the write provider digital marketing guide part 1

Why Document your Content Marketing Strategy?

Most content marketers will admit that they skip the strategic planning stage because

clients want instant results – or they at least want to see some action from their marketing

team. Managing clients is something that everyone who sells intangible products needs to

perfect.

When you see the difference a documented content strategy makes, you will realise that you’ve been wasting budgets for a long time. From our experience at The Write Provider, businesses that use a defined strategy:

Gain more from analytics Are more efficient and effective marketers Are more connected to their existing and target customer base See better returns on their investment

There is no one-size fits all solution for content marketing. Effective content marketing requires a bespoke approach that is both measurable and sustainable. Simply writing a regular blog post is not content marketing, although it is an essential element for many businesses.

The challenge for many businesses is knowing where to start, who to trust with the budget and being will to accept that content marketing is a long-term marketing process. Content marketing is a method that improves efficiency over time and will lead to a low-cost per acquisition for each sale if your business commits to the plan.

“Content is the fuel and social is the engine”

Create your three-step plan to research, convince and convert your audience.

It is not enough to provide a good product or service. Modern customers require a

brand connection.

DIGITAL MARKETING MASTERCLASS Content Marketing

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Agree Your Innovation Action Plan

Anyone asking for a content marketing budget needs to present a convincing to the business’ CFO that demonstrates that it is a worthwhile strategy. The value of innovation is difficult to prove because it is uncharted territory, but having a strategy in place and agreeing how to introduce KPIs ensures the venture is measurable. Measurement allows for improvement and it is the basis for everything in business, as is proven by the need for an analytics industry.

How to Plan Your Innovation

Sitting on your own and looking at case studies is nobody’s idea of fun, but who said marketing was fun all the time? Case studies matter because they contain experience that would otherwise cost your business dearly to find out. Although, you should always understand that someone else’s experience is not always your own. Your business, its product and its customers are unique to your situation. That makes it important to know what your business can extrapolate from the experience of other businesses and what is irrelevant to tour

situation – in other words, keep an open mind and look to improve the methods of others.

When you are ready for a team meeting where your marketing stars are primed for this ‘innovating` approach, you need to have an agenda that will help you create your content

marketing plan.

This is what your meeting should establish:

What are your business’ challenges?

What is the ‘best case` outcome from

this venture?

What is the cost of failure?

Decide who can help with this planinternally and what resources will youneed to bring in and what you can

outsource.

What is your budget?

What are your KPIs and when will you

measure them against targets?

What, if any obstacles do you anticipate

and how will you deal with them?

Who has responsibility each area of yourcontent marketing plan and how willthey manage it?


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Forming your Case to Convince CFOs

ROI on content marketing is difficult to measure. Some content appears to convert everyone it interacts with into sales, but that is only because it is content at the lower end of the funnel. The sales funnel may start with a 145-character tweet that you send six-months before the customer is ready to interact with your business. Without those touch points for your business, customers will have another brand or product in mind

When making your case, try not to focus on ROI. That is important, but it is not something that should dominate your presentation because it is largely unknown for your business until you experiment. As your content marketing strategy follows a unique plan with outsourced and in-house resources, the actual cost of marketing and the profit it generates will also be unique to your organisation.

When making your case, cover the following points as clearly as possible:

1. What are your goals for content marketing?Some businesses want to increase brand awareness, other businesses want to retaincustomers and many want to nurture leads. Define goals that your business requires from acampaign in order for the process to be successful.

2. How great is your need?Your business should have a need that is great enough to commit resources for anacceptable period in order to gauge results and improve on the process. Are you able touse content marketing to improve your business?

3. What is involved in making your content marketing business model work?Summarise the scope of your business plan and state what team you will need in place. Willyou need to reduce resources for marketing that is already in place or will you recruit extrabodies and allocate new funding?

4. What motivating factor does content marketing have that distracts you from other tasks?


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Will existing marketing efforts, such as SEO, benefit from the added digital presence?

Do you feel content marketing is the right choice for redirecting resources from poorly

performing areas of your business?

5. What will make you fail and what will happen if your content marketing strategy does

not succeed?

Does your content marketing’s success have risks or obstacles that could affect the

success of your campaigns and stop you reaching your goals? Be aware of what you can

control and how you are able to reduce risks to an acceptable level. How will any action

you take to alleviate risk affect your ROI?

Targeting Personas

People are obsessed with demographics and the amount of data available can distort marketing efforts for some businesses. It is the buyer persona that you should influence how you target content marketing, as this is what will sell your product or service.

For example, a child may like a clothing product because a famous teen idol wears it. Would your business have more sales when marketing those clothes on a children’s entertainment website or one that concentrates on parenting? Targeting the buyer is likely to show more profit.

Similarly, a business selling cloud services may offer the best hardware on which to run those services. Should the business’ content marketing efforts highlight the technical specifications to technically minded IT professionals? Should it target CFOs and highlight bottom line benefits of low acquisition costs and the lower lifetime costs of cloud computing versus on-premise IT?

