Content Marketing Strategy Guide

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CONTENT MARKETING
STRATEGY GUIDE
Create a structured plan to reach and convert
more using the power of online content
Author: Stephen Bateman
Edited: Dr Dave Chaffey

Content Marketing Strategy

TWO. Define Audiences
and Personas

Contents

ONE.
Audit and Goals

Seven Steps to Success Guide

Introduction.............................................................................................. 5

Discover your “content marketing sweet spot.”....................................................................29
How to create personas for content marketing....................................................................30

THREE. Define your content marketing strategy............................... 40

Content Marketing Strategy: Seven Steps to Success. Updated March 20th 2016
© Smart Insights (Marketing Intelligence) Limited. Please visit our Content Marketing Toolkit to see related resources, or ask a question.

SEVEN. Evaluate and
Measure ROI

Define the key parts of your content strategy.......................................................................40
Link your strategy to goals................................................................................................... 41
Define the value you will offer your audience through your content.....................................43
Specifying the value your content offers..............................................................................44
Content types and formats...................................................................................................44
Content Matrix......................................................................................................................46
A closer look at different content formats............................................................................47
How to audit and inventory your marketing content.............................................................55
Get effective editorial governance in place..........................................................................64

SIX.
Content Distribution

TWO. Define Audiences and Personas .............................................. 29

FIVE.
Content Hub

Introduction .........................................................................................................................14
The content explosion .........................................................................................................14
Why it’s important to audit your content marketing capability. ............................................15
How to set goals for your content marketing strategy. What do you want your content marketing to deliver? .................................................................................................................18
Getting buy-in for content marketing ...................................................................................23
Making the business case and getting buy-in for content marketing ..................................25

FOUR.
Editorial Management

ONE. Content Marketing Capability Audit and Setting Goals........... 14

THREE.
Strategy

Why is content marketing important?.....................................................................................5
Defining content marketing....................................................................................................5
How content marketing supports marketing goals.................................................................5
Create a content hub to give sustained, integration communications....................................7
About this guide................................................................................................................... 11

Techniques ..........................................................................................................................65
Do you have the right team in place?...................................................................................67

FOUR. Editorial Management............................................................... 73

Review options for creating and sourcing content...............................................................89
Great content.......................................................................................................................92
Content curation...................................................................................................................97
Hinge content around a ‘big hairy audacious content idea’ (BHACI) ................................ 101
25 Ideas for atomising your content...................................................................................102

SEVEN. Evaluate and Measure ROI................................................... 115

FIVE.
Content Hub

What is ROI? ..................................................................................................................... 115
How to measure ROI for content marketing?..................................................................... 116
Using Google Analytics Actionable analytics for content marketing.................................. 119
Setting KPIs for content marketing....................................................................................120
Using Google Analytics: Actionable analytics for content marketing................................. 121
Some examples of how to review content marketing effectiveness in Google Analytics...122

FOUR.
Editorial Management

Distribution happens late, but is planned early .................................................................105
Recommended best practices...........................................................................................105
The role of influencer in your content marketing outreach ................................................109
Paid distribution ................................................................................................................ 112
Recommended best practices........................................................................................... 113

THREE.
Strategy

SIX. Content Distribution ................................................................... 105

TWO. Define Audiences
and Personas

FIVE. Create compelling content for your content hub..................... 89

ONE.
Audit and Goals

Develop your editorial calendar...........................................................................................73
Create your content hub.......................................................................................................78
Guidance on using a blogging platform as your content hub .............................................84
Running an effective blog or content hub............................................................................86

SIX.
Content Distribution
SEVEN. Evaluate and
Measure ROI

Introduction

In this introduction we explore the benefits of content marketing and explain the ‘Content
Marketing blueprint’ which will help you explain to colleagues how to create a powerful content
marketing machine.

We love the focus on content marketing today since we see content marketing as the fuel
for all your core digital marketing activities like search, social media, email and landing page
marketing. Get it right and it will build an audience and by engaging them, encourage them
to buy and share content with others while creating rich insight to help create more relevant
recommendations.

Defining content marketing
Joe Pulizzi, founder of the Content Marketing Institute, defines content marketing as:

We agree! An effective content marketing strategy supports buyers at every stage of their
buying cycle, leaving no gaps for prospects to fall through. As such, content marketing is the
marketing strategy that helps target audiences move through the lifecycle to purchase.

How content marketing supports marketing goals
On the next page, our Digital Marketing Radar shows why content marketing is so important
today. The Radar shows all the different types of site that are content-driven. Increasingly, it’s
content that’s the currency to give you visibility. Content marketing covers all of these.

SEVEN. Evaluate and
Measure ROI

What is it? Content marketing
Content marketing involves creating and distributing different types of content that fuel all
your core digital marketing activities to engage and persuade your audience to meet your
goals across the customer lifecycle.

SIX.
Content Distribution

“How a brand creates, delivers and governs original or curated content to attract and retain
customers, positioning the brand as a credible expert and, ultimately, motivating a change in
behaviour”

FIVE.
Content Hub

Of course, as you will see throughout this guide, it is the quality of your content that is critical
to driving successful conversion to lead and sale on your website and social presences.

FOUR.
Editorial Management

A content marketing strategy can also help counter customer engagement which is one of the
biggest challenges of marketing today given the range of channels and time-poor audience.
Customer engagement is the key to igniting your customer engagement and generating
demand using targeted, relevant, discoverable and optimised content that gives you and your
business the higher level of visibility and authority needed in search results and everywhere
your audiences are researching and discussing their problems, issues, needs and struggles.

THREE.
Strategy

A content marketing strategy has the benefit that it doesn’t seek to improve one channel in
isolation as an SEO, Social media or email marketing or company website ‘strategy’, instead
it gives a multi-channel lifecycle engagement strategy, unifying ALL your digital marketing
communications to support customer acquisition, retention and growth goals. A coherent
content marketing plan will reduce the need for separate plans for individual digital marketing
activities.

TWO. Define Audiences
and Personas

Why is content marketing so important?

ONE.
Audit and Goals

In this guide, we explain how to use content marketing more strategically to support the
growth of a business. Through following a strategic content marketing process structured
around our seven pillars of content marketing, your activities will be more closely aligned with
your objectives to show demonstrable return on marketing investment (ROMI).

For us, these are the reasons why content marketing is central to success online:
þþ Share-worthy content creates awareness for your brand. If your content engages
readers they will share it via their social accounts, email or word-of-mouth as a
recommendation. Everyone is an influencer today!

þþ Content drives purchases. We base our decisions on online content when shopping
online or researching for offline purchases.

þþ User generated content drives purchases. Buyer behaviour has changed, we now want
to reference wider opinion from others like us about products and services, whether rating
sites, blogs or social networks – buyers dig out content to help their decision making.

Content marketing supports and integrates all the core digital media channels

þþ 1. Natural Search. Content on your own site is core to supporting Search Engine
Optimisation (SEO), one of the key sources of new visitors to a site. The relevance of
keywords and quality of content is what attracts visitors and perhaps more importantly
links from other sites which help you site outrank competitors.

þþ 3. Online PR. The stories you share via other sites are ultimately content and
increasingly link back to content on a site, for example in a social media newsroom.

þþ 5. Display advertising. Display ad formats like banners and skyscrapers need to engage
and link to deeper content on site like the other channels in this list. There are also great
opportunities to engage through retargeting or AdWords remarketing.

þþ 7. Mobile marketing. Mobile marketing gives new options for delivering communications
via each of the channels above. Since smartphone or tablet platforms are often used
in different contexts this implies new types and formats of content may be needed to
engage mobile users.

SEVEN. Evaluate and
Measure ROI

þþ 6. Email marketing. Email marketing is perhaps the Grandaddy, the most established
of all these digital communications techniques. Enewsletters have always required
quality content to engage and this is even more true today with inbox competition and
competition from the social status updates. The content and offers and emails need to be
integrated with all these other channels.

SIX.
Content Distribution

þþ 4. Social media marketing.The status updates you share through social networks and
other sites are micro-content too and typically will link back to content on your site or
blog. So they should be part of a unified content marketing strategy to engage different
audiences.

FIVE.
Content Hub

þþ 2. Paid search (AdWords). It’s also important to give relevant content on paid search
landing pages to gain a better quality score in Google and to gain conversions. Both are
important to get ROI from AdWords.

FOUR.
Editorial Management

Another way to explain the power of content marketing is simply through the digital channels
it can support. We have toolkits in the members area for each of these:

THREE.
Strategy

þþ Content on a range of platforms drives purchases. The importance of the internet
continues to increase as technology (especially smart phones and tablets) evolve and we
evolve with them.

TWO. Define Audiences
and Personas

þþ Syndicated content drives purchases. Content marketing strategy is much broader
than your site since it includes content on social networks, online publishers, comparison
sites, blogs and many other types of influencer site.

ONE.
Audit and Goals

þþ Content drives results from SEO. Google has made this important since 1998 when it
launched. Content became, and still is, king since websites are content and being found
relies on content.

Strategy Recommendation 1 Show the power of content marketing by relating it to other
digital media channels.
Demonstrate to colleagues how content marketing supports and integrates many core
digital marketing activities enabling it to be managed as a whole.
ONE.
Audit and Goals
TWO. Define Audiences
and Personas
THREE.
Strategy
FOUR.
Editorial Management
FIVE.
Content Hub
SIX.
Content Distribution
SEVEN. Evaluate and
Measure ROI

Create a content hub to give sustained, integration communications

1. Fuel your SEO since Google will know your site is active and it favours more active
sites.
2. Fuel your social media through providing shareable content which encourages clicks
back to your site giving the opportunity for leads and sales.

FOUR.
Editorial Management

Strategy Recommendation 2 Create a sustained strategic approach to content marketing
Content marketing works best when you have a sustained rather than piecemeal
approach to creating and distributing content. That’s not to say you can’t succeed with
a single content asset, some smaller businesses do, but to compete with other larger
businesses, we believe you do need to developed a sustained approach to creating
content

THREE.
Strategy

3. Engage your different audiences through time leading to future purchases. For
the smaller companies who simply don’t have the resources or belief to develop
longer-form content on a blog it may be sufficient to have regularly curated on a
Facebook page.

TWO. Define Audiences
and Personas

We believe that publishing regularly updated quality blog-style content on a hub like a
magazine or resources area will:

ONE.
Audit and Goals

What is it? Content marketing hub
A key part of our blueprint for content or inbound marketing this is shareable destination
for content, social, email and search marketing that can be integrated through the creation
of a content hub which is a destination on your website which is a blog or online customer
magazine with a planned editorial calendar and resourcing.

FIVE.
Content Hub
SIX.
Content Distribution
SEVEN. Evaluate and
Measure ROI

The visual shows how you can use different types of brand content creation shared via

The blueprint is aimed at emphasising the key aspects of content marketing:
1. The quality and range of content must be outstanding and sustained to compete.
3. You need to invest in seeding content and using influencers to increase awareness
and sharing of content
4. If you get the whole process right it will support your overall brand marketing goals
5. You need the people, tools and process to monitor and optimise content and sharing
effectiveness.

We will talk a lot about how to create and manage content hubs, plus give examples of them
in this guide. For now, here are some well-known, successful hub examples from different
sectors:
þþ Car insurance – Confused.com blog, now positioned as a magazine.
þþ Financial services – HSBC Expat Explorer
þþ Retail – Mr Porter’s Journal blog
þþ Travel – Kuoni Travel inspiration

FIVE.
Content Hub

þþ Consumer brand – L’Oreal’s Makeup.com

FOUR.
Editorial Management

A Content Hub won’t be essential for all businesses. Very small businesses who don’t have
the resources to fuel it may find that their Facebook or LinkedIn page acts better as a hub,
but larger businesses will want their own website to be a destination for engagement and
purchase. Remember you don’t have to create new, original content every day, once a week
or once a month may be all that’s needed and it’s best to have this content on your site than
on a social network alone .

THREE.
Strategy

What if I don’t have the resources or time to create a content hub?

TWO. Define Audiences
and Personas

2. You need a defined, branded hub to share content

ONE.
Audit and Goals

your Content Hub to engage your audience and encourage sharing. To reach more people
beyond organic sharing or ‘social media amplification’ involves using influencer outreach on
Marketing Outposts and Influencer Websites to encourage people or publications who have
a following to share your content. The combined effect should be to boost your position in the
search results pages (SERPs). Research conducted across Hubspot’s customers show that
those who publish the most content tend to be most successful. Finally you can use Market
Monitoring, Social listening and social participation to boost your real-time marketing and
become more responsive to the interests and needs of your audience.

