6 Steps to a Killer Content Marketing Strategy

This book, and indeed the way we like to do things at WMG firmly hangs upon our 6 Steps to a Killer Content Marketing Strategy. Each step of this strategy is integral to a successful content marketing campaign. And we cover each area in detail in this book. So read on to find out how to create and execute a killer content strategy for your business.

Food for Thought: How to Generate Your Most Important Content Marketing Asset

A good idea is a powerful weapon. If content marketing is marketing designed to heighten the potential of your clients’ brands, then the idea that the content is centred around is the foundation for your entire campaign. So, how do you create an idea that has the potential to raise the profile of your clients’ brands? We put it to you that regardless of the size, scope and style of your client, innovation is the key. Innovation of what, precisely? Your approach, your method, and your idea selection process.

Collaboration is king

Content marketing moves fast. Extremely fast. In digital marketing, you are only as good as your best content idea. Therefore, every effort needs to be taken to generate the best possible idea, and when it comes to ideas, the more brains involved the better.

In the days of old, it used to be that individuals in companies would sit separately in their own little cubicles, and would work on their own ideas. Of course, things have changed and you’d be hardpressed to find an office that isn’t open plan, spacious and collaborative.

Collaboration is crucial for idea generation and is almost certainly the best approach to take. Get your team together, stand up and find a quiet room. It’s all about bouncing ideas off one another and throwing things against the wall to find the best ideas.

Topic Meeting

Collaborating sounds like a total free-for-all approach to idea generation, but if implemented in according to a strict methodology, your collaborative ideas session will be highly productive. An excellent method is topic mapping.

Topic mapping helps you to take the product that your client offers, and build out all of the possible angles for engaging content. Take the example of a running shoe seller. If you’re trying to create engaging content for them, you might take the concept of the running shoe and thing of all of the possible angles available by mapping them out in a sort of web which helps you link ideas to one another. With the running shoe as an example, you might start with the idea of the best running routes in your area, how to cool down after a run, or running endurance and health tips and go from there.

The second step is inherently more challenging than the first, but there are some great free tools you can use to help you make your decision. The first is Google Trends, which allows you to enter a keyword term and discover what topics are in vogue on the web. Another tip would be to use Google Analytics to see what content your client has been successful with in the past to ensure your idea is well suited to your client’s audience’s tastes. These tools are really just the basics, and professional content marketers have a number of extra paid tools that help them pinpoint the best idea. Ultimately, an idea is the seed from which a campaign grows, so to make the most of your idea, from your approach, your method and your idea consolidation, and you’ll be surprised by the results.

3 Ways to Create Content that People Actually WANT to Consume

I’m a massive consumer of content. Huge. If content were food, I would be that person who has to have the side of their house removed in order to get out of bed. I read content before I get out of bed. I read content before saying good morning to my daughter. (I don’t even say good morning to my husband any more – I’m too busy). I listen to podcasts on my drive to work. I consume videos, blogs, ebooks all day at work. I watch how-to’s and attend webinars while I’m on the cross trainer at night, and wind-down with a TED talk in the bath. Yet so much of what I consume is utter rubbish. Out of all this content fodder I’m chowing down on every day, I would guess I consume one good piece of content a day.

The reason? Relevance.

If it has absolutely no relevance and no benefit to me, my life, my work, and therefore my mind, I lose interest.

Where's the ah-ha?

The problem is, “4 ways to this”, and “7 reasons for that” are all interesting headlines, but when I actually read the content there is no “Ah-ha!” moment.

If I read “The secret to a successful and happy life” I am expecting to learn the secret, and implement it into my daily life, thus being eternally successful and happy. High expectations, you say?

When I’m consuming content I’m expecting digital generosity: tips I can use, links I can click, things that are going to make my life easier. And that one really useful, completely unique idea which makes me say “Ah-ha!”. It’s the realisation that you can really achieve THAT thing, with THESE simple steps.

The Top 3 Super-helpful Secrets To Creating Amazingly-relevant Content For Your Awesome Audience

OK, so my headline is definitely going too far, this is nothing ground-breaking, but it should definitely tick your “Ah-ha, I can use this in the daily implementation of my content plan going forward” box.

1. Targeting Content On Where Consumers Are In The Buying Process

Surprisingly, according to a recent study from eConsultancy and the Content Marketing Institute, only 40% of UK marketers are using this tactic to decide what content they should be publishing. Yet to me, this seems like the most obvious:

• It keeps the content relevant – and that’s the goal!
• It helps to generate leads.
• Because it’s attributed to your sales process, it's valuable, and therefore can quite easily be attributed with an ROI.