Demographics will work to some extent in the first example, because children are unable to impulse buy online. In the second example, the business would have a lower ROI because the data is not sufficient for a highly targeted campaign. Both the CFO and the IT


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professional may read the content produced by the IT services company in the first example, but only half of the data would be effective without the use of a buyer persona.

Keep the fact that your buyers are people and unique well within sight. Separate your target market by how those people behave. Market to the person, not the demographic. To do this, you will need to create buyer personas to which you will target your content.

Persona Development Creating and testing many buyer personas is too costly and may even be unnecessary for many businesses, but that does not mean that many personas are not useful or should not play a part when budget and time allow for them.

If your business needs to obtain actionable data, early in the content marketing journey then you need to take time to understand your target market. Personas are something you MUST research. When you have your personas, you need to walk through the process of that buyer interacting with your brand on each or multiple touch points. Remember that conversions are something that happen at the end of a process and you cannot implement that process until

you understand it.

Eventually, you will have a persona for each market segment that you want to penetrate. Each persona travels to your point of sale as a successful conversion, but arrives through different first point of contact to another buyer. The persona may jump into the middle of your funnel or arrive directly at your sales page thanks to PPC, but wants to know more about your company. If that is the case, the buyer will explore your on site content and possibly download digital assets such as e-books or reports. Imagine the power of successfully accessing and converting customers at every touch point through effective content distribution.

What do you need to include in a buyer persona? Decide who the customer is and think about the buyer’s need in terms of their problem - not your solution. Then you can decide how your business can add value to a relationship with

that persona.


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Plan your Persona Engagement Engaging your audience, or rather, getting your audience to engage with your brand or businesses is the ultimate aim of content marketing at the top of the funnel. The engagement cycle is something that your business uses in all its sales, so effectively planning and executing it online with minimal input

is the holy grail of digital marketing.

The reason we call it an engagement cycle is that not every customer will travel from first touch point (PPC or social perhaps?) and head straight down your path to a sale. Along the way, potential customers will have objections or obstacles that stop them

converting.

This is why planning the engagement cycle is a critical part any content marketing plan. At the very least, you should collect email addresses in return for something with a user-perceived value that you provide in

the form of downloadable content.

Some businesses use a content lock that hides content from users until they sign in. When users sign in to a site using social media profiles, the business is not only able to market to the users via email, but it

should have much better data.

All data has value, each time your business collects data about a potential customer, it gives your business the opportunity to tailor marketing target to that user many more times. Use these tactics and your cost per customer acquisition will eventually

plummet.

By now, you should realise why a customer engagement cycle is critical. Most of your business’ marketing expense should be for that initial effort at the top of your sales

and marketing funnel.

Takeaway - Decide what you want to say to your audience at each stage and when

or how you want to say it.

The Perfect Salesperson

Think of your website and content

as a robot. It does everything that a

traditional marketing and sales

department does without sleep.

It does eat and content is the best

nourishment. Feed content through

your online channels in line with a

planned engagement cycle and you

will sell online.


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Plan the Sale A defined sales process allows you to monitor your traffic from broader marketing at the top of your funnel through to highly targeted content when conversion takes place at the bottom. This how you can tell what your potential customer knows about you or if they know nothing

at all before the first encounter.

Analytics allows you to categorise each person or prospect using the following table:

Audience Member How Qualified is the Lead

First Encounter Raw lead/data from first contact

Aware of You Searched for you or reacted to remarketing

Engaged Prospect Subscriber, member, webinar viewer or all

Evaluating Your Offer Yet to buy, but still engaging

A Positive Reactor Has made a purchase

You can plan your content to target audience members easily when you understand how your funnel works.

From a buyer’s perspective Buyers are likely to go through periods of indecision, especially when your business has larger average order costs than it would if you sold snacks and drinks. That is why engagement and

being ever-present is important from first point of contact.

You can’t force customers down your funnel, although sales and other methods of introducing urgency are good methods of converting indecisive prospects to buyers. Discounting may not always work in your industry and you should avoid it wherever possible, especially when competitors saturate the industry with similarly discounted offers. Go for another USP and win

by convincing through engagement.


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Buyers will not always act as you want them to and that will not matter if all your content supports the overall content mission. You can ensure your content achieves this objective by

putting in effort early when creating personas and a content marketing mission plan.

We will address many more areas of content marketing, using in-depth knowledge of how and where to place your content to ensure you maintain a consistent voice for your chosen distribution channel. If you would like to learn more, visit http://www.writeprovider.co.uk/ and submit your Email to receive every instalment of the The Write Provider’s Digital

Marketing Guide.

Product or Industry Aware

Research

Buying DecisionCompare Product

or Providers

Conversion

The following diagram is a rough demonstration of the engagement cycle, but it is fair

to assume that your audience can jump in at any point and will not necessarily start

where you expect. They may also drop out of the cycle and re-engage some other time

for many reasons that we will never know entirely.

http://www.writeprovider.co.uk/


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About The Write Provider:

The Write Provider is a team of digital marketing

professionals who pride themselves on meeting

the challenges of an ever-changing digital

marketplace. We have a good track record of

creating delivering high quality content to the

right audience and the right time and in the right

location. If you need help with your content

marketing, call 020 8798 0672 or 020 7993 8817

Email [email protected]