þþ SME B2B – American Express Open Forum – advice content incorporating a community
You can see more examples of hubs to inspire you here1. These examples focus on an
audience and we commend them since the brands behind them have invested to sustain
them through time.

A more strategic way of showing colleagues the power of content marketing is to relate it to
supporting marketing objectives across all the stages of the customer lifecycle as defined
by the Smart Insights RACE planning framework which we have developed to help create
integrated digital plans.
þþ Stage 1 Reach involves building awareness of a brand, its products and services on
other sites and in offline media and building traffic by driving visits to web presences.
þþ Stage 2 Act stands for interact, your aim is to achieve the initial engagement of your
1 Marketing Insider Group : 99 examples of Content Hubs

SEVEN. Evaluate and
Measure ROI

How content marketing supports customer management

SIX.
Content Distribution

þþ Enterprise B2B – Adobe CMO.com

visitors when they enter your site. KPIs include bounce rates, time spent on site and page
views. High page views, long dwell times and low bounce rates are all signs that your
audience is engaged.

þþ Stage 4 Engage. Build customer relationships through time to achieve retention goals.
Google is less satisfactory in this area since it doesn’t have suitable metrics and you may
have to derive these through your sales systems.

TWO. Define Audiences
and Personas

The role of content marketing in supporting the marketing goals of each part of RACE are
summarised in this infographic. You can see the role that content provides in each.

ONE.
Audit and Goals

þþ Stage 3 Convert – Achieve conversion to marketing goals such as new fans, leads or
sales on web presences and offline.

THREE.
Strategy
FOUR.
Editorial Management
FIVE.
Content Hub
SIX.
Content Distribution
SEVEN. Evaluate and
Measure ROI

About this guide
The Smart Insights Content Marketing toolkit

þþ Score your capability using our interactive benchmarking tool which gives you a score for
7 areas of content marketing and then recommends where to focus

þþ Download the editorial planning spreadsheets to create a content plan
þþ Download the evaluating content marketing guide which has more details

TWO. Define Audiences
and Personas

þþ Complete the e-learning which follows a similar structure to this guide with each section
marked off as you complete it

ONE.
Audit and Goals

This guide is a key component of the Smart Insights content marketing toolkit in the
members area2. We recomend you consult the other resources in the toolkit to support your
improvement in content marketing. We recommend:

THREE.
Strategy
FOUR.
Editorial Management
FIVE.
Content Hub
SIX.
Content Distribution

þþ Campaign planning – structure integrated, content-led campaigns
þþ Email marketing – use the contact strategy for content to be delivered by email
þþ Search engine optimisation – learn the principles to gain evergreen traffic
þþ Social media marketing – best practices for social sharing

2 Smart Insights Content Marketing Toolkit (In the members’ area, so sign-in needed).

SEVEN. Evaluate and
Measure ROI

We also recommend these closely-related tookits to get improve content marketing:

How is this guide structured around the seven pillars of a strategic content marketing
approach?

Diagnose and Plan
Create a strategic
structure for content
marketing.

Ideate

Generate a flow of ideas
and governance for
your content marketing
activity.

Define
Audiences
Create Buyer
Personas
Buying cycle
analysis
Keyword
analysis

Audit
Existing
Assets
Select
Content
Types
Define Mix
Define
Governance

Step 1
Audit and
goals

Step 2
Audience
and
Personas

Step 3
Content
Strategy

Editorial
management
Create Content
Hub
Use Content
Calendar
Content Factory

Step 4
Editorial

Distribute and
Nurture

Market your marketing.

Options for
creating
content

Content
Creation
Systems and
Tools Content
Curation

Step 5
Create content hub

Options for Content
Distribution and Promotion
including Owned, Earned
and Paid
Influencer Outreach

Step 6
Content distribution

Measure & Report
Evaluate, improve
and prove content
marketing ROI

Identify and
Set Content
Marketing
Metrics and
KPIs

Track and
Report
Content
Marketing
Activity

Step 7
Evaluate and
measure ROI

This guide is for anyone who is responsible for the quality of marketing content in their
organisation, or their clients.

The planned approach we define is most necessary at medium to large organisations where
content marketing must serve different audiences. Smaller businesses and startups seeking
to use strategic marketing content to kickstart their growth through a planned approach will
also find it gives them a roadmap to grow their business.

There are many, many great books that persuasively explain “why use content marketing”.
We’re influenced by many of the specialists on content marketing that we acknowledge
below.

About the authors

He is a leading specialist on using strategic content marketing to
improve the performance of people in business, who want to challenge
themselves and their teams to reach their highest content marketing
potential.
Based in Exeter, but with clients everywhere, Stephen likes to to show people how to
do successful content marketing, rather than tell them, which means giving them an
understanding of how they can structure their marketing content all along their funnel for a

SEVEN. Evaluate and
Measure ROI

Stephen Bateman is a career marketer turned marketing consultant,
author and speaker, and the contributing Content Marketing Strategy
Expert for Smart Insights.

SIX.
Content Distribution

But our guide focuses more on the how, rather than why. We have summarised many of the
strong arguments for the how already. We’re sure you buy into them, but you still need a
strategy, a plan and practical advice on how to implement your content strategy.

FIVE.
Content Hub

What makes this guide different?

FOUR.
Editorial Management

It is for people who are interested in using a planned, strategic approach to making marketing
content work harder to compete more effectively in a crowded marketplace, and win more
market share. It is for people who want to approach content marketing in a less ad-hoc, and
more strategic, planned way.

THREE.
Strategy

Who is this guide for?

TWO. Define Audiences
and Personas

Audit Content
Marketing
Capability
Set Goals
for Content
Marketing

Produce

Create your content.

ONE.
Audit and Goals

This guide is structured using a tried, tested and trusted content marketing strategy planning
process developed by Stephen Bateman. The methodology encompasses five stages,
atomised into seven pillars, which make up the steps in this guide:

more profitable return on content marketing investment.

Follow Stephen on Twitter @concentricdots or connect on LinkedIn.

Acknowledgments – who inspires us?

THREE.
Strategy

This guide is our advice rooted and inspired from a number of influential and leading experts
on content marketing as well as our own experience. We’ve listed the best, if you’re looking
for alternative perspectives. We’re sure you know many of these already, but if not, check
them out.

TWO. Define Audiences
and Personas

Dr Dave Chaffey is the editor of all Smart Insights resources. He has advised
on content marketing and SEO since he created his first site in 1997 when
Altavista was the leading search engine and switched to Google in ‘99. Ten
years ago he ran the SEO training courses for the Chartered Institute of
Marketing and for several years was the tutor on the Econsultancy Advanced
SEO course and also created the original Econsultancy Best Practice guide
to SEO. Today his main SEO focus is improving organic search results for
Smart Insights and its expert members. SmartInsights.com generates nearly
80% of its 1/3 million visits a month through SEO.

ONE.
Audit and Goals

Stephen is also the author of Smart Insights’ Content Marketing ROI Guide, A guide to
measuring, evaluating and reporting your content marketing performance and tutor on the
Smart Insights content marketing e-learning tool, which together compliment and dovetail
with this strategic content marketing guide.

þþ Joe Pulizzi (www.junta42.com), author of “Get Content, Get Customers”

þþ Ann Handley (www.marketingprofs.com), a co-author of “Content Rules
þþ Lee Odden of the TopRankBlog.com, author of “Optimize”
þþ Jay Baer (www.ConvinceandConvert.com), author of “The Now Revolution”

FOUR.
Editorial Management

þþ David Meerman-Scott (www.davidmeermanscott.com), author of “The New Rules of
Marketing & PR”

þþ Seth Godin (www.sethgodin.com), author of way too many books to mention!
þþ Chris Brogan (www.chrisbrogan.com), author of “Trust Agents”
þþ Michael Seltzner, author of “Launch” and founder of the Social Media Examiner website
http://www.elevationprinciple.com.

þþ Hubspot (www.hubspot.com)
þþ Marketo (www.marketo.com)

About this revision

SEVEN. Evaluate and
Measure ROI

This rewrite, dated March 2016, brings the guide up to date and inline with the seven pillars
of our strategic content marketing framework in our Content Marketing Toolkit, to dovetail with
Stephen’s online e-Learning Toolkit and Content Marketing ROI Guide.

SIX.
Content Distribution

þþ Altimeter (www.altimeter.com) including Rebecca Lieb, Charlene Li and
Brian Solis (www.briansolis.com), author of “Engage”

FIVE.
Content Hub

þþ Kristina Halvorson (www.contentstrategy.com), author of “Content Strategy for the Web”

ONE

Content Marketing Capability Audit and Setting Goals
We see the need for setting content marketing goals as essential for success.

However, many marketers produce marketing content and dubiously dub it “content
marketing” without mapping their content marketing activity to business goals or to the
customer buying cycle.
This is evidenced in a lot of social and blog content, which brands churn out for the sake
of it, rather than tying content back to business goals. Doug Kessler, sees this as content
marketing’s own worst enemy - check out his manifesto against this3.

TWO. Define Audiences
and Personas

In our Content Marketing ROI Guide,CEOs and CFOs say plainly that they do not care very
much about content campaigns or everyday metrics, but instead want to see proof that their
marketers are striving to achieve smart goals that impact improved business performance
and positive ROI.

ONE.
Audit and Goals

Introduction

THREE.
Strategy
FOUR.
Editorial Management

The last five years have seen the amount of content produced online rise exponentially.

SIX.
Content Distribution

The content explosion proves that barriers to entry are low and that just about anyone with a
computer and an Internet connection can create and distribute content.

FIVE.
Content Hub

The content explosion

SEVEN. Evaluate and
Measure ROI

3 Doug Kessler, Velocity partners. Stopping the content marketing deluge.
13

Best Practice Tip 1 Create and distribute marketing content that ties back to business goals
“About 80 percent of the content created by most marketing departments is rarely or never
used by the sales team.” Sirius Decisions

ONE.
Audit and Goals

But the overall quality of that content marketing activity is questionable, since only 32%
of respondents in the 2016 CMI UK Content Marketing Benchmark Survey describe their
organisation’s content marketing maturity level as sophisticated or mature.

TWO. Define Audiences
and Personas
THREE.
Strategy
FOUR.
Editorial Management

This why we recommend using our content marketing toolkit to first assess your existing
content marketing capability

Review your score to see where you are now and to explain to colleagues where you
need to be. You may be at level 1 or 2 and only need to get to level 3.
It’s most likely a big re-think, and changing from broadcaster mindset to an influencer and

SEVEN. Evaluate and
Measure ROI

Strategy Recommendation 3 Benchmark your content marketing capability
The first task, if you haven’t already is to head over to assess your current content
marketing capability using the Smart Insights Content Marketing Toolkit diagnostic
available in the members’ area.

SIX.
Content Distribution

For organisations to excel in content marketing requires a step change in marketing
behaviour. Before you can adjust to change, having a clear picture of your current capability,
strengths and weaknesses, and the skills and knowledge that you have and don’t have, is
essential to bridging it and knowing realistically what you’re capable of. This means that
you’re going to need to develop the content mindset first, before your organisation can.

FIVE.
Content Hub

Why it’s important to audit your content marketing capability.

publisher hybrid is not easy, but essential.

ONE.
Audit and Goals

TWO. Define Audiences
and Personas
THREE.
Strategy

This prompts you to assess and score your capability against the core disciplines, which then
generates your content marketing maturity report, with recommended actions for up-skilling

FOUR.
Editorial Management
FIVE.
Content Hub
SIX.
Content Distribution

SEVEN. Evaluate and
Measure ROI

For a more granular assessment of your content marketing capability, you can head
over to the self-assessment tool on Stephen Batemans website, which will generate
a score card like the one below http://bit.ly/self-assess-your-content-marketing.

ONE.
Audit and Goals

TWO. Define Audiences
and Personas
THREE.
Strategy

Another helpful capability review is from Altimeter, by Rebecca Lieb, which we recommend
downloading if you’re completing an audit – it involves these nicely named stages of
capability:

FOUR.
Editorial Management
FIVE.
Content Hub

þþ Stand: you haven’t yet realized the value of content marketing as a key component of
your marketing strategy.