So you can quite easily create a plan which targets each of these stages within the buying funnel, in a format suitable for your audience at that stage, and the result should be that your customers turn into promoters; talking about you, tweeting about you, and generally just saying really good stuff on your behalf, becoming earned assets which you can continue to reap the benefits from thanks to all your hard work you put in upfront.

Tip: Prioritise which phase needs addressing first. For instance if your problem is that you get leads but they don’t convert, focus first on some great testimonials – perhaps video testimonials, case studies, guides to your products, fact sheets and some bespoke tools for your sales people to use.

This goes hand in hand with my next point…

2. Translating Customers’ Problems Into Content

It is a fact that people love nothing more than a problem solver. Agony aunts still plague magazines and tabloids. Q&A sites are becoming increasingly popular and cover everything from medical problems to how to grow vegetables. Everyone loves a problem solver. Importantly, problems are emotive subjects. They’re personal to the beholder and consume their minds, causing stress and anxiety when there is no solution.

Become the problem solver, and you’ll be talking directly to your customer, on their level, and to their emotions. It's a well-known fact that people buy people. So building a relationship and addressing your customers emotions with understanding, empathy and ultimately a solution creates a strong bond. (Note: This applies to B2B as well as B2C – honest!) Don’t tell them stuff that’s just not relevant though, like how many widgets your gadget has. What they really want to know is how you are going to solve their problem. In their language – not jargon. They’re asking “Great, but how does this help me?”

Think benefits over features. Here’s how:

1. Create a list of problems your customers have (you might have to actually talk to your customers to do this, and ask them what their biggest problem was that you fixed for them).
2. Create a list of solutions you offer to counter them (but keep it benefit driven, not feature driven.).
3. Curate the solutions into broad topic areas; lists, how-tos, complete guides to… soon enough you’ll have a bunch of resources that you can begin to create, based on solving a problem for the customer rather than selling a feature-driven solution.

Tip: get into the habit of using the word YOU in your content. If you begin to say WE, stop, think about it, and turn it around to become a benefit for your customer. If you can’t, it probably wasn’t relevant anyway. Move on and come back to it later.

3. Personalising Your Content To Who You Are Talking To

Again, we want to be relevant. That’s the aim. So talking to the masses isn’t going to cut it. It makes content too broad, non-specific, and therefore might as well be chip paper tomorrow. There are many ways to personalise your content:

1. By industry:

• Create case studies by industry
• Produce industry reports
• Make good-looking infographics all about one industry and the effect of your product or service on it.

2. By profiling buyers or creating personas

A marketing director wants different information and in a different format to a CEO. A Mum needs different content to a Dad. Whether it's B2B or B2C, profiling who you are talking to in any one piece makes it super-relevant. Think about that person’s needs, what do they want from you? And how is that different to the other buyers you’re talking to?

3. By company size

• In most industries, if you’re targeting B2B buyers, their needs are influenced greatly by their size.
• Create bite-size pieces of useful, specific content for smaller businesses (they tend to be busy doing 5 people’s jobs!) but for larger businesses, create content which engages – like videos, webinars and in-person events.

Tip: The power of One. Keep your focus on one thing, for one person, one need, one objective. Even if it’s a short-but-sweet blog post, the point is it’s relevant and focused on a niche.

Takeaways:

• Make sure your content has an “ah-ha”. Answer the question, give away at least one good tip, tool or link. It’s for the greater good.
• Make sure your content is relevant by targeting: the buying process, customer need or personalisation.
• Even if it's B2B, try to create content focused on emotion. People buy people.
• Focus copy on “You” and not “We”.

Want to know more? We run targeted content campaigns for many of our clients and find it's the best way to segment topics for successful content marketing. Contact us to find out how WMG can help you

The Format: Why an Integrated Approach to Content Marketing Works

Content comes in a variety of different forms, and with so many to choose from, how do you know which one works best for your company? From video and audio to text and apps, fixating on one might seem like a money saver, but in fact it will only limit your marketing potential.

Using one type of content will appeal to one type of person and fulfil one need, so diversify and make your content interesting. A mixture of content formats will mean that you are able to target a variety of audiences.

Often you can reuse your content, so producing an infographic which is supported by a feature blog article, highlighting and explaining the key facts and figures can work. Equally, producing a hefty and complex report could allow you to create video-explainers or video blogs which last a couple of minutes, but which convey the messages within the report in a more visual, interactive manner.

Text

Text based content can vary from a very informative news piece or ‘how to’ to opinion, recommendation and thought leadership. Text content generally drives more traffic than video and is easy to consume.

