5 must have elements for your content marketing

5 Must-Have Elements for Your

Content Marketing

2015

5 Must-Have Elements for Your Content Marketing

INTRODUCTION

Introduction

• What is Content Strategy?

–A critical piece of marketing for businesses of all

kinds.

–Type of marketing that can yield great benefits that

reach audiences you might not otherwise reach

–Not just about a single channel such as a website,

social media, or thought leadership writing

– Takes all of your channels into account and ties them

to business-level goals using meaningful

measurements

Introduction

• Another definition (from Rahel Bailie):

“Content strategy deals with the planning aspects of

managing content throughout its lifecycle, and includes

aligning content to business goals, analysis, and modeling,

and influences the development, production, presentation,

evaluation, measurement, and sunsetting of content,

including governance.

What content strategy is not is the implementation side. The

actual content development, management, and delivery is

the tactical outcomes of the strategy that need to be carried

out for the strategy to be effective.”

Introduction

• Who needs a content strategy?

–There is not a single organization that can’t benefit

from a strong content strategy

–The complexity and sophistication of yours will

depend on:

•Specific marketing needs

•Size of your audiences and your budget

•Scale of your organization.

Introduction

Finally, it’s not enough to simply have a strategy.

It needs to be measurable, practical, achievable and

manageable.

We approach this in five steps:

1.Strategy

2.Content Creation

3.Content Marketing

4.Content Management

5.Measurement


1 | STRATEGY

1: Strategy

• What do we mean when we say “strategy”?

– Establishing goals

– Determining our key audiences

– Determining how to reach those audiences

• All of this needs to tie back to key performance indicators (KPIs)

– Otherwise the work you are doing will not achieve the true

purpose of advancing the company’s goals.

• Following the definition of your strategy comes your marketing plan.

– This is what bridges your marketing goals to your strategy

– Ultimately to the tactics you will use to achieve your stated

objectives

1: Strategy

• What makes a good strategy?

– Ties back to your organizational goals

– When creating your strategy, make sure you keep the following

things in mind:

• What is your business or organization trying to achieve?

• Who are you trying to reach?

• What methods are the most effective ways to reach them?

• What are your competitors doing to reach them?

• What is the ultimate measure of success?

1: Strategy

Remember the 4 stages of the long view of the customer experience as you

create your strategy:

● Awareness

The first connection you have with your audiences is their initial exposure

to your brand and/or products and services

● Perception

Once your audience has exposure, they form an opinion about your brand

● Engagement

The next stage is engaging with your brand, which starts a two-way

dialogue

● Action

Finally, if the engagement is maintained, some sort of action is taken by

your audience

1: Strategy

• A good strategy is measurable

– Your plan must outline how you intend to measure

its success.

– You need to understand how you will track the

pieces of your plan as you

• create the content

• execute your plan.


2 | CONTENT CREATION

2: Content Creation

How do we define Content Creation?

• As we know, content creation can take many forms, including:

– articles, white papers, infographics, website content, emails,

brochures and many other items.

• In the mean time, we are going to talk about three important aspects to

consider about content creation:

1. Think modular

2. Think forward

3. Think realistic

2: Content Creation

Think modular

• Think in terms of how you can create a larger piece of content that can be

broken up into smaller pieces

• For instance, an infographic could play several roles.

– An illustration in a white paper or blog post talking about the topic.

– Smaller callouts on a website, or as short posts on social media.

– Animated and turned into a short video.

• Think about how all of these items were made easy simply by thinking

about how the different channels you create content for share many

similarities.

2: Content Creation

Think forward

• Keep your content assets as future-proof as possible

– Make them easy to scale up and down as different sizes and form

factors are often needed.

• e.g. increasing sizes of social media profile graphics, to things like

retina display resolutions increasing, and many other factors.

• Take into account your schedule and marketing calendar

– How can you take advantage of events that will happen in the future

as you plan out your content creation?

– What overlaps between industry events, or even other

announcements by your organization, and your content calendar?

2: Content Creation

Think realistic

• Make sure that you take reality into account as you start planning your

content creation.

– If your plan is too ambitious and can’t be implemented, it doesn’t

matter how great it would have been

• Ensure the you have enough resources (staff or budget for

agencies/consultants)

• Think about what busy times, events and other things that might be

happening throughout the course of the year.

– Make sure that your content creation schedule takes these times into

account.

