Content marketing – 12 simple steps to success
Image by Anita Menger from Pixabay
Content marketing can be extraordinarily effective in driving traffic, generating leads and building trust. But you must have an integrated strategy.
Effective content marketing requires your business to undertake continuous, never-ending action. It’s not a campaign-based activity. Rather, you need to create, curate, distribute and share content on an ongoing basis to engage audiences and build trust over the long term.
This, in turn, supports your organisation’s broad marketing and financial objectives. Doing something, anything, in terms of content marketing activity, is better than doing nothing.
However, in a contemporary business environment where all your competitors invariably undertake a variety of content marketing activities to gain an edge, it pays to have an integrated strategy.
From my experience, a successful content marketing strategy comprises 12 simple steps:
Set your objectives
Know your audiences
Develop your brand voice
Determine your content mix
Build your editorial calendar
Allocate responsibilities
Produce your content
Edit
Refine your design
Publish
Promote
Measure the results
1. Set your objectives
What are your reasons for creating content? What’s your vision for success? What are your timeframes and deadlines for achieving your projected marketing and business outcomes?
Typical content marketing objectives include:
Driving brand awareness (especially in terms of positioning your brand as a thought leader in your industry)
Driving traffic to your website
Reducing marketing costs
Generating and nurturing sales leads
Converting sales leads
Nurturing customer relationships and increasing brand retention/loyalty.
2. Know your audiences
Content marketing is an ongoing conversation with your target audiences. So it helps if you understand your audiences’ circumstances and preferences.
You can achieve this understanding by developing buyer personas – distilling the typical attributes of a customer segment into a fictional representation of a specific, individual, fictional character.
Personas help you to identify the types of content you need to produce – that will appeal to the persona’s preferences. Likewise, personas help you to identify the topics your content should cover. They also help you determine the language (i.e. voice and tone) you should use in your content and the ways in which you should distribute your content for optimum consumption.
3. Develop your brand voice
An appropriate voice and tone ensures that your content engages customers and helps you create an emotional connection with them.
While you may use many tones in your content marketing, you should only have one brand voice.
Audiences are more likely to trust your brand if the voice used in your content is consistent across every channel and accurately reflects your organisation’s personality. Individual audience members should feel they’re enjoying a conversation with a friendly, approachable, trustworthy industry expert.
While your brand voice may be consistent, the tone can vary according to the different audiences (or personas) addressed, the different content types and the different messages within each content type. For example, you might use a casual, friendly tone on Facebook or Twitter, and adopt a more formal, professional tone in a white paper.
4. Determine your content mix
The types and formats of the content you produce should align with your objectives, audience preferences, brand personality, your organisation’s skill sets and budget.
There are many formats to choose from, such as:
Blog posts
Case studies
E-books
Fact sheets / checklists
Worksheets and templates
White papers and research reports
Image galleries
Infographics
Slide decks
Videos/vlogs
Podcasts
Webinars
The types of content you produce at any time should also fit with a target audience’s stage in the buying cycle. For example, product specifications don’t generally help in terms of driving brand awareness, but they may be useful for those prospective customers who are on the cusp of buying.
5. Build your editorial calendar
Content marketers need to think like publishers and broadcasters.
To that end, it pays to build an editorial calendar that schedules all the content you produce. It helps to ensure you create, curate, distribute and share each content item at the right time, in the right format and to the right audiences. A calendar also helps to ensure you involve the right team members in the publishing process.
Your calendar can be a relatively simple document, perhaps in an Excel spreadsheet that you can share with your team on a daily basis. It can be developed for your content program for a month or two in advance.
6. Allocate responsibilities
Where possible, a content marketing program should be a team effort that involves a number of people within your marketing department or organisation as a whole. Each person should bring a specific skill set to the program.
Typical roles within a content marketing team include:
Managing editor
Subject matter experts
Writers/editors (in-house and/or outsourced)
Designers
Photographer
Video/audio producer/editor
Social media specialists
7. Produce your content
The initial creation of your content is generally a three-stage process:
Brainstorm
Outline
Write
Brainstorming can be done as a regular team activity in which each member can suggest ideas without fear of immediate criticism or rejection. After concepts are recorded, they can be cross-checked with business objectives and audience needs to determine their relevance and viability.
Once you have a viable concept for a content item, the writer and subject matter expert can create an outline of how it might be executed. Your outline will generally include key messages, creative approach, structure (i.e. the order of points to be covered), and the proposed final format (e.g. blog post, ebook, video, webinar). A single concept might also be repurposed to create a number of parallel content items in different formats.
After you’ve created a basic outline of each proposed content item, it’s usually best to write a first draft as quickly as possible. Set a time period and keep your hands moving on the keyboard the whole time. Don’t stop to correct spelling mistakes or syntax errors. You’ll have time for that later. Just follow the outline and give your stream of consciousness free reign until your draft is complete or your time is up.
8. Edit
The difference between successful content and unsuccessful content often lies in the time and effort given to the editing process.
Too many marketers publish the first draft of a blog post, ebook or even video script without a moment’s thought. They then wonder why the content fails to engage with audiences to the extent they had hoped.
In editing, you simply need to ensure your content item is clear, succinct and relevant to audience needs. To achieve this, you must be ruthless. In fact, I like to describe my editing as a ‘slash and burn’ process. Where possible, I eradicate redundant phrases, eliminate dense jargon and replace formal syntax with a more conversational turns of phrase.
It often pays to read a draft out loud. If something doesn’t make sense when you hear it, you know you have to change it.
You also need an organisational style guide for all team members to follow. This helps to ensure the writing is consistent and aligns with the brand ‘voice’.
9. Refine your design
Your target audience is unlikely to read or view your content if the design or layout is poor. From simple PDFs to web pages, infographics, slide decks and videos, the visual elements of each content item should aid clarity, readability and ease of consumption.
The style of your design should also be consistently relevant, both to your brand personality and to the needs and preferences of your target audience personas.
10. Publish
All of your content should be published on your website and, to ensure it is accessible, it’s a good idea to create a ‘content hub’ section on your website.
A content hub or resource centre can be a central repository that displays categories that enable visitors to easily search for the types of items that interest them. Categories can include subjects (relevant to your industry) and formats (e.g. articles, videos, factsheets, webinars etc).
You should also look for opportunities to repurpose and re-publish your content on third-party sites, such as social media platforms, blogs, industry magazines and news sites.
11. Promote
It’s not enough to just produce content and publish it on your website. You also need a promotion or amplification strategy to inform your target audiences that it’s there – at least until you can build a self-sustaining word-of-mouth reputation.
Examples of channels you can use to promote your content include:
Social media – organic and paid
Search engine optimisation (SEO) – organic and paid
Email
Content syndication
Advertising
Media relations
Telemarketing.
12. Measure the results
There are many ways to measure the return on your content marketing investment. The trick is to develop and present the most relevant metrics to the most appropriate stakeholders.
It’s also important that you remember to align your metrics with the content marketing objectives you outlined in step one.
Accordingly, content marketing analytics to consider might include:
Website traffic volume
Content views and downloads
Social media reach, engagement and shares
Links to your content
Blog subscribers
Lead generation
Sales conversion.
Next steps
Of course, once you’ve measured the results of your content marketing activities, the next steps are to use these metrics to review your objectives, deepen your understanding of audience needs, fine-tune your brand voice, and so on.
The process never ends. It should just keep improving. With continuing process improvement, your business outcomes should just keep getting better.
When you need help with your content marketing, please contact me any time.