Visual

Visual content can be video, images, live streams or infographics, amongst others. Visual content, and particularly video, is extremely shareable, and so is a great way to increase brand awareness.

Audio

Audio content is usually a podcast and can come in the form of answering questions, reviews, information, or something humorous. Podcasts are somewhat undervalued by marketers, but it can be a great way to grab attention.

Brands That Use A Variety Of Content Well

Kraft

An American company, Kraft got on the content marketing bandwagon pretty early when they created www.kraftrecipes.com. A hub of information and interaction, this website includes recipes, budget tips, ‘how to’ videos, an area for community discussion and an app for your mobile. They have harnessed a variety of content and made it work for them. Kraft have made sure that they have a consistent brand voice throughout their content types, and made sure each piece of their content is specifically targeted. They have built a community through this, with people sharing their ideas and experiences through comments.

Adobe

Because Adobe offers a variety of different software suites, they separate their content into different spheres – they even have different social media accounts for the different areas of their business. Their “Metrics not Myths” is the campaign that Adobe used to raise awareness of their Marketing Cloud. Adobe used video, blog posts and an app to market their product and through it, the campaign drove 12x the weekly target of direct inquiries.

Takeaways

• Different types of content mean that you can target different audiences
• Use a mixture in your digital marketing campaigns
• Make sure each piece is targeted and has a goal
• Keep a consistent voice across all formats

Content Promotion: The Key to Content Marketing Success

Spending hours crafting the perfect piece of content for your site doesn’t guarantee that it will reach your target audience. The key to content marketing success actually lies within content promotion. How you promote your content online with paid, earned and owned media can be the difference between one person reading your content and one hundred thousand people. With this in mind, here is a step by step guide to choosing the best channel to amplify your content, plus we’ve created a handy infographic to help!

Finding Your Target Audience

Content promotion isn’t simply about tweets, posts, pins and photos. It’s about targeting your audience and finding out which platforms they populate daily. Integrating your content on a channel that your audience uses every day is a simple way to get your brand noticed for all of the right reasons. So how do you know where your audience hang out? Research. If your target audience are males under the age of 35, Facebook and YouTube are where you will find them. But if females over the age of 35 are your target demographic, focus your content marketing efforts on Facebook and Twitter. Be sure to keep an eye on the channels that your competitors are using and the track the response they are getting. Social tools like BuzzSumo are ideal for identifying key influencers in your industry by helping you stay one step ahead of your competitors.

Choose a Channel

Once you have found where your audience is, you can then use this channel to communicate your message. In order to locate potential brand ambassadors that will share your content, you must find a channel that complements your brand and the type of content you wish to promote.

Social Channels

Will you be engaging your customers with interesting blog content via Twitter and Facebook or would your content be more suited to YouTube or Pinterest? You don’t have to pick one and stick to it, experiment with a few channels to see which one works for you. Facebook and Twitter may be the most popular channel but if you are a beauty, fashion or lifestyle brand trying to target a young demographic, an image based platform like Pinterest or Instagram may be more appropriate.

Tailor Your Content For Social

The key to content curation is maximising your chance of success on each of your chosen channels. For example, rather than pushing out the same content on Twitter and Facebook, tailor your status updates accordingly. Updating each social platform with the headline of your article or infographic is not going to engage key influencers so take a moment to make each update bespoke and give your followers a reason to share it. If you are using Twitter as your chosen channel use a hashtag to expand your reach and use a URL shortner like Bitly to make your tweet more reader friendly.

Paid, Earned And Owned

Without content promotion, a huge social following or a database full of engaged email subscribers, your content will probably fall on deaf ears. The best way to tackle this problem is to use paid methods, like PPC, display advertising and email list buying to increase your owned channels – like your email subscriber list and your social media channel. When you continue to deliver great content, these subscribers, followers and customers become your brand ambassadors, earning you great reviews, testimonials, and ultimately promoting your messages for you, meaning that the initial cost of earning and owning those channels through paid media can be reduced.

Effort Vs. Budget

SEO Moz created a really helpful reference guide to help choose the best channel for your marketing (we’ve included this in the infographic we produced). When considering which channel to use to promote your content, take into consideration which is going to give you the best result quickest – a.k.a the low hanging fruit. That doesn’t mean you should dismiss higher cost or higher effort channels.

Looking at the broad ROI expectation is a must to be able to make an informed decision. Your content needs to impact the bottom line. The effort and cost of one channel is only worthwhile if it's going to give you a greater ROI than the next channel. Use your content as a tool for nurturing and growing each of your channels.

