elements produced, deployed and merchandised.

Wrap Up

This is a critical document. You may wish to limit distribution of it for fear of the competition getting a hold of your planning. You might also wish to prepare a completely false version of the document with the same aims in mind. You might also wish to prepare this on a monthly basis for the same reasons.

This methodical, systematic process helps you create a solid content pyramid, with a strong foundation and ascending orders of meaningful information that inform your content and add depth and dimension.

Call us today to get your "Customer 1st Content Marketing Strategy" for achieving increased revenues at reduced risk. We'll get you started. You'll see results.

Toll-free North America 1 (877) 949-2726 for Content Marketing Strategy.