þþ Walk: now with a solid foundation organizationally that supports content creation, your
content strategy is more fully refined and tweaked. There is also a concerted effort to
connect content development with all parts of the organization’s communication teams.
þþ Jog: your company is seriously committed to content marketing and has a clear strategy.
þþ Run: companies at this stage have production and creative as full, standalone business
unit, and your company is creating content that is sold and licensed based on its
standalone merit.
The following Altimeter Group content marketing maturity framework can help you assess

SEVEN. Evaluate and
Measure ROI

þþ Stretch: you understand the benefits of content marketing and have started to create
content.

SIX.
Content Distribution

The stages in the Altimeter capability model are:

your content marketing efforts:

ONE.
Audit and Goals

TWO. Define Audiences
and Personas
THREE.
Strategy
FOUR.
Editorial Management
FIVE.
Content Hub

To make content marketing work, you need to define your marketing and business goals.
Then you can create content that serves those goals, instead of just giving your audience
something to pass the time.

I like to differentiate between goals and smart objectives, the latter being more tangible and
concrete; objectives are more specific, goals top-level aims.
Goals work together with objectives because goals define top-level targets, and objectives
define the measurable elements of the goals: Metrics and KPIs .

Goals
A goal is a top-level target showing general aims. Goals are abstract and not easy to
measure. For example, a goal for your content marketing could be to increase brand

SEVEN. Evaluate and
Measure ROI

It’s important to understand your goals and objectives, because you need to be clear from
the start about what your content needs to achieve.

SIX.
Content Distribution

How to set goals for your content marketing strategy. What do you
want your content marketing to deliver?

awareness.

Objectives

For example, a smart objective for your content marketing with the goal of increased brand
awareness would be to increase the number of organic brand searches by 200% from 1,000
to 3,000 each month.

Use the SMART criteria in the grid blow to tighten up your objectives

TWO. Define Audiences
and Personas

Setting SMART Objectives

ONE.
Audit and Goals

Your objectives translate the goals into specific targets that can be measured. Objectives are
more precise and should be easily measurable.

THREE.
Strategy
FOUR.
Editorial Management

To check you are choosing the right objectives, consider using these 10 measure design
tests developed by performance management specialist Professor Andy Neely.

FIVE.
Content Hub

10 Design Tests to assess your SMART Objectives

For SMARTER metrics, ask these questions for your KPIs as you develop them.
2. The focus test. Are we only measuring what we set out to measure?
3. The relevancy test. Is it the right measure of the performance measure we want to
track?

5. The access test. Is it easy to locate and capture the data needed to make the
measurement?
6. The clarity test. Is any ambiguity possible in interpreting the results?
7. The so-what test. Can and will the data be acted upon, i.e. is it actionable?
8. The timeliness test. Can the data be accessed rapidly and frequently enough for
action?
9. The cost test. Is the measure worth the cost of measurement?!

SEVEN. Evaluate and
Measure ROI

4. The consistency test. Will the data always be collected in the same way whoever
measures it?

SIX.
Content Distribution

1. The truth test. Are we really measuring what we set out to measure?

10. The gaming test. Is the measure likely to encourage undesirable or inappropriate
behaviours?
These tests show there are additional filters on top of SMART that are useful to choose the
best measure, We particularly like the “So-what test”.

Use our SMART KPI RACE framework to help you focus your goals and objectives.

ONE.
Audit and Goals

Recommended technique: RACE Framework

TWO. Define Audiences
and Personas
THREE.
Strategy
FOUR.
Editorial Management

Reach

Encourage

Convert

Engage customers

audience

Action

to Sale

to Retain & Grow

Unique visitors

Online opportunity
(lead) volume

Online sales volume

New visitors

metrics

Visits
Conversation volume

Performance drivers
(diagnostics)

Share of audience
compared to
competitors
Share of search
Brand / direct visits
Cost per Click and per
Sale

Centric

Brand awareness
Conversation

KPIs

Bounce rate and
duration measures
Macro-conversion rate
to opportunity and
micro-conversion
efficiency

(online influenced)

Conversion rate to
Sale
E-mail conversion rate

Audience share

Value

Share of conversations

KPIs

E-mail response
quality
Transactions
Active customers %
(site & e-mail active)
Active social followers
Repeat conversion
rate
Lifetime value

Cost per Opportunity

Cost per Sale

Customer satisfaction

Customer loyalty index
Customer advocacy
index
Products per customer

Polarity (sentiment)

Business

(online influenced)

Offline sales volume

Goal value per visit

Revenue per visit

Online product
requests

Online originated sales
revenue and profit

(n, £, % of total)

Retained sales growth
and volume
Revenue per 1000
emails sent

SEVEN. Evaluate and
Measure ROI

Customer

Offline opportunity
(lead) volume

E-mail list quality

SIX.
Content Distribution

Tracking

FIVE.
Content Hub

Metric

In the UK, the top business goals from content marketing are for sales, engagement, lead
generation, brand awareness, customer retention, and lead nurturing, as show from this
research from the Content Marketing Institute for their 2016 benchmarks report.

ONE.
Audit and Goals

TWO. Define Audiences
and Personas
THREE.
Strategy

Metrics allow us to measure things, and useful metrics measure the things that show whether
your content marketing is producing acceptable growth or not.

Let’s look at a few example metrics

Goals for lead-generation and email communications
rr Q. Contact Us or phone call-back thank you page goal?
rr Q. Lead-generation thank you page goal?
rr Q. Goals for content marketing pages that generate leads e.g. white papers, guides?

SEVEN. Evaluate and
Measure ROI

Best Practice Tip 2 Select your broad goals and specific objectives
List the goals and corresponding SMART objectives that are most relevant for you, and
check you have them setup in your analytics.

SIX.
Content Distribution

For each goal, you want to try to determine metrics that show whether you’re succeeding or
not.

FIVE.
Content Hub

The goal comes before the metric: It’s important to remember why we need metrics in the
first place (see our content marketing ROI guide).

FOUR.
Editorial Management

Here are some ideas on specific goals, which can be tracked within analytics, for all types of
content and optimised to deliver more leads and sales.

Goals for site engagement
rr Q. Time on site engagement goals?
rr Q. Pages viewed engagement goals?
rr Q. Videos watched goals?
rr Q. Customer feedback goals?

Goals for top of funnel product engagement

rr Q. Product search page viewed?
rr Q. Category page viewed?
rr Q. Product page viewed?

TWO. Define Audiences
and Personas

If you can encourage site visitors to go beyond the home page to view product-related pages
they’re closer to buying, so you should assess the success of the site in getting visitors to
these types of goals, which relate to the funnel diagram shown above.

ONE.
Audit and Goals

rr Q. Document download goals?

Goals showing social engagement or participation with the site

þþ Blog comments.

THREE.
Strategy

Encouraging participation helps develop social proof to new visitors that you’re a credible
brand to do business with. Goals in this category to set or track include:
þþ Product comments, reviews and ratings.
þþ Sharing content or linking through to social presence like Facebook, Twitter or Linked In.
Recommended technique: Create a simple conversion model
To set realistic objectives, and a budget for your content marketing, use a simple conversion
model like this one:

£1.6M / £2500 = 640
customers

640 / 2200 prospects = 29%
conversion rate

Customers who purchase
from our Advanced
programme spend this
amount with us on average
This is a realistic number
of new customers for this
product class
This is a high proportion to
convert, but our sales force
can do this with the help of
content marketing

SEVEN. Evaluate and
Measure ROI

Calculate the number of
customers you need to
convert in order to reach
your target?
What percentage of your
prospective market do you
need to convert to achieve
your objective?

Comment
This is a 9% growth rate over
last year

SIX.
Content Distribution

Example
Generate £1.6M in additional
sales of primary medical
care products from ideal
buyers on our database by
March 2017
Identify your average
£2500 average customer
customer value for this target value / order size
customer group

FIVE.
Content Hub

Marketing task
Write down what the
business needs to achieve in
next 12 months

FOUR.
Editorial Management

þþ Favouriting or sharing of pages through social bookmarking.

Comment
The success stories, content
types, routes to customers
and measurement have been
mapped out and the team
can undertake this activity
1
9% of gross revenue is a
standard marketing budget
for us

More resources to help you set goals and metrics for your content marketing

Another critical task for a successful content marketing strategy is defining a vision for the
future and then specifying more specific goals which will set goals and targets to improve
your marketing performance.

Recommended approaches to help increase buy-in to content marketing
For most companies, a change towards content marketing is a big ask. It often needs a
fundamental shift in the marketing communications process. It’s going to require some
level of a cultural shift within the organization that can be a daunting, especially for larger
organizations where getting stakeholders around a table is not so easy. So at an early stage
you need to find out, what are the main blocks to change, you can overcome them?

SIX.
Content Distribution

The content marketing mission statement

SEVEN. Evaluate and
Measure ROI

rr Q. Approaches to overcome barriers to internal change reviewed?

In almost every one of his keynote presentations, Joe Puliizi covers the content marketing
mission statement, because content marketing is not about what you sell but what you stand
for and “the why must come before the what.”
His tips on content marketing mission statements include:
þþ Posting it: Include the mission statement where it can be found easily
þþ Spread it: Make sure everyone involved in your content marketing process has the
mission statement. Encourage them to print it out and pin it up on the wall.

FIVE.
Content Hub

Key Strategy Recommendation 4 Create and communicate a vision for content marketing
A focus on content marketing requires a change of direction in many organisations. To help lead
this change and show the future, you need to communicate it to colleagues who may not get it.

FOUR.
Editorial Management

Getting buy-in for content marketing

THREE.
Strategy

I provide more advice and practical techniques to help you peg your content marketing
strategy to your goals and metrics in Chapter Two (page 10) of the Smart Insights “Content
Marketing ROI Guide “Setting Content Marketing Goals & Metrics,” and in Step 1b of the
Smart Insights Content Marketing e-Learning Toolkit “Set goals and SMART objectives for
content marketing.” You will find more help with defining content marketing metrics and
evaluating ROI in Step Seven of this guide.

TWO. Define Audiences
and Personas

What marketing budget will
you put on this goal?

Example
Tell compelling success
stories from existing
buyers, engage interest
of prospective buyers
and convert interest into
consideration with supporting
marketing content
We will allocate 10% of the
customer value to generating
each sale = £250 for every
prospect, which provides a
total budget of £160,000

ONE.
Audit and Goals

Marketing task
Write down what content
marketing needs to do to
help sales achieve the
business goal

þþ The litmus test: Use the mission statement to decide what content you will and won’t
create.
þþ Often, a bad judgment in content creation can be fixed by running it by the mission
statement.

ONE.
Audit and Goals

Here are a few examples from three different types of business. In the left hand column you
can read the corporate mission statement and in the right column the content marketing
mission statement.

TWO. Define Audiences
and Personas
THREE.
Strategy

Do you have a content marketing mission statement?

þþ “What we do now works just fine...”: This is the worst hurdle to overcome and more often
sits with both of the above. It’s ignorant to the volume of change in marketing.
þþ We think these strategies from the Content Marketing Institute are also useful guidelines

SEVEN. Evaluate and
Measure ROI

þþ “We’ve always done it like this”: With current employees or teams, suppliers, partners or
vendor relationships, it can be hard to deviate from the well-worn marketing path, carved
by years of doing things the old way. It’s like turning a supertanker, even with the best will
in the world. Often, in this instance there isn’t someone who’s job it is to “own” content
internally, let alone use it for marketing, so it’s not on anybody’s agenda. It is also a
compounded issue because measuring what content marketing is and is not working has
to be done first, to create the stage for a new approach.

SIX.
Content Distribution

þþ “We can’t do that – it’s not what we do”: This is the feeling of fear, or vertigo that many
organizations get when they move from the firm ground of the tried and tested (I use that
word loosely) to what Seth Godin once called the anti-gravity that comes from leaping
into change. It’s strange because such companies are not really blowing anyone away
with the buyer experience they create, yet it feels safe to be like everybody else and to do
“what we’ve always done” and not move into unproven or unchartered territories.

FIVE.
Content Hub

Here are some problems to watch for:

FOUR.
Editorial Management

Anatomy of a content marketing mission statement

to base your management of change upon:

missinng
URL

þþ Empower change. Creating a culture that supports content marketing is critical in that
content creation and online conversations are viewed as a core competency, at least
within marketing. That process might look something like this:

þþ Each team member develops their own unique plan and processes that will allow them to
achieve those outcomes

THREE.
Strategy

þþ Team managers or supervisors give each of their team members objectives to meet
within a shared 90 day time frame

TWO. Define Audiences
and Personas

þþ Get buy-in. In almost all cases, culture shift starts with a leader and their vision. The
CMI’s B2B content marketing research found that one of the biggest differentiators
between effective and less effective content marketing is senior management buy-in: 23%
of the least effective marketers cite this as a challenge whereas this is an issue for only
7% of effective marketers. You’ll need to offer strong leadership with the ability to tap into
all levels of the organisation and enable collaboration.