How To Choose The Right Channel For Your Content

We’ve created an infographic as a quick reference guide to how to choose the right channel for your content. Whether you need to work out the best social platform for your audience, you’re assessing the benefits of paid, earned and owned channels, or you’re looking at what will achieve the best ROI compared to the time and effort required, we’ve got it covered.

Takeaways

• Developing a multifaceted strategy to promote your content via shared, earned and owned media is essential for content marketing success.
• Don’t underestimate the power of your own marketing assets. Use your social media presence, email lists and blogs to leverage your content.
• Always take a bespoke approach to content curation.
• Assess channels based on their ROI – and then decide whether to spend the time or money on nurturing them with your content.

How to Measure Your Content Marketing Success

Fundamental to measuring success, is defining objectives and measures at the start of your campaign. What is it you want to see from your content marketing?

• Better SEO rankings?
• A lift in email newsletter subscribers?
• More leads?
• More sales?
• An increase in social followers?

You may have had great ideas which could be turned into beautifully crafted content, but if you haven’t considered how you’ll be measuring the success of your content, or what the aim of your content was in the first place, the content you’ve just spent all that time creating could be wasted.

In a previous chapter – 3 ways to Create Content People Actually WANT to Consume, we explained the different content tactics you should use depending on where the visitor was in your buying funnel.

Objective: Attract Strangers

Taking this concept, you may decide that because you are targeting ’Strangers’, you will be creating infographics, videos and blogs, increasing your SEO rankings and general PR. Measures for attracting strangers will be things like:

• Backlinks: Achieved by people liking your content and sharing it with their network through their blog, their website, or some other linkgenerating method. This is the most effective way of increasing your SEO rankings.
• Rankings: If you’re generating links back to your site, your rankings should improve. If you have good rankings, the likelihood of strangers stumbling across your site when they’re conducting informational searches increases.
• Unique visits: Number of unique visitors to your site. The more the better – these are new people who have never visited before, and therefore represent awareness.
• Onsite engagement: Bounce rate and time on site are both great indicators of engagement. Visitors should be browsing your site MORE and for LONGER if you’re creating engaging content.

Objective: Engage Visitors

If you want to work on keeping your visitors returning, and convert them to a lead or sale, you might want to start a relationship with them by signing them up to an email newsletter with the offer of a free report, industry whitepaper, or invite only seminar or workshop. Metrics you’re looking for here are:

• Number of leads
• Number of email subscribers …and then unique opens and clicks within the email showing the engagement.
• Number of returning vs new visitors. This will tell you if your content is genuinely valued, as you will see an increase in returning customers the more compelling your content.
• Number of downloads. If you are creating assets which are downloadable you can both collect email addresses in order to send the asset via email, and you can track the downloads to assess the success.
• Number of attendees. If you’re holding in-person events, track the number of attendees (and encourage them to bring a friend!).
• Video views. You can see this and you can access drop-off stats within YouTube, mirroring the drop off against your video.

Tip: You should make sure you have high converting landing pages – regardless of your call to action (sign up, download, attend, enquire…), you can maximise engagement and conversion with some bespoke, best-practice landing pages. Look at Unbounce for an easy way to set up and test landing pages without needing to use your IT department.

Objective: Convert Leads

Once you have your lead, the idea is to close. For that lead to become a customer they need to trust you. This is of paramount importance. You’ll be providing testimonials, case studies, data sheets, calculators, and analysis – all kinds of tools that will help your lead to make that important decision. The key metric here…

Conversions. Yep. That’s it. If your objective is to close, then there isn’t a better measure than how many you closed vs how many leads you had.

We believe that whether you are a new visitor, a lead or a customer, you should always be the recipient of amazing content. Your measurements for delighted customers will be things like:

• Reviews and testimonials. Sites like TripAdvisor for the travel and leisure industry are a great example of this. Google star ratings or review sites specific to your industry are a great indicator.
• Social media engagement. Your customers will be your greatest ambassadors. They might need a bit of encouragement, but if you’re active on social media, they will reciprocate.
• Email newsletter engagement. As before, opens and clicks are a great indicator of engagement, but also any call to action which isn’t lead-generating is another way to see that your customers are engaging.

Tip: Create a newsletter JUST for customers. This can be advertised as an exclusive customer-only newsletter where they are rewarded with first-look content and customer-only offers.

Tools To Measure Your Content Marketing Success

Whilst Google Analytics is a great start, having a deeper understanding of your content marketing metrics is a must. Using just one analytics data source is a risk, so we recommend using a variety to make sure you have a 360 degree view of your content metrics:

• Radian 6. Crucial for in-depth social monitoring, and includes analysing opinions and demographics of your audience
• Core Metrics (Now part of IBM Enterprise Marketing Management suite). Provides web analytics, assists in providing sophisticated content recommendations and helps to bring together offline marketing initiatives with online campaigns.
• Omniture. This is like a very bespoke version of Google Analytics. Everything is personalised to the client, making things like analysing a user journey and optimising for buyer behaviour a lot more targeted and a lot easier!

