The A-Z Overview On How To Develop An Actionable Content Marketing Strategy

Your strategic focus is on delivering customer-centric content, and how content marketing strategy is a journey, not a one-step bandaid.

The content marketing strategy provides the road map for the customer journey, and shows us how as a business we can create and develop a customer-centric content strategy that pre-sells your "want solutions", and is a roadmap for moving people from stranger to lead to customer to loyal customer.

Plan to create relationships through one-on-one discussions that build upon themselves over time to create a sense of trust, openness and integrity.

A is for Advocate

Content is about something your customers care about, or should care about. Content is not about you or your stuff. Your strategy needs to ensure all of your messaging is on behalf of the ideal customer. Advocating for them means standing in their shoes, feeling their confusion and skepticism. Make your strategy speak to the core problems and challenges your customers experience daily.

B Is For Balance

Their will inevitably be conflicting objectives in your strategy. The first is balancing your sales and marketing objectives to the objectives of your customers. There will be trade-offs; some of them will be difficult and others straightforward. Understanding what the content is supposed to achieve helps make hard decisions easier, and keeps the roadmap uncluttered by detours.

C is for Context

Meaning and interpretation take place at all times. If you control some of the context for your content, you can contribute to the user's perception and understanding of that content. Your strategy needs to factor context to be as important as content. Placement, medium, channel, tactics and distribution contribute to context. How, and where, you promote your content is a strategic issue.

D is for Development

The content marketing strategy should contain a clear map of the content process, from 1st request to deployment, promotion and archiving of the content. Establishing a systematic process prevents many errors and ommissions, and promotes targeted relevant messages. Development guidelines focus messages to be unique to your positioning and supportive of the brand.

E is for Evangelist

The content marketing strategy is only developed as a roadmap to arrive at a destination. I believe the only logical destination for content is to create ideal customers. One outstanding attribute of ideal customers is that they become influencers and brand evangelists. They create credible backlinks and authoritative comments that attract a wider audience and deflate skepticism faster than you can.

F is for Framing

The strategy needs to include reference to framing. In the brand style guide certain language is going to be acceptable. Also, certain ways of describing things will be proscribed, such as calling a site a "website", as I do here. Framing is a device that creates perceptions about the brand by employing various rhetorical and linguistic devices to lead the user to the thoughts we hope them to have. A close cousin of context.

G is for Governance

There can be many voices in the content process. A method of assigning responsibility and creating roles within the system is required. The strategy needs to specify all of these roles and the scope of responsibility. From the high-level view: it is essential that your content be created and delivered consistently, and that your content present a singular brand voice and experience.

H is for Help

Your content marketing strategy is supposed to help you achieve your goals by meeting pbjectives through a certain time frame, usually a year. Like a map, it's a guide. It helps you get where you want to go. It should be friendly. It needs to be concise. It must be clearly written. Your content marketing strategy is your friend helping you to maximize your content opportunities and create more customers.

I is for Inspiration

Ensure your content inspires customers to learn, do and take action to actively become better customers, by including inspiration as a mandate in your strategy. Creating, producing, managing and merchandising content is hard work. Build in team inspiration from the beginning, and include customer-centric inspiration as part of your unique positioning and brand voice.

J is for Jettison

There's likely some awful content sitting on your website right now. It's time to set standards of what is acceptable content. Your strategy will outline the criteria for keeping or throwing away content. Removing content is often difficult given stakeholder emotions. Specifying rules and publishing them openly shows departments the impartial nature of the removal decision process.

K is for Knowledge

This is the foundation for the strategy: what we know about i) what we want; ii) how to get there; iii) who we want; iv) what they need in order to be attracted to us. Specify the knowledge your business currently has, the knowledge it needs to uncover; the knowledge leads need to make the decision to become customers; and finally the knowledge required by customers to become ideal customers.

L is for Leadership

As the champion of the content marketing process, your leadership in producing this action plan demonstrates your commitment to i) making the business money; and ii) saving the business money. Specify in the plan the level of leadership required for the strategy to succeed. Customers love to buy, not be sold. How can content marketing take a leadership role for the business?