2: Content Creation

Think realistic (continued)

• Make sure that you are being realistic about any other dependencies:

– Product launches that seem at risk to not happen on time

– Other items that might fluctuate over time

– Your content creation should be able to be able to anticipate at least

some calendar fluctuation.

• Find methods that allow the items you generate to be:

– Modular

– Flexible

– Consistent

– Able to be repurposed across a variety of mediums.

• Less is more approach to individual pieces can work for teams of any size


3 | CONTENT

MARKETING

3: Content Marketing

How do we define Content Marketing?

• Content marketing is the marketing and business process for creating and

distributing relevant and valuable content to:

–Attract

–Acquire

–Engage

a clearly defined and understood target audience with the objective of

driving profitable customer action

• Content marketing is comparable to what media companies do as their core

business

–Except that in place of paid content or sponsorship as a measure of

success, brands define success by ultimately selling more products or

services.


• Find the Right Channels

–We need to implement our marketing plan using the assets we developed during

the content creation stage:

•We are doing the equivalent of finding paid media outlets

•Instead finding the best channels on which to distribute our content.

•If we prepared an effective strategy, the “content marketing” portion of our

content strategy should be pretty straightforward.

–We are executing our content marketing strategy and plan at this point in the

process.

•Using our editorial calendar, we are placing the content we’ve created and

ensuring the right type of assets are placed:

–At the right time

–In the right place.


How to Deal with Change or New Opportunities

• What if an unbelievable opportunity arises, or much worse, what if something we had

been planning on happening falls through?

–While we don’t want to make a wholesale change to our strategy before we can

measure its effectiveness, many times there are forces outside our control, or

unexpected opportunities that may present themselves long after a plan is

created.

• Proceed cautiously, but do not pass up a good opportunity.

–You should also do your best to find an alternative “next best” solution if

something you were counting on falls through.

–Make sure that the choices you make are strategic and fall according to your

overall goals and objectives

–Remember that at the end of the day, you need to be successful and get the

results you desire


4 | CONTENT

MANAGEMENT

4: Content Management

How do we define Content Management?

• Now that we’ve discussed your content planning, creation, and marketing, we need

to make sure we know how we’re going to keep track of all the assets we’re

coordinating.

– How do you:

• Organize your content

• Categorize them in a way that is easy for both your external and internal

audiences to use most effectively?

• A website content management system (CMS) does this for your web-based content

• You will be creating many other assets as part of your content strategy

– You will need the proper tools to keep track of what you have

– Allows you to be nimble as a marketing team

– Alows you to provide audiences with what they need, where they need it.


Process

– Before we talk about some tools you can use to manage your content,

it’s important to note that simply buying software will not not go too far

without a solid, easy-to-understand process.

– This process will vary depending on:

• The size of your team

• The amount of marketing channels you market on

• The number of agencies you may work with

• The amount of regulations/compliance your industry requires


Process

– The important things to keep in mind is that you need to make it

ultimately very easy to understand your process, including:

• Responsibilities (who does what),

• The timing (when they do it)

• How they do it.

– Documentation will go a long way here, and help you and your team

stay organized.

– Make sure you can document all of the steps along the way and write

it from the perspective of a brand new employee.

– This will make sure it works for the broadest audience possible.


Tools

• While website content management systems keeps your web pages

organized, it’s also important to understand that other types of content

needs to be managed.

– This can include:

• Documents with your corporate messaging

• Graphics files

• Photos

• Videos

• Other files


Tools

• The most basic tool may be a shared hard drive that you store all your files

on.

– This may work for smaller organizations, but soon you may find it hard

to find things if you are searching for things based on a way that your

shared drive is not organized.

– This means you may need a storage system that allows you to

categorize or tag content.

– You may find that you quickly run out of storage space if you work

often with larger media files such as videos.


Tools

• Here are a few things to keep in mind as you look for the right tools for

your organization:

– Is it flexible enough so that your internal and any external teams can

use it?

– Does it allow you to categorize and organize your files and information

in a way that makes it easy to search and sort?

• Try thinking through a few scenarios that involve trying to find

something based on timing or by subject matter and make sure

the system will work for you.

– Does it have enough storage capacity for both today and tomorrow?

• Categorization of content will help you as your library of assets continues

to grow.


Evaluation

• Evaluation in this phase is meant to determine how well the management

itself is working:

– Does your team spend less time trying to locate files, messaging

examples or other materials?

– Are you able to easily find your content based on timing, marketing

channels, or campaigns?