The Best Of The Free Content Apps

Here are a couple of other tools we use regularly, which feature either a free trial or a free version to use before scaling up to a paid subscription:

1. Buffer app. Buffer allows you to post to multiple social sites through its platform, and acts as a URL shortener. The great thing about Buffer is that not only can you see the engagement (clicks, retweets) but you can also see what Buffer labels “potential” – this is the number of people who may have seen your post. What’s more, you can connect it to Bit.ly…
2. Bit.ly enterprise. Bit.ly is essentially a URL shortener. But more than this, it tracks link performance across different platforms and its social media dashboard allows you to monitor and optimise your content publication.
3. Wildfire app. Excellent because it links seamlessly with other Google packages you might already be using, Wildfire app allows you to create paid promotions and integrate them with bespoke social landing pages which all feed into the Google products you already use.
4. Unbounce. Perfect if you struggle to push things through your IT department. Unbounce lets you use a template to create a bespoke landing page which is optimised for converting – whether it’s a download, an enquiry, an email newsletter sign up.
5. MailChimp. Chimp is an email campaign management service, perfect for starting your email newsletter list and managing your subscribers. You can download or pay a small fee for email templates, and the best thing is that you can send 12,000 emails to 2000 subscribers absolutely free.

The Last Piece of the Content Marketing Puzzle: Iterating Your Content Strategy

As we’ve seen over the past month, there’s much more to content marketing than you at first might think. It’s a complex subject that lots of people – including so-called content marketers – struggle with.

In this final blog post on the content marketing series, I summarise the main points from the previous blog posts to give you a comprehensive look at all that a good content marketing strategy contains. Then, in the second part, I explain how you can take all that you’ve learnt from your successful campaign, and use it to inform your campaign strategy for next time.

The Content Lifecycle Story So Far

What we’ve been building up to is a model that views content marketing as having a lifecycle. Each of the blog posts in this short series on content marketing has shown a particular aspect of the lifecycle:

1. Idea Generation: (How to create a brilliant, marketable idea)

• A good idea is a powerful weapon
• Collaboration is essential to idea generating
• Mapping out topics thematically helps to narrow down your idea search space
• Selecting your idea of choice is simple with the right analytic tools

2. Content Targeting: (How to pitch your content at a relevant audience)

• Provide your reader with at least one “Ah-ha!” moment by answering the question you set out to answer
• Choose a method of delivery that finds your target market
• Make your content relevant and reader-focused

3. Choosing the Format: (Selecting a suitable format for the content)

• Different types of content allow you to target different audiences
• Using a number of formats is more effective than using one
• Keep your voice consistent across formats

4. Content Promotion: (Isolating the platforms the content will be delivered on. Three ways to choose the right channel are:)

• By who you’re targeting
• By choosing between paid, earned or owned channels
• By analysing effort required versus the budget allocated and ultimately, the likely ROI

5. Measuring Success:

• Decide on your objectives, and then how you’ll measure them before creating content
• Ways to measure whether your objective is to attract, convert, close or delight
• The tools to measure your content marketing success – free and paid.

The above bullet points have all been discussed in lots of detail in the weeks past, so before we round out the last step in the lifecycle of content marketing, have a look back and refresh yourself.

Step 6 – Iteration: The Last Step In The Content Marketing Lifecycle

Now that you’re all caught-up, we can move on to the last piece of the puzzle – content strategy iteration. As a simple definition, iteration refers to the process of taking a thing, looking at how it can be improved, and then replicating the original thing with those improvements. It’s not a complex process, but it’s one that virtually any system, product, model or idea can be improved by. In a content marketing context, iteration looks something like this:

1. Idea Generation
2. Content Targeting
3. Choosing the Format
4. Channel Selection
5. Measuring Success
6. Record/Report Successes
7. Return to 1, using 6 to guide you

As you can see, iteration is crucial to any long-term content marketing project. It allows you to both learn from your past mistakes and do something constructive with them, and it also allows you to take your strategy and move it forward rapidly.

In Summary…

Iterating on your content strategy is the last piece of the puzzle for content marketing, and it concludes our series on the subject. If you’d like any more advice on how to get started with your content marketing strategy, contact WMG to find out how we can help. So go, fellow marketers, and produce successful content marketing campaigns!