ONE.
Audit and Goals

þþ Respect the current culture. Leadership guru and pioneer, Dr. Warren Bennis talks about
“Contextual Intelligence,” highlighting that to truly implement change, “you’ve got to
know the territory.” Marketers acting as change agents need to make the time and effort
to understand the history and traditions that have created the organisation’s culture.
Marketers should consider inventing new content and values that support new content
marketing programmes in context of what was or is.

þþ Each plan is required to include a list of resources and support that the supervisor will
provide, to help the report meet their objectives

The whole team needs to appreciate that what got us here, will not get us there. Once this
happens then the grounds for change are in place - everybody is facing in the same direction
and wondering “what, how and when?”, not “if or why?”.

rr Q. Business case for change defined?
Once you have thought through some of the barriers to implementing a content strategy, then
you’re in a position to make the business case.

Best Practice Tip 3 Combine the soft arguments for content marketing with the hard
measures
The soft arguments can win hearts, but to win minds we’ll show how to develop quantitative
arguments.

SEVEN. Evaluate and
Measure ROI

We’ll look at the business case for content marketing from two points of view, use which work
best when talking to your budget holders. First we’ll look at the soft reasons and then a more
quantitative approach.

SIX.
Content Distribution

Key Strategy Recommendation 5 Demonstrate the power of content marketing to convince
colleagues
To help buy-in, we recommend three main techniques: showing changes in consumer
behaviour, improvements to competitor or internal results.

FIVE.
Content Hub

Making the business case and getting buy-in for content marketing

FOUR.
Editorial Management

þþ Manager, supervisor and report are held mutually accountable for delivering on their
commitments, weekly productive conversations help maintain momentum going toward
the objectives.

Using the soft arguments to make the business case for more investment in content
marketing, you need to clearly show the linkage to other channels like social media
marketing and SEO plus conversion, which are better known as drivers of performance.
These are the arguments we use to show why quality content is crucial:

Reason 2. Marketing is publishing

THREE.
Strategy

It’s well documented. If we’ve learned anything over the past few years, even from a
search optimisation perspective, it’s that the majority of new marketing efforts rely on an
understanding of publishing information to your audiences. So, marketers need to think more
like a publisher, and less like sales and marketing folk. We need to give people content that
people want to read, not what we want to say. More about “inspire me”, less about features
and benefits. There’s another pay-off here too – you differentiate in the process, your
competitors are most likely banging the sales drum and turning people off.

TWO. Define Audiences
and Personas

We know that developing a marketing plan is about firstly understanding your audience’s
unmet needs. Whether customers, potential customers or influencers. Content allows you
to offer solutions to those challenges in a multitude of places. If you cannot contribute to the
conversation there is little chance of becoming a trusted source of information, let alone be
visible in search engine listings or leverage social networks like Facebook.

ONE.
Audit and Goals

Reason 1. Little content = little conversation

Reason 3. You need clear goals for social media activity and SEO

FIVE.
Content Hub

All the social media participation in the world won’t address these questions. When the
questions are answered you can consider the Smart Insights digital radar to figure out where
best to publish and share your content to power link-building and drive conversation in the
right places.

FOUR.
Editorial Management

Being “active” in social media is not a marketing goal, just like “more natural search traffic”
can lead to distraction about what matters – getting the right traffic - thinking about the types
of people you want to communicate with. This is why you need a considered and integrated
content strategy. Questions you must answer include: What is the purpose of your content
(and social media marketing)? What are your key messages vs what do I (the customer)
want to hear? What content assets do you have and what do you need to originate or gather
from third parties?

Reason 4. Content is currency

Brian Solis said this, he also said that you can replace “social media” with “publishing” or
“content strategy” in that same equation. Be clear that you are producing this content, not
only to be shared by your customers and prospects, but to accomplish tangible objectives
that can be measured back to sales.
Online interactions have to be fuelled by something, it’s about creating valuable, relevant and
compelling content on a consistent basis in order that your brand is not only well placed to
be trusted (or simply just Liked) but even just to be visible, on a customer’s Facebook News

SEVEN. Evaluate and
Measure ROI

Reason 5. Social media = I hear you + I’m listening to you + I understand

SIX.
Content Distribution

Fascinating, useful, educational and entertaining content is shared through social media. It’s
the currency, the firewood – whatever you want to call it. So many of us have rushed into
social media only to wonder why our Facebook Pages have no comments, there’s no Likes,
no blog interactions, we don’t have the right kind of Twitter followers. The same applies to
SEO – if content is not relevant it’s not likely to contain the right keywords, therefore you’re
not going to rank for the search terms that you really need to.

Feed or an influencer’s blog, for example.
Social media and search results form the cart, the functional tool(s) we use to share our story
and interact. Consider content as the horse, doing all upfront work, in order that we get to join
the ride.

rr 1. Demonstrating success through a pilot or existing activity. This shows real-world results
specifically for your company so tends to work best, if you have demonstrable success.

yy You may already have examples of success across different areas:
yy New visitors acquired through social media activity
yy Conversion increases through reviews and ratings
yy Increased existing customer engagement and sales through content shared through
email marketing or social media

Best Practice Tip 4 Create a conversion model to show value generated
A spreadsheet conversion model will give you specific ideas for how you can increase sales
value or the number of visitors to the site through the customer lifecycle.

FIVE.
Content Hub

The spreadsheet on the next page is an example of one of the models available via
SmartInsights.com to improve performance. You can use this to assess the returns from
content marketing.

FOUR.
Editorial Management

rr 3. Model improved results through a cost-benefit. If you can create a model to show how
you will increase sales through improvements to visits or conversion this can work well if
you can substantiate it.

THREE.
Strategy

rr 2. Showing how competitors have changed and what they have achieved. Successful
competitor activity can strike fear into colleagues or show the opportunity. Find case
studies or presentations produced by competitors or benchmark their performance
against yours in terms of visits, engagement or sales.

TWO. Define Audiences
and Personas

yy Sales increases through SEO

ONE.
Audit and Goals

Some of the approaches that we have found effective to highlight the business opportunity
and/or the threat are, in order of effectiveness:

SIX.
Content Distribution
SEVEN. Evaluate and
Measure ROI

ONE.
Audit and Goals

TWO. Define Audiences
and Personas
THREE.
Strategy

For content marketing, you should show how consumers use different information types
that influence sale (e.g. reviews and ratings, blogs, social media comments), ideally for your
industry.

FOUR.
Editorial Management

rr 4. Use benchmarking statistics or change in consumer behaviour to show how the
technique is effective.

FIVE.
Content Hub
SIX.
Content Distribution
SEVEN. Evaluate and
Measure ROI

TWO

Define Audiences and Personas
ONE.
Audit and Goals

Discover your “content marketing sweet spot.”
rr Q. Define how content supports your brand and audience needs
This step flows immediately on from Step 1, since with your content auditing and goal-setting
done, the next step is to do the research to clarify the sweet spot to engage your audience.

TWO. Define Audiences
and Personas

THREE.
Strategy
FOUR.
Editorial Management
FIVE.
Content Hub

It’s important to remember that people don’t buy what you do, they buy WHY you do it.

Uncovering your sweet spot and creating content focused on the relevancy sweet spot has
several key benefits that can be summed up in the following points:
þþ It shows people you care and makes you stand out as memorable.
þþ It means you won’t create content for a void, but to fill an identified sweet spot, where
otherwise there would be a gap.

SEVEN. Evaluate and
Measure ROI

Best Practice Tip 5 Define your content marketing sweet spot
Your sweet spot lies at the intersection of your business expertise and your audience’s
most pressing issues and challenges. If we had to choose one word to sum your content
marketing sweet spot, then that word would be “empathy.”

SIX.
Content Distribution

We think defining how content enhances your brand’s ability to engage different types of
audiences is one of the most important parts in this guide strategically, and probably the most
overlooked in our rush to tell an audience what we know and think, as fast and as cheaply as
possible!

þþ It sets you apart from your competitors, and helps your prospective customers choose
you.
þþ It’s transparent, authentic, credible, and about being more of what you are.

ONE.
Audit and Goals

þþ It has great emotional impact, and helps your audiences grasp the essence of what
you are in a few words. This is often a weakness for small business, and the cause of
unprofitable marketing.
þþ It’s about how much better and more empowered you make your customers feel.
þþ Its underpins your content marketing mission statement (see previous chapter.)

How to create personas for content marketing

What is it? Web design personas
A thumbnail summary of the characteristics, needs, motivations and environment of typical
site users.

Types of Personas
You can create personas of these 4 types depending on how you want to use them or the
budget available.
1. Ad hoc personas. Quick and dirty” created through existing knowledge of the

SEVEN. Evaluate and
Measure ROI

Recommended resource
See our Personas toolkit for more persona examples and key techniques. Many examples
from this section are taken from here. So we really recommend you download it if you will
be involved in creating or briefing personas.

SIX.
Content Distribution

Key Strategy Recommendation 6 Develop customer personas to support content marketing
Personas are valuable to support all aspects of your web and social presence including
content marketing.

FIVE.
Content Hub

Ardath Albee, a persona specialist, puts it another way: “A persona puts a face on an
otherwise faceless segment.”

FOUR.
Editorial Management

The original definition of a buyer persona was developed by user experience agency
Foviance/Seren, who said: “A persona is a fictional character that communicates the primary
characteristics of a group of users, identified and selected as a key target through use of
segmentation data, across the company in a usable and effective manner. This ultimately
enables the company to design the best user experience for its customers at all touch points,
which is a key success factor in today’s business environment”.

THREE.
Strategy

What is a persona?

TWO. Define Audiences
and Personas

To create marketing content that hits home runs with your audience, you need to create
compelling, resonant and relevant content for your audiences, which means one crucial truth:
You need know your audiences intimately, and the best tool for getting to know your buyers
better than anyone else is generating buyer personas, like the ones used in journalism, which
allow you to empathise and deliver content that aligns, attracts and engages your audiences,
with the bottom line objective of bringing them a step closer to doing business with you.

audience, without in-depth research. May be design or marketing-oriented and be
narrative based or based on a summary of goals and characteristics.

ONE.
Audit and Goals

2. Web design or Customer experience personas. Created specifically to
improve the online user experience and improve the results from sites. Ideally they
incorporate touchpoint mapping for to support purchase decision-making across
channels. Usually based on research.
3. Marketing personas. Used to summarise customer segments based on their characteristics, behaviour and perception of a brand.

Elements of personas
There isn’t one way of creating customer personas. Rather there are common components
you should have in mind, depending on the complexity of persona, be they B2B or B2C. The
common components include:

þþ 2. Label. It helps to give a label summarising the characteristics too. Example: Head of
Production

þþ 4. Goals or Motivations. These can be in the context of reasons for using a service,
or more general life goals. Example: Business: Control purchase process and costs;
Personal: Improve profile, join a larger company at a more senior levels.
þþ 5. Challenges, barrier or pain points. A summary of the need for a product or service.
Which factors will drive purchase. Example: Reduce time on non-essentials.

þþ 7. Information needs. Related to buyer behaviour, the information used to take
decisions. This can be summarised on a mental model map. Example: ROI justification
with break-even point

þþ 9. Customer journey maps. A separate technique with examples in our persona toolkit
and eLearning Toolkit.
þþ 10. Perceptions. Perceptions of need for product or service or competitors which can be
plotted on a perceptual map.

SIX.
Content Distribution

þþ 8. Platform usage. For example, use of device type or social network, usually in the
context of purchase.

FIVE.
Content Hub

þþ 6. Buying decision behaviours. We will see that different personality types may
affect the speed of decision-making or the type of information used to take the decision.
Example: Doesn’t believe in technology unless clear ROI justifications.

FOUR.
Editorial Management

þþ 3. Demographic characteristics. For example, age, gender, social group. Example:
Age: 36

THREE.
Strategy

þþ 1. Name. It’s usual to give personas a name to refer to them based on their characteristics. Example: Jan Jones

TWO. Define Audiences
and Personas

4. Buyer personas vs sales personas. Typically focus on buyers, so are often known
as ‘Buyer Personas’. Within B2B it can be useful to define sales personas to help
develop the selling narrative.