M is for Message

Content is actually more than content. There's the massage - the what's in the message and how it is presented and reads. Then there's the frame and context of the message - including who it's from, reflecting what has already been sent and reinforcing the meaning through the medium it is delivered. Address relevancy, engagement, and consistency in the strategy.

N is for Needs

Personas, buyers, influencers, decision makers - each constituency has different content needs. The strategy maps all the consumers of content to the specific consumption and preference of that individual. The strategy begins the process of deciphering and explaining exactly what engaging content is, and how that engagement changes from person to person and through the buy cycle. (The single most important work in the entire systematic marketing pipeline process.)

O is for Organize & Orchestrate

The strategy is the one place that contains all your thoughts about content. The strategy is an aid to organizing those thoughts in an order that makes sense. By presenting all the relevant information required to develop, create, produce, deploy, measure and merchandise your content - the strategy allows you to orchestrate the content process for maximum actionable impact.

P is for Process

The strategy is the system is the process. A content marketing strategy includes all the elements of the process, in logical order, including timing, methods and tactics, talk points for brainstorming and creative. The goal of a systematic content marketing process is to create a consistent, engaging, customer-centric message in whatever format required - with as little repetitive overlap as possible.

Q is for Qualify

What's the purpose of content marketing? For B2B and B2C businesses, the purpose is to qualify leads and provide action steps for lead scoring along a road to eventual ideal customers -- and to dis-qualify all others. The strategy is the road map that structures the qualify/dis-qualify roads and provides a high-level view of the action steps needed to identify and move prospective ideal customers through the buy cycle.

R is for Road Map

If you don't know where you're going you'll never know if you reached it yet. A road map is a specialized set of visual instructions for following directions and driving from your start point to the end point. There aren't any gaps on a roadmap. There should not be any gaps that leave actions and tactics up to guessing what's appropriate. The strategy should be comprehensive.

S is for Strategy

What's the strategy for the content marketing strategy. There should be distinctive set times in the year for reviewing the content marketing strategy and revising goals and objectives. The measure, test, revise, test, measure methodology provides ongoing reporting of the KPIs that actually matter. Have a built-in review and revision schedule for your strategy and stick to it.

T is for Tackle

Don't be afraid to tackle big issues in the strategy. If you know that 10 landing pages and offers provide more traffic and leads - then put it in the strategy, and formalize making the attempt. Stretching for larger goals helps you define what the important details are and what can be left for later. Get the strategy tuned up with the help of Sales to create offers and content that attracts your ideal customer.

U is for Understanding

Aim to fill the strategy with customer understanding. Asking questions about the answers you get when you ask the first question is the means to better understanding customer needs, wants and fears. The road bed for content is speaking to customers about what they need to hear when they want to hear it. It's also about being findable and making information available to them because you understand their concerns.

V is for Value

The strategy must provide value to the business in the form of more customers buying more, more often. It can take months and even years for content marketing to demonstrate it's value. Prepare Sales and the C-Suite that as content marketing efforts begin, the current Marketing & Sales activities need to continue as is, to bridge the period between launch and seeing measurable results.

W is for Workflow

When workflow is incorporated into the strategy, there is a clear delineation between responsibilities and milestones that encourages smoother working relationships. Workflow also eliminates task hoarding and "responsibility scope creep" that can red light the process of content creation and execution. Include workflow diagrams and names for consistent performance of your systematic process.

X is for X-ray

The strategy will act as an x-ray providing insight into what customers are saying and doing, andd how well your team is responding in creating managing and deploying content; and in changing emphasis and brandvoice as testing indicates. Your strategy is also a competitive analysis and monitor of the marketplace and the factors affecting change in your ideal customer's actions.

Y is for YAGNI

"You aren't gonna need it". If you're not sure about an element or tactic, drop it for now. The effort of producing usable, findable, relevant, engaging and interesting content will keep most marketing Departments revving their engines in an attempt to stay ahead of the pack. Your challenge is to create a strategy that makes it easy to systematically produce engaging content - and enough of it.

Z is for Zest

If your strategy is pedestrian and boring then your content's going to be boring too. Keep things lively and interesting by stretching abilities and challenging the status quo. Design fun into the process where possible and make brainstorming creative a joint effort across every division in the business. Plan to hold content contests for exciting content and reward every contributor with a memorable bonus.

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.