• With all of the great content assets you’ll be creating, they can easily get

out of hand and be difficult to organize without the right type of

management plan.

– This may include processes in combination with the right tools, and

the way it scales will depend on the size and type of your organization.


5 | MEASUREMENT

5: Measurement

How do we define measurement?

• It is the ultimate way to determine if your content strategy has

had success.

• No marketing effort would be complete without a measurement

plan.

• While the plan itself is created much earlier in the process, the

measurement part of your content strategy is where you begin to

report on how your efforts are performing across:

– Audiences

– Channels

– Campaigns and tactics within those campaigns

5: Measurement

Process

If you work measurement into your content creation and marketing process,

it will never feel as if it is an afterthought.

Ask yourself the following questions:

● Who is the target audience?

● Where will this content be viewed or consumed?

● What is the desired action (download, view, etc.)?

● What type of measurement is available?

● How will you report on the success of this piece of content?

5: Measurement

Tools

– The measurement tools you are able to use will depend on whether

you have direct access to the property where the content is displayed.

– Owned properties: on properties you either own (your website) or

“rent” (your social media properties) you will be able to directly view

statistics about who is viewing your content

– When you have direct access to measurement, you can use

tools like:

» Google Analytics for websites

» Built-in tracking/reporting tools in platforms like

Facebook

» Subscribe to other third-party services that are able to

aggregate statistics from a variety of sources.

5: Measurement

Tools

• Third party properties

– Sometimes your content is not somewhere that you have direct

access to view analytics or statistics from.

• Content on a high-traffic website or publication can give you great

visibility you may not otherwise be able to get

– When you don’t have direct control over where your content is placed,

you will need to find ways to drive traffic to places that you are able to

track. Try:

• call to action to download content

• links to your website

• other prompts can help you capture some of the traffic that is

viewing your content.

• Pay attention to your organic search traffic to determine if you

have a spike in traffic from searches

5: Measurement

Tools

• Third party properties

– While you may not be able to see the direct search

terms audiences are using, you may see a bump in

traffic.

• Another way to help here is by buying keywords

using paid search advertising that are related to

your content marketing efforts.

• This will help capture some of the traffic from

people who are seeking more information.

5: Measurement

• Evaluation

– When you ask the questions suggested earlier in the

“Process” section, your evaluation of the success of

your efforts becomes much easier.

– To summarize, we’ll evaluate our efforts based on

three major things:

i. Audience

ii. Action

iii. Result

5: Measurement

Evaluation

Audience: who is viewing our content?

○ We can ask ourselves if the audience interacting

with our content is our primary audience.

○ If so, we are able to reach the right people with our

message, and we are successful so far.

5: Measurement

Evaluation

Action: what are they doing once they view our content?

○ Once the right people are viewing our content, what

are they doing with it?

○ Are they quickly viewing and then moving on, or are

they spending time with it?

○ Do they share it with other colleagues, friends or

family?

5: Measurement

Evaluation

Result: what has their action achieved?

○ Once we have reached the right audience and they are

interacting with it, what do is the end result?

○ Do they:

■ contact you for more information

■ purchase a product

■ give you their contact information

■ take a survey?

○ This will be the true test of the success of your efforts

5: Measurement

• Evaluation

– Based on your evaluation, you’ll be presented with options:

• If things are performing well, you may keep things as they

are or only make minor adjustments.

• If there is a lot of room for improvement, you may make

more substantial changes to your content and even how it’s

measured.

• You will need to compare initial results with your revised

ones.

• Through an iterative process, you will get closer and closer

to the results you desire and hopefully begin to quickly

exceed them.


CONCLUSION

Conclusion

• We’ve covered the entire content marketing process in 5 steps:

–Strategy

•What are your goals, who are you reaching and how?

–Content Creation

•What content will be used to reach your audiences?

–Content Marketing

•Tactical execution of your strategy

–Content Management

•Organization and coordination of your content marketing pieces

–Measurement

•Evaluation of the effectiveness of your efforts

Conclusion

• For those that are mid-way through a set of content

marketing efforts:

–It never hurts to re-evaluate how you got where you

are

–Sometimes it doesn’t require starting from scratch to

revisit a step in the process that you might have

rushed through

–Reviewing your planning and creation might allow

you to make a significant improvement to an effort

that is currently underway.

Conclusion

• May you be intentional, strategic, and ultimately

successful in all of your marketing efforts!