SEVEN. Evaluate and
Measure ROI

ONE.
Audit and Goals
TWO. Define Audiences
and Personas

THREE.
Strategy

Benefits of personas
2. They take the guesswork out of creating valuable content
3. They underpin the success of every stage of content marketing process
4. When shared across a team, with outside contributors, they act as a hymn sheet,
getting everyone singing from the same song sheet about what’s important to your
customers

6. They help us see commonalities and identify the behaviour patterns that characterise
our customer segments.
7. They make it possible to speak to our audiences in a cost effective way.

A 5 step process for effective persona creation

Step 1: Research and collate your audience insight data
A. Data your business collects
þþ 1. Profiling from on-site data capture e.g. online forms – compare to ‘offline audiences’…
þþ 2. Customer prospect and sales database – profile or cluster analysis used to identify
groups
þþ 3. Customer surveys e.g. offline or delivered by email or prompted by an online tool like
Hotjar

SEVEN. Evaluate and
Measure ROI

Here are some more detailed guidelines and tools to help you develop personas:

SIX.
Content Distribution

The Smart Insights Content Marketing eLearning Toolkit describes in detail how to interview
buyers with the aim of generating highly detailed B2B buyer personas and customer
journeys.

FIVE.
Content Hub

5. They avoid falling into the trap of writing about what you know a lot about: Your
products & product features, from your perspective - not the customers !

FOUR.
Editorial Management

1. A Persona works as a Relevance Tool

þþ 4. Google Analytics now has a demographic assessment. Under Audience - background.
þþ 5. Social media page profiling, e.g. your Facebook or Twitter page insights or LinkedIn
company page
B. Primary qualitative marketing research
ONE.
Audit and Goals

Surveys, interviews and focus groups completed by research specialists
C. Third-party data
Online panel data tracking browser characteristics and behaviour of websites, Comscore,
Nielsen, Experian Hitwise.

Step 2: Cut the cake – define the personas that work for you
The most difficult task in persona creation is “how to cut the cake” – coming from data to a
decision of how many personas descriptions to include. This involves more than a group of
consultants or project members just handing over some descriptions.

The typical output is a summary of the needs and wants of a fictional character. For us, these
are 5 key areas to the description You may not mention each area specifically, but make it
clear for any reader to understand based on your description.

þþ Body: a photo or a description of how the person looks creates a feeling of the person as
a human being, posture and clothing tells a lot about the person

þþ Background: we all have a social background, education, upbringing which influences our
abilities, attitudes and understanding of the world
þþ Emotions and attitudes towards technology including platforms such as browsers, mobile
and social media tools

Few organizations allow for team members to be part of the writing process. More often
using external consultants or the usability department to write the descriptions. We think,
it’s too important to be outsourced completely. The personas method should rather be
perceived as a process where everybody should understand how the descriptions came
about and what they can be used for. If you allow different team members to be part of
the writing process they will feel ownership for the personas they create. Personas will

SEVEN. Evaluate and
Measure ROI

þþ Personal traits: this one is tricky, in fictional writing there is a distinction between flat
characters and rounded characters. The flat character is characterized by having only
one character trait and is difficult to engage in. The rounded character has more than one
character trait, is not predictable and easier to engage with.

SIX.
Content Distribution

þþ Psyche: we all have an overall attitude towards life and our surroundings which also
influence the way we meet technology e.g. is the persona introvert or extrovert

FIVE.
Content Hub

We’ve found that the more human this is, the more value you’ll get from it, ultimately the
organisation buy-in will be easier.

FOUR.
Editorial Management

Step 3: Constructing Personas

THREE.
Strategy

This process is about finding data that supports the initial patterns and at the same time
supports the personas descriptions and the scenario writing. This will help generate
engagement in the descriptions and support scenario writing e.g. what do the users value
and ignore, what is their attitude towards the brand/site/content, and in what situation
will they use our content? Each persona needs to be different enough, and also have a
representative sample size to warrant your focus – after all you cannot create a persona
for everyone. Our experience is that 6-8 is almost always sufficient, indeed 3 or 4 may be
fine.

TWO. Define Audiences
and Personas

þþ Keyword search behaviour from Google (https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

of course benefit to be finalised by a single person to ensure homogeneity in writing and
presentation.
Step 4: Develop Scenarios
ONE.
Audit and Goals

Personas are nothing in isolation, the real purpose of personas is to create scenarios from
the descriptions. The scenarios serve to describe in which situations the persona will use and
interact with our site or content. Each need or situation is the beginning of a scenario.

þþ What are your customers’ content preferences?
þþ How do they discover, consume and share content?

þþ What are they looking for on search engines and discussing on the social web?
þþ Can they be grouped into audience segments based on their preferences and content
discovery and consumption behaviors?

Develop a completed profile format that you can consistently build for each profile, here’s a
very short example with content marketing in mind:
Attitude & Behaviors: Read, share, moderate interaction, introvert
Preferences: Tips, opinion gathering, graphic rich content
Publish/Share: Comments, Status Updates, Bookmarks
Top Searching Keywords: CRM software, social CRM
Social Sites: Twitter, Facebook, StumbleUpon, Blogs
Often the persona method is viewed as means for communication to others, but as you may
imagine it can be as much a process that ensures a customer-centered approach across the
entire business – a valuable by product here?

Techniques

A mental model map is a fantastic, practical tool for reviewing the effectiveness of content
and usability of a website.
Start by identifying the questions / information needs the persona has at the top and then, at
the bottom note where static or interactive content is used to answer prospects questions.

SEVEN. Evaluate and
Measure ROI

1. Mental Model Map Gap analysis

SIX.
Content Distribution

Don’t let your effort date. We would recommend always updating information on the personas
since technology changes so fast. Consider a personas ambassador, the marketing manager
maybe, someone who looks into the descriptions now and then, and who project participants
can contact if they find anomalies in the descriptions.

FIVE.
Content Hub

Participation: Join, Collect

FOUR.
Editorial Management

Demo: Male, 30-35, College, senior management, high earner

THREE.
Strategy

Step 5: Generate Profiles, share and get team buy-in

TWO. Define Audiences
and Personas

A scenario is like a story, it has a main character (the persona), a setting (somewhere the
action takes place), it has a goal (what the persona wants to achieve), it has actions that lead
to the goal (interactions with the site/content on multiple sites forming the customer journey),
and it has obstacles that block the way to the goal. All scenarios are not necessarily happy
ones, and often centre on pain points. Questions include:

ONE.
Audit and Goals
TWO. Define Audiences
and Personas

THREE.
Strategy

A useful technique for showing which touch points personas can be influenced through.

FOUR.
Editorial Management

2. Mapping content to buying cycle customer journey mapping

FIVE.
Content Hub
SIX.
Content Distribution
SEVEN. Evaluate and
Measure ROI

3. XY Characteristic mapping

ONE.
Audit and Goals
TWO. Define Audiences
and Personas

THREE.
Strategy

It’s useful to relate personas to the buying journeys or stages and the actions or activities that
the persona takes at each step. Then content can be developed to support each stage of the
buyer journey.

FOUR.
Editorial Management

4. Buyer person content mapping

FIVE.
Content Hub
SIX.
Content Distribution
SEVEN. Evaluate and
Measure ROI

ONE.
Audit and Goals
TWO. Define Audiences
and Personas

THREE.
Strategy
FOUR.
Editorial Management
FIVE.
Content Hub
SIX.
Content Distribution

This technique, first described by Bryan Eisenberg often isn’t built into Personas, but is a
separate technique that could be applied across personas. It’s helpful to show that different
personality types can exist within a Persona and that these can affect the speed with which
people buy and the factors they consider

SEVEN. Evaluate and
Measure ROI

5. Buyer personality and behaviour

ONE.
Audit and Goals

Example Personas

TWO. Define Audiences
and Personas

THREE.
Strategy
FOUR.
Editorial Management
FIVE.
Content Hub
SIX.
Content Distribution
SEVEN. Evaluate and
Measure ROI

ONE.
Audit and Goals
THREE.
Strategy

See more examples from other sectors in our customer persona toolkit.

TWO. Define Audiences
and Personas

FOUR.
Editorial Management
FIVE.
Content Hub
SIX.
Content Distribution
SEVEN. Evaluate and
Measure ROI

THREE

Define your content marketing strategy
ONE.
Audit and Goals

rr Q. Content strategy developed?
As we’ve seen, a successful content strategy needs to tell your story as it relates to your
customers, and as a part of the wider marketing strategy. It also needs to be rooted in
delivering on the goals in Step 1.

TWO. Define Audiences
and Personas

Armed with your customer personas, you can now focus your content strategy, which sits at
the intersection of your audience and business.
An understanding of your audience means you can define the topics, create a brand story
and ensure that your subject matter will enable your content marketing to hit home runs with
your audiences.
In short you will have a real purpose for your audience. This will align with your content
marketing mission statement.

rr Q. What do our buyers really need to know about your products, about information and
anything relevant to what we have to offer? There’s what you want to say (or sell) and
what the audience are looking for to make a decision.

rr Q. How does what they need to know align with your unique expertise to create the best
content? What are the priority areas where there’s a really great fit?
rr Q. How do you position content for maximum impact, and what media types will be most
relevant? Think back to personality and being authentic in how you communicate, it has
to be natural too.

Define the key parts of your content strategy
These are what we see as the key elements of a content strategy:
þþ Q. Define purpose of content to support strategic business goals. How will content help
meet these broader requirements – for example growing a certain market or launching a
new product? Keep these in mind so that you prioritise effort and resource.

þþ Q. Define content type priorities. What are the topics that you’ll need to cover in your
content and importantly, what are the priorities within those where effort should be
weighted? For example, with the Open Forum portal their content focuses on innovation,
marketing and finance though it can cover health and lifestyle too.
þþ Q.Differentiation. How are we creating the necessary differentiation? There are so many
ways to approach content generation and aiming to be original and relevant can only help
you stand out from the crowd.

SEVEN. Evaluate and
Measure ROI

þþ Q. Define what customer value your content types should deliver. Using the personas, as
described in Step 2, to define the problems and opportunities that your content is going to
address.

SIX.
Content Distribution

rr Q. Content strategy components defined?

FIVE.
Content Hub

rr Q. What will provide your consumer most benefit personally and professionally? Your aim
is to add maximum value.

FOUR.
Editorial Management

rr Q. What’s the intersection between your expertise around the products or services and
the information or entertainment needs of your consumer? Map them to reveal the sweet
spots.

THREE.
Strategy

In his book “Get Content, Get Customers,”Joe Pulizzi’s recommends you have these
questions in mind:

þþ Q. Core brand messages. What are the core brand messages communicated through
those defined topics or conveyed through the content?

ONE.
Audit and Goals

þþ Q. Content sources. How will we design and manage the content mix across curated,
aggregated, user-generated, co-created, original and even (possible) licensed content?
We’ll come onto this in the next step, but the point is that there are many sources of
content creation so knowing what suits your strategy, budget and resource is important.

Link your strategy to goals
rr Q. Strategy linked to SMART goals?

TWO. Define Audiences
and Personas

In the first section, we recommended that you use the RACE framework to set SMART goals.
Since your strategy must support your goals, let’s return to RACE to suggest strategies to
consider to support your content marketing goals.

Reach - be visible online
Approaches to use to improve your reach through content marketing are:

þþ Publish to outposts - make your content visible in places where your audience already are.
Success comes from employing online listening to the market and doing the hard work too.

FOUR.
Editorial Management

þþ Create good stuff - ask not what helps spread your message but what content does your
audience need or enjoy, where is the intersection of value for your brand (what you want
to say) and your audience (what they are trying to solve)? The more that content is based
on their needs, the more it’s going to be perceived as valuable - use social listening tools,
blog researching and search engine keyword research to quickly define those audience
pain points.

THREE.
Strategy

þþ Target - ask “who is listening to you already”? Make something for them, ideally
something that makes their life a little easier, inspire them to want to talk about you to
others. Be targeted in your approach above all else - the first question is not how many,
but who - who are your key influencers?

Act – encourage participation and sharing of your content

þþ Make it shareable - Having content that is easy to share matters. There are a wealth
of tools that you can use to make it easy for users to pass your story forward into their
social networks, the Facebook Like/Send button on Tweet Meme are the most obvious.
And, don›t forget enabling syndication and bookmarking of your quality information and
content. Anyone that is expressing an interest should be encouraged to share it.

SEVEN. Evaluate and
Measure ROI

þþ Be human - when a user hits your website does it make sense, is it organised “for
me” and my needs or is it a re-brand of how every other site operates in your market?
Using a language that sounds human and is well structured, offers a huge advantage in
introducing your ideas to others so you can be quickly understood. Is content in a format
that makes sense and does it hang together under topics or categories that speak to the
audience, allowing them to find more of the same.

SIX.
Content Distribution

þþ Create variety - with a range of persona types and devices on which content is
consumed, varying how content manifests is important in itself. Consider the difference of
mobile smartphones to desktop PCs - what is it that fits your audience? There’s so many
ways to share content - including a daily blog post, a weekly video series on YouTube,
quarterly webinars with guest speakers or a bi-annual ebook. You can even go interactive
with quizzes and contests, it›s all content.

FIVE.
Content Hub

At this stage we are looking to encourage visitors to interact with and share our content, so
we need to know the content types that are effective. Approaches to use are to:

Convert - gain permission
At this stage we are building a relationship, converting to a lead or a sale. To help with this
you need to:
ONE.
Audit and Goals

þþ Value - Demonstrate value. What do you want me to do, and why would I sign up, follow
or connect with you on an ongoing basis? Keep the calls to action appealing, relevant and
valuable, what do I need to do – is it offline (attend an event or visit a store) or online (go
to your customer community service or Facebook page).

TWO. Define Audiences
and Personas

þþ Interact - The more interactive content is, the better. Can I ask questions, vote on
something, take a quiz, use a diagnostic that helps me make a decision or enter a fun
contest that entertains. Help “me” get involved with the content and with the subject
matter in new ways, teach me something. Consider interaction from your brand’s
perspective too, encourage the human to human interaction through commenting on your
blog, in a forum or maybe a webinar about a meaty subject area.

Engage - develop advocacy and referral

THREE.
Strategy

þþ Promote - Selling, at the right time, it’s ultimately why we are in business. Make
promotional offers natural and convenient, demonstrate the value exchange. Create
social media-only offers – for example vouchers or special notifications only available via
Twitter or Facebook – and promote access to those in emails or on brochures, Starbucks
are masters of this.

This is the long-term engagement. Key approaches to guide your work here include:

This is extremely important for getting senior team members on board, and more importantly
bought in, so that the necessary budget is made available. Here are some key questions to
help set those goals:
rr Q. What are the core audience types? There’s likely more than one, for example the
consumer of the product or service, and also key influencers like industry bloggers and

SEVEN. Evaluate and
Measure ROI

So, for us, content marketing success requires an adoption and integration of simple, but still
new, processes. Behaving like a publisher over a broadcaster to create an inbound effect
of interested prospects and customers is something that still feels pretty new to marketers.
Yet we can see that it’s authentic marketing, meeting market needs and helping consumers
make decisions over looking to interrupt and persuade. Having a process in place to create
and re-create content in multiple forms for distribution in multiple channels like email,
outposts like Facebook or LinkedIn and of course your own web services, will help you scale
up and meet these new demands.

SIX.
Content Distribution

þþ Social CRM - social tools are just that, a means to build a better business because we’re
now afforded the ability to cost effectively listen and serve the customer better. After years
of paying research companies and chasing insight we find it here, right on our doorstep if
we’re open to employ it as a process within the business. Only one benefit of that is our
ability to continually improve content and communications.

FIVE.
Content Hub

þþ Integrate - share content through extended services that marry marketing with that value
exchange - special deals and timely reminders and updates are important for this, think of
an ISP reminding you of domain name renewals via email at the exact moment you need
to know and appending an offer to that for hosting effective promotional content at the
right time.

FOUR.
Editorial Management

þþ Build trust - work hard to gain customer comments and feedback from all sources
including social media – then pool and present them to consumers to help engender
trust. Pulling feeds from external sources, like Twitter, as social proof that people like your
brand is particularly powerful, though don’t forget to simply ask and reward customers for
coming back to your site to share their product story.

journalists.
rr Q. What is the story or the crucial messages that the content must communicate?
rr Q. What must your content enable the audience to do that helps achieve your goals?
ONE.
Audit and Goals

rr Q. How will the content show success – what are the key measurements at the simplest
level, for example blog subscribers, newsletter sign-up, or data capture from an ebook
download

Define the value you will offer your audience through your content

TWO. Define Audiences
and Personas

“the potential customer needs evidence that we understand their problem well before they’ll
buy, share or recommend us”

FIVE.
Content Hub

The need to REALLY understand what customers value is similar to wider digital and
marketing planning of course. But here it’s content value. You should refer back and
summarise each of the persona profiles in clear statements that everybody in the team can
understand, for example:

FOUR.
Editorial Management

rr Q. Content value defined?

THREE.
Strategy

Then, summarise the solution, for example: “Thought Leadership”.

A good example of this particular scenario is the American Express Open Forum (http://www.
openforum.com) web portal, where they garner experts across a range of topics with the sole
objective of “helping you grow your business”.

The key element of a strategy is to decide where you will focus your efforts, so make sure
your analysis is sufficiently in-depth
“When you start looking at a problem and see a simple solution, you don’t understand the
problem. You keep looking and you are halfway there. The really great person will keep going
and find the underlying principle of the problem, [to] come up with a beautiful elegant solution
that works”

SEVEN. Evaluate and
Measure ROI

Though the example here is B2B, it works just the same for B2C since we want our content
to meet a requirement or solve a problem that in its simplest sense leaves the consumer able
make a decision about something.

SIX.
Content Distribution

This is an example of the intersection that Joe Pulizzi talks about, along with an approach of
how to address it.

Steve Jobs

Specifying the value your content offers
rr Q. Do we get the sell-inform-entertain-share balance right?
ONE.
Audit and Goals

Next, get more specific about the content value. We think the Sell-Inform-Entertain balance
is useful here, because it reflects different content needs for different types of customers in
different markets.

TWO. Define Audiences
and Personas

Best Practice Tip 6 Review Sell-Inform-Entertain-Share balance of your content
There’s a tendency to focus on one type of content, but you should review a balance.
For example, consumer audiences don’t just want entertainment and business audiences
may want to be entertained as well as informed. There’s not such a different between them:
B2C Proposition
Make my life easier
Help me learn / have fun
Make me look good
Give me a great deal

Content types and formats

THREE.
Strategy

B2B Proposition
Make my work easier
Help me develop
Make me look good
Give me a great deal

FOUR.
Editorial Management
FIVE.
Content Hub

Content formats vary and choice of content formats is dependent on your goal, and how your
target market would find it easiest to consume your content, at their pace and their chosen
device and time of day.
Your choice of content types is also determined by your resources, skills and budget since
more demanding content like ebooks, webinars, videos and infographics requires time,
production, design and more budget.
The advantage of bigger, heavier weight content, sometimes referred to as bricks (Jay Baer)

SEVEN. Evaluate and
Measure ROI

It’s time to consider the different types of content that are available to engage different
personas.

SIX.
Content Distribution

rr Q. Different potential content types reviewed?

or “epic” content (Pulizzi) is that it can be repurposed or atomised (Velocity Partners.)

ONE.
Audit and Goals
TWO. Define Audiences
and Personas

Heavyweight content
þþ Infographic

þþ Article / Interview

þþ White Paper

þþ Press Release (media announcements)

þþ eBook

þþ Podcast

þþ Professional Video

þþ Handheld video

þþ Mobile App

þþ Case Study

þþ Interactive quiz or assessment

þþ Price guide

þþ Event

Overall, the key is to be efficient with the media chosen, and start with tangible and useful
topics that your audience can understand.

You layer on the twigs, sticks and logs only when the fire is burning on tinder. It’s a useful
metaphor to keep in mind when planning.

Seed interest in your content where the discussion is happening
Anne talks about finding tinder off-site in other blogs and Twitter, LinkedIn discussion groups
and Q&A sites like Quora, you interact and leave comments and invite readers to check
out your (relevant, awe-inspiring) content as well. Then, create tinder on your site as well,
something shareable and easy to comment on or maybe even interact with (not just text), this
is where the social object concept comes to play of course – it could be an interactive tool or
video. In the most part this on-site tinder is exactly the role that your blog should cover.

SEVEN. Evaluate and
Measure ROI

rr Q. Approach for seeding interest in content reviewed?

SIX.
Content Distribution

In her book “Content Rules”, Ann Handley talks about Content Campfires, Chris Brogan also
uses this analogy and it’s a useful in visualising the challenge.

FIVE.
Content Hub

þþ Webcast

FOUR.
Editorial Management

Lightweight content
þþ Blog post / checklist

THREE.
Strategy

In this sense content can be viewed as being either a) lightweight, frequent and by definition
less demanding and less expensive to create, and b) heavyweight, but with greater, longer
lasting impact.

Best Practice Tip 7 Light your content marketing fire with tinder
Spark interest in your content by engaging in conversations on other blogs or in your owned
media and pointing back to your content, adding something to the conversation at the same
time, not just posting a link.
ONE.
Audit and Goals

The goal is to get traction and raise awareness for your content in a multitude of places
without being annoying and link-baiting – so “fanning the fire” with a purpose to add value
to conversation over blatantly trying to poach traffic. It’s common sense really.

TWO. Define Audiences
and Personas

Twigs and logs - With the tinder in place, you can then lay the twigs and logs onto that
campfire – here are the major content formats that we’d recommend:
1. Webinars and live broadcast video as well as recorded webinars or streamed media
2. Ebooks or shorter guides including article content (web page, or short documents)
and whitepapers
3. Recorded and edited video including animated or explainer videos
4. Podcast and audio shared for iPod or mp3 player consumption. Think about the
audio from videos for mp3 consumption as well as turning the audio to transcripts
3

Content Matrix

Our matrix, is structured to help you think through the dimensions of different content based
on how your audience might think and what you’re trying to achieve as a business:
rr Q. What will work where your audience are more or less impulsive or rational?

rr Q. What is the potential for content to attract inbound links to your site to help with
SEO?

FIVE.
Content Hub

rr Q. How does content in each sector support your content creation and marketing goals?
Depending on the quadrant(s) that you feel drawn to for your audience, it offers a starting
point for your ideas generation.

FOUR.
Editorial Management

Through running workshops we have developed our own content marketing matrix. We
recommend the content marketing matrix as a key technique to review current use of content
marketing and identify new types of content.

THREE.
Strategy

5. Q&As and FAQs

SIX.
Content Distribution
SEVEN. Evaluate and
Measure ROI

ONE.
Audit and Goals
TWO. Define Audiences
and Personas

þþ Step 1. Review how you assess the value of different types of content.

FOUR.
Editorial Management

The process we use for applying this matrix to companies or brands is:

THREE.
Strategy

þþ Step 2. Review current use of content within company through plotting on the grid.
þþ Step 4. Brainstorm future content types possible
þþ Step 5. Use your criteria from Step 1 to select new content types to trial in content
campaigns.

We’ll now use the example of HubSpot to explain common formats for B2B content
marketing, many of which can be applied to consumer sectors. Will give our tips as we look
at each. HubSpot combined these techniques as part of a strategic approach to content
marketing to build growth that enabled the to achieve a billion dollar IPO.

The staple approach. HubSpot have invested in good quality posts enforced through style
guides. They are often defined to target specific audiences and search behaviours through
posts in different categories. More recently they have segmented a single inbound blog into
three and encourage subscribers as shown below. Nice!

SEVEN. Evaluate and
Measure ROI

1. Regular blog posts categorised by audience need and intent

SIX.
Content Distribution

A closer look at different content formats

FIVE.
Content Hub

þþ Step 3. Review competitor use of these content types through plotting on the grid

ONE.
Audit and Goals
TWO. Define Audiences
and Personas

The idea of people consuming live content is not new, webinars have been around for years.
The quality and practicality of it is rocketing now that broadband penetration is so high.
HubSpot example: Notice how they integrate with business goals through the panels in the
left sidebar and clear call-to-action in the main navigation. They “sweat their assets” through
making it easy to see webinars on demand and accessing them on iTunes.

FOUR.
Editorial Management

2. Webinars and streamed media

THREE.
Strategy

FIVE.
Content Hub
SIX.
Content Distribution
SEVEN. Evaluate and
Measure ROI

And, of course, they practice permission marketing through profiling all webinar attendees.
It’s nice they ask the softer question of “what is your biggest marketing challenge” – good for
follow-up phone calls.

Best Practice Tip 8 Practice permission marketing
Make sure you encourage sign-up in return for your most valuable content and use this to
profile your audience and follow-up by email or phone.
ONE.
Audit and Goals

Here’s an example of the email follow-up – with a nice additional follow-up consultation.

TWO. Define Audiences
and Personas

As with any content, focus on what content is best communicated through a webinar
presentation and combine that with what is keeping your customers awake at night.
Here are our top tips for webinars:
1. First – be clear what you need out of it – leads most likely or new subscribers, maybe
you want your content shared for traffic generation? The “r” in ROI must be clear.
Design that in to the process from sign-up and the last slide in the presentation, how

SEVEN. Evaluate and
Measure ROI

It doesn’t matter where you are or where the business is the costs and time required to
attend are vastly reduced. Importantly – done right – they’re interactive and social (otherwise
it’s a video presentation!) in the sense of any conference or classroom with the ability to
message or talk with the speaker. Just as with real world events we’re seeing people use
Twitter now as well, as a means to message other event attendees and this stream being
used as a back drop to the webinar or event.

SIX.
Content Distribution

Webinars in particular are due for a revival, we believe, they can often look poor but the
principal of them makes sense for people wanting an efficient way to consume information.
They’re very presentation orientated, just like a conference and so allow PowerPoint, screen
sharing and video to be broadcast to multiple, registered attendees. Why do they work? It’s
really efficiency, anyone at a PC can attend a “lunchtime briefing on lead generation”, for
example.

FIVE.
Content Hub

Best Practice Tip 9 Make each item of content shareable
Use the native sharing buttons in the developers library for Twitter or Facebook, or
services like www.addthis.com and www.shareservices.com to add buttons in the
relevant places right next to your content.

FOUR.
Editorial Management

HubSpot also make all of their content highly shareable – before and after use.

THREE.
Strategy

will you follow up with attendees?

ONE.
Audit and Goals

2. Have a good speaker and presenter! They are going to make this work ultimately – go
find new talent with big ideas that fits your thinking and will be motivated to work for
free. Remember that being good in webinars requires additional skills to being good
in a real conference.
3. Like any presentation, show don’t tell, this is visual so mix up content, share stories,
use case studies – you want it to be compelling, totally different to reading an ebook
or blog article. Map the story of the webinar out in advance, just as you would a
PowerPoint presentation.

TWO. Define Audiences
and Personas

4. Choose a moderator to work with the speaker; this is a deal-breaker as well as you
want to keep attendees enjoying the experience. This person will get everyone ready,
moderate comments and any Q&A at the end of the webinar – what’s the question the
user is asking, get it out quickly so everyone understands.
5. This is obvious – but practice! Make sure the tech works, everyone involved is
comfortable and the connection is good. Plan for things going wrong – it will be more
likely it will falter at the speakers side, web connection issues maybe so plan how you
will keep things going.
3

2. Ebooks, guides, whitepapers, research and infographics

Hubspot example: Hubspot’s free resources have sufficient depth to be useful and they
always feature appealing headlines and covers. They also use interactive tools.

SEVEN. Evaluate and
Measure ROI

Best Practice Tip 10 Make your Ebook content as appealing as possible through
headlines and graphics
It’s worth investing in these and the overall design and experience to help engage your
audience and to make it more sharable.

SIX.
Content Distribution

Ebooks epitomise the idea of content atomization (write a bigger piece and then break
it down to a multitude of pieces and re-create / re-work for a new context). They are the
high-end of what you might produce and differ in that they are longer, concept centric and a
mix of text and visuals, they’re also more conversational than white papers and are readily
made up of guides when you consider the chapter format in advance.

FIVE.
Content Hub

These are all on a theme – they’re based on ideas, or research, customer success stories
even. They all seek to solve a problem for the reader, to aid in a decision about something.
They contain text, images and charts. The broad difference is that white papers tend to be
authoritative, very often co-created to add credibility with a focus on a particular subject.

FOUR.
Editorial Management

7. Re-create your content from webinars – there’ll be blog posts and articles in the
attendee questions or from key concepts in the webinar, a podcast summary
afterward as well as a playback (on-demand) version of the full show for everyone
that missed out.

THREE.
Strategy

6. Encourage interaction within the platform and across social networks whilst the
webinar runs. Message attendees – are they happy – and also consider polls to
get people involved and illicit responses (social objects within the webinar). Event
organizers love Twitter, think about creating a short, searchable hashtag for your
event to collate a useful stream for users.

ONE.
Audit and Goals
TWO. Define Audiences
and Personas

A good consumer example of an ebook is this example guide from i-to-i TEFL who sell TEFL
courses, their guide helps the user understand TEFL and if it’s for them, using two authors
paid to do that for them. One of us helped manage the creation of this page, so hope you like
it – it certainly worked well for us!

Hubspot: Inbound marketing kit.

SEVEN. Evaluate and
Measure ROI

Best Practice Tip 12 Practice co-marketing
Identify other complementary organisations with a similar or larger reach and similar
audience that you can co-develop and co-share content with.

SIX.
Content Distribution

Smart Insights have worked with HubSpot on co-marketing, amongst many other partners,
to develop joint research and templates to expand awareness and leads from the audience
of each partner. HubSpot have dedicated roles for co-marketing in different marketing since
they see at as so important.

FIVE.
Content Hub

Best Practice Tip 11 Bundle content
Grouping content of different types can add to its appeal and can expand reach through
attracting visitors with different needs through search or different scent trails on the site.

FOUR.
Editorial Management

Notice that Hubspot (and Marketo) also have kits where they group content together, for
example this marketing kit4 is a great way of adding value to visitors with relatively little work.

THREE.
Strategy

ONE.
Audit and Goals
TWO. Define Audiences
and Personas

1. You’re teeing up your brand as a reliable source of information, so just as with
webinars, start with what keeps your audience awake at night. You might take
different perspectives on that topic in the same guide.

3. Add credibility where possible, seek out people to involve for casual comments are
as more serious co-authors. If they don’t confilict it will lighten the load and provide a
win-win in both credibility and more reach within their network.

5. Design it – it’s well worth the fee to turn great content into a great looking ebook that
brings the story to life visually – more engaging and more shareable.

7. Promote and have a strong landing page to download the guide from, incorporate
social proof of the ebook’s success if you can. Again, ensure that visitors can share
the page via social networks and email. You then have to consider, will you require
registration to access the ebook, maybe just giving the first chapter free, or will you
give it freely as recommended by David Meerman-Scott? What’s the right call? It
depends, on your priorities right now and your goals in the short to medium term. If

SEVEN. Evaluate and
Measure ROI

6. Encourage sharing of the content. Ensure it’s Creative Commons licensed and
embed share icons into the PDF since most will browse on-screen and it reminds
them to share it like they might a web page with the same benefits of populating the
tweet for them, for example.

SIX.
Content Distribution

4. Aim for fun and intriguing as well as educational, wherever possible. Why? Simply
because it’s more shareable than something that is just informative – you get to bring
your uniqueness to the table as well, you’re building your brand.

FIVE.
Content Hub

2. Simplify the complex – “save me time”. Break it down and make it easy for me to
consumer, you’re creating great, atomisable content in the process as well.

FOUR.
Editorial Management

Either way, ebooks and whitepapers are great for brands with products and services that
require thought before purchase – that is their real strong point. They can be rich and written
for multiple audience types involved in the sale, they are shareable and naturally err towards
purchases based on quality and innovation, less so on convenience or price. Here are our
top tips for ebook and whitepaper creation:

THREE.
Strategy

you “want leads” then the answer is there, however if you want to build a brand to
generate interested traffic in the medium term… you decide!

3. The importance of video
ONE.
Audit and Goals

The cost and ease of creating videos has never been more favourable, in addition to that
your users are creating them as well – and, we’ve already mentioned that YouTube is the
second largest search engine and we’re still seeing video as the major content trend. Video,
like text, is now a tool in your arsenal, you just need to get playing with it and see how it
feels. All video is not the same, so consider:

TWO. Define Audiences
and Personas

þþ User generated video that you edit together or just share – maybe create a contest based
on video entries
þþ Shoot your own video to help communicate an idea or concept succinctly
þþ Think about the new Explainer video trend pioneered by Common Craft where complex
concepts are broken down in a visual and animated way – remember the quality of the
narrative and voice over is 50% of the success
Hubspot example: which is worth a watch.

THREE.
Strategy

FOUR.
Editorial Management
FIVE.
Content Hub

They now also have a YouTube channel.

þþ YouTube (http://www.youtube.com/my_webcam): Use your webcam to record directly to
the YouTube site.
þþ Facebook (http://www.facebook.com/VideoApp?v=info): Use your webcam and the
Facebook Video application to record directly to your Facebook Profile or Page. Quickly
access this feature via the Video tab on your Profile/Page.
þþ Ustream (http://www.ustream.tv): Record live streaming video from this site. Share via a

SEVEN. Evaluate and
Measure ROI

Our perspective is that as far as the ability to view on multiple platforms or devices, ensure
shareability and inspire a valuable moment of engagement with the consumer, video is hard
to beat. Here are some recommended resources for creating videos:

SIX.
Content Distribution

Best Practice Tip 13 Group your YouTube content within a YouTube channel and use
video to support the learning and sales process
You likely won’t get as any many views or subscribers from your YouTube channel, but
some prefer to learn or decide on products this way, so conversion may well be higher.

unique URL and embed codes. Ustream applications are also available for downloading
to your computer and mobile phone.

ONE.
Audit and Goals

þþ Livestream (http://www.livestream.com): Record live streaming video from this site.
Share via a unique URL and embed codes. A Livestream application is also available to
download to your computer.
þþ qik (http://qik.com) Download this mobile application to record live streaming video on the
go using your cell phone’s integrated video camera and upload to your YouTube account.
This app also allows for automated Tweets and live chat.

TWO. Define Audiences
and Personas

þþ VYou (http://vyou.com): Video Q&A site, where you can record video answers to the
questions other users ask.
þþ Wetoku (http://www.wetoku.com): Create side-by-side video interviews to embed across
the web.

4. Audio, podcasts and video podcasts

Of course – don’t forget iTunes – the premier directory for podcast material. Go to iTunes and
from there submit a podcast.
HubSpot example: After trialling a regular HubSpot.tv spot, they now have a nicely themed
podcast to attract the right type of business owner or manager audience.

FOUR.
Editorial Management

Editing is straight forward and important too. You can cut the waffle and have well formatted
10-30 second sound bites. Consider branding you audio and position it as commute or break
based material for people on the move.

THREE.
Strategy

Audio podcasts have certainly lost appeal as video has risen but for ease they’re well
worth trying out and are well suited to people in a place to listen to conventional radio – like
commuters, for example, even phones have mp3 players now. Our recommendation is to
focus on audio content being a supplemental radio show to your other content marketing.
It’s the easiest media since you have the equipment and material ready-made to do it – you
can form audio content from blog posts, articles, e-newsletters and even take the audio from
video. Audio also lends itself perfectly to interview based content, too.

FIVE.
Content Hub
SIX.
Content Distribution
SEVEN. Evaluate and
Measure ROI

Best Practice Tip 14 Deliver a regular content stream through your hub
Regular updates delivered at a regular time can help engage your audience through
“setting their alarm clock”

Another feature of the audio approach which is common to all of their content marketing is
that they attract top quality speakers which is relatively easy given their reach.

ONE.
Audit and Goals

Best Practice Tip 15 Include authoritative celebrity or industry figures to endorse or
contribute to your content
You may not be able to afford the best, but afford the best you can.

5. Q&As and FAQs

TWO. Define Audiences
and Personas

We believe this area is a seriously hot place to invest your time and money. The popularity
of Yahoo! Answers shows there has always been a demand for this and growth of Quora.com
gives a more social spin to this approach.
There is a difference between the two since FAQs are based upon commonly asked
questions that you write ideal answers to from your understanding, they typically save time
for you and the consumer so long as you stick to direct and simple answers.

Either way running an FAQ or a Q&A is a commitment to develop and keep up to date, but
well worth the value for the consumer.

Best Practice Tip 16 Understand common user questions and answer them
Answer them either through the content on your hub, FAQs or a social network group.

rr Q. Have we audited current content effectiveness and content gaps?
Auditing your content and its effectiveness is the real start point on the journey to making
content more effective, and it can also be crucial for senior managers in proving the value of
investment so far in content marketing and getting buy-in and budget for a proper job.

SEVEN. Evaluate and
Measure ROI

How to audit and inventory your marketing content

SIX.
Content Distribution

HubSpot example: Hubspot bills these as “communities” on different platforms – either
owned “inbound.org” or independent – such as the Linked In group for Hubsport

FIVE.
Content Hub

There a number of tools helping achieve this to varying extents, check out http://www.osqa.
net and also http://www.wordpressqa.com, both are site instillations so a little harder to
integrate.

FOUR.
Editorial Management

Q&As are similar in that it’s questions and answers, but the difference is that it’s live,
crowd-sourced and largely user generated. Similar to a forum but with specific positioning,
functionality and designed to be Q&A based. Your brand can earn the opportunity to be a
resource pre, during and post purchase and so connecting customers with potential buyers.
Jay Baer refers to this as a ‘social FAQ’ where those Q&As can be set free across the
internet. That is the value of a Q&A over an FAQ, it’s inherently about “me” and so way more
shareable. With a blog you are further building community alongside more static web content
whilst gaining an opportunity for your internal experts to play a role in the Q&A as well.

THREE.
Strategy

They naturally edge towards people in buying mode who don’t want to, or cannot, speak
to someone. Done well and categorised for easy dissemination across product pages the
FAQ section is a valuable tool, though its down-side is that it’s still linear and does not take
advantage of the constant new questions or thoughts that the consumer may have. Enter the
Q&A.

ONE.
Audit and Goals
TWO. Define Audiences
and Personas
FOUR.
Editorial Management

The purpose of your content audit is to

THREE.
Strategy

6. See how well you’re covering the topics that are important to your audience
8. Help you find gaps that you can fill with new content pieces
9. Identify great pieces of content that can be repurposed into other formats to reach
even more prospects

FIVE.
Content Hub

7. See whether you’re maintaining a good mix of content types

SIX.
Content Distribution
SEVEN. Evaluate and
Measure ROI

ONE.
Audit and Goals
TWO. Define Audiences
and Personas
THREE.
Strategy

Technique 1 – Reviewing your internal story
FOUR.
Editorial Management

It’s essential that your audit covers both the organizational and customer interests. Our
friends at CDA have an excellent framework for this two-pronged diagnostic, with what you
should review in the three areas of mutual interest:

FIVE.
Content Hub
SIX.
Content Distribution

Bryony Thomas at Watertight Marketing stresses the importance and role of both rational
and emotional content for striking an emotional chord with your potential buyers very early
in the relationship (touchpoint 13 on the Watertight Touchpoint Leak Assessment), but
also emotional connection, lower in the funnel as your buyers approach a decision to buy
(touchpoint 3) provided by the visual and written style of your content that has to be friendly
56

SEVEN. Evaluate and
Measure ROI

The CDA pyramid shows the critical importance of having content to support the different
rational stages in the customer buying cycle.

and allow people to make an emotional connection with your business

ONE.
Audit and Goals
TWO. Define Audiences
and Personas

Perform external analysis to compliment your internal audit
rr Q. Have we benchmarked current content effectiveness and content gaps against
competitors?

Undertake an external analysis of your competitors and key influencers through market
research, reading blogs and white papers; understand emotional feelings about the brand
and topics through social sentiment analysis from social media listening tools; use keyword
research to understand words and phrases used in searching for content in Google, using
keyword and discovery tools.
rr Market research – ideally ensure that somebody different does this so that you avoid
confirmation bias. This can get expensive but you need to be able to validate popular
sources of content in the market, where it overlaps with yours and learn which audience

SEVEN. Evaluate and
Measure ROI

Once you have the completed the internal story, it’s important to perform a similar process
externally to see what you’re missing.

SIX.
Content Distribution

Before auditing your own content we suggest you start by benchmarking against competitor
content, since this will enable you to be more critical about your own content and so find
problems and identify new opportunities. Take a look at Step 7 for our detailed suggestions
on how you review content effectiveness with Google Analytics.

FIVE.
Content Hub

Technique 2: Benchmarking and key tools

FOUR.
Editorial Management

A content audit is a job for someone with a head for analytics, since this is a serious and
tedious process to ensure that the data gives you confidence and that you emerge with a
clear story to make decisions as you move forwards.

THREE.
Strategy

is consuming that content. There’s a wealth of information out there including free blogs,
free white papers, Slideshare presentations, conferences and of course the premium
(paid) industry content.

TWO. Define Audiences
and Personas

Once you have the list bring in to discovery tools to learn what’s most popular:
þþ Google KeyWord Tool (https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal)
þþ WordStream (http://www.wordstream.com/)
þþ Majestic SEO (http://www.majesticseo.com)

FIVE.
Content Hub

þþ SEMRush (http://www.semrush.com/)

FOUR.
Editorial Management

Best Practice Tip 17 Use top keyphrases to identify your content marketing competitors and
opportunities
Once you have found the highest volume keyphrases in your market using the Google
Keyword Tool, check out the competition and then identify the gaps – which are the niches
you can compete in?

THREE.
Strategy

rr Keyword research - conduct or hire out keyword research to understand the words or
phrases used by your audience when they hit Google. With the right keywords you’ll not
only learn why some of your content is / is not working, you’ll also increase the visibility
of your content and drive more traffic to your website. Brainstorm and use web analytics
tools to identify valuable keywords sending traffic already to you or known others.

ONE.
Audit and Goals

rr Social sentiment - understand how the audience is feeling about brands and topics more
generally. There’s a range of software available to help automate the auditing of how
an audience is feeling, so it’s crazy to not make use of that. The software is looking for
triggers for sentiment (positive / neutral / negative) alongside mentions of your brand
or the categories and topics related to your brand. This automated approach is really
valuable for large scale analysis, of course if there’s 10 references then simply reading
them is better for gauging sentiment. An important point here - of say 1,000 tweets how
do you know the 25 that matter? Identify and focus on those with most influence in your
market over casual commentators, it saves time and will help tighten your brief. Think
about using tools like Social Mention (http://www.socialmention.com) and Radian 6 Social
Mention (http://www.radian6.com) to help with this.

þþ Ubersuggest (http://ubersuggest.org/) for multilingual queries.
SIX.
Content Distribution

We recommend the Google Keyword Tool as your starting point. Here’s an example of how
you could use it to gain ideas. When you use this tool make sure you tick the “Exact” match
type to get a more realistic idea (by default it gives a broad match which overestimates the
number of searches). It’s best to start broad, with your category, here “seo”.

SEVEN. Evaluate and
Measure ROI

ONE.
Audit and Goals
TWO. Define Audiences
and Personas

FOUR.
Editorial Management

Once you have some ideas at this top-level, get more specific. If we’re writing a guide to
SEO, it’s clear from the keywords that people are looking for a basic guide (although here the
“starter guide” is a specific guide from Google – we recommend it).

THREE.
Strategy

As an example of the thinking that the keyword tool can prompt, notice that people are looking
for “seo service”, so maybe a guide or blog post could be titled “Choosing an SEO service”
rather than “Choosing an SEO company”. Of course it will be hard to compete on this term, but
when people browsing the web see your guide mentioned in social media or in on other sites it
will resonate better with them. Also notice the use of qualifiers like “tips and tools”.

FIVE.
Content Hub
SIX.
Content Distribution

Technique 3. Auditing your content
There are two parts here, quantitative and qualitative. Use a spreadsheet to audit your content.
Quantitative – The plan here is to create a full inventory of the existing web content and then
get a sense of what’s available, what’s popular, what is working and what’s not.

SEVEN. Evaluate and
Measure ROI

rr Competitor research – are your competitors getting it right? What tools are your
competitors using and how is their content organized, is there anything to learn there.
To illustrate this type of analysis, in Step 3 we look at the example of Hubspot in detail
reviewing their content types.

You can use something like Excel, making it easy to list each page line by line and then, on
separate tabs, any other content (Word Docs, PDF’s, PowerPoint, Video, audio) that has
been of use in your digital marketing so far. There are tools that help map a site in XML easily
and will then export to a CSV file, tools like that include Integrity. Once all data is recorded
you need to organise it and get a sense of popularity.
ONE.
Audit and Goals

Keep it simple so you can sort the data as needed and then summarise the story in
PowerPoint so that it’s easy to cut and paste and for others to digest. The page / document
inventory will include columns:
þþ Unique identifier (for every document, video or web page)

TWO. Define Audiences
and Personas

þþ URL / document name
þþ Page title
þþ Topic covered
þþ An indicator of popularity:
þþ Page views or unique visitors
þþ Downloads
þþ Bounce rate
þþ The owner of the content

Consider these as ways of questioning:
þþ Top gripes that customers have
þþ Top questions when in buying mode
þþ The question is now simple – what are you currently missing in your content that those
customers would really value in knowing?
Define the content topic ‘gaps’ and priorities

Best Practice Tip 18 Define content gaps and priorities
The output from your keyword research and competitor analysis should show the scale of
your opportunities.

SEVEN. Evaluate and
Measure ROI

As a result of the above you can now reveal the content gaps and priorities, your areas of
focus essentially, where exactly are you are going to invest your no doubt limited resources
with tangible proof as to why.

SIX.
Content Distribution

þþ Top “eureka” moments for new customers that trigger a buy decision

FIVE.
Content Hub

Qualitative. Raw data of content usage and interaction alone is only useful to a point. Ask
other team members who talk direct to customers like sales and customer service, for their
ratings of the top 10 issues or concerns that they deal with on a daily basis, or the common
gripes about the website or any downloads or white papers that are available to them as part
of the buying cycle. You’re looking to identify the pain points of the users in real terms, to see
what backs up the data that you’ve garnered. With enough budget you would logically extend
this into simple customer focus groups, and focus groups with leads that never converted to
customer (more importantly!). Keep the focus on content though.

FOUR.
Editorial Management

Ensure that you also summarise the broader story of peak visitor days and times, broadly the
most popular page/topics and least popular, also consider the top entry and exit pages and
patterns for what content, by media type, is most interacted with. It sounds a slog, and it is, but it’s
all about building your confidence and the business’ confidence to invest more in the right areas.

THREE.
Strategy

þþ Content type (text, video, PDF download etc)

ONE.
Audit and Goals

As an example, if your audience has a particular set of problems or issues that is clear in the
research that your product or service can fix, then you’ll want to focus there, maybe there are
some immediately clear opportunities to help your product or service become more buyable,
assuming your current content does not meet those needs already. It’s a not so simple case
of listing those priorities for the audience against what content you already have that is either
missing or is available but not being used well enough. Maybe you have content but in the
wrong media format, maybe it’s not findable on the site or just isn’t resonating with your
audience at all in communications terms.
Develop your Keyword Glossary

TWO. Define Audiences
and Personas

Next, create a list of your keywords and phrases to reflect your customer behaviour; then you
can map this against content types and use within your SEO. As part of this, you may also
wish to look at hashtags for key social media platforms. Sometimes shorter lists are better so
they can be grouped. In your spreadsheet consider including:
þþ Primary and secondary demand phrases grouped by type of keyphrase
þþ Keyword data (popularity, competitiveness, etc.)
þþ Competitive research – who is ranking well on those terms
Map keywords to all site content (downloads, images, video, social content, web pages) –
ensure you leverage all the keyword effort!

+ +
Common qualifiers for content marketing are:
þþ How to

FIVE.
Content Hub

The best way to summarise the types of qualifiers is through writing out the semantics of a
sentence like this:

FOUR.
Editorial Management

Best Practice Tip 19 Group and categorise your keyphrases
We’ve seen many companies develop a long list (actually more often it’s a short list), but
there’s no grouping so it’s difficult to manage. Once you have grouped keyphrases in a way
that reflects customer behaviour, then you can map these groups against potential content
types.

THREE.
Strategy

þþ Website categories and where keywords sit in relation to them

þþ Guide to
Common post-modifiers are:
þþ Ebook
þþ Download
þþ Calculator

You can now reveal your content gaps and priorities, and identify where you are going to invest.
Our content matrix, originally developed to help you produce the right content for the right
goal and stage of the buying cycle, also works as a content auditing tool.
You can audit types of content at a top level using the content marketing matrix to identify the
gap between what you’re doing now and what you could in future.

SEVEN. Evaluate and
Measure ROI

Technique 4. Identifying your content gaps and priorities

SIX.
Content Distribution

þþ Tips

ONE.
Audit and Goals
TWO. Define Audiences
and Personas
FOUR.
Editorial Management

Our matrix is structured to help you think through the dimensions of different content, based
on how your audience might think and what you’re trying to achieve as a business:

THREE.
Strategy

þþ Q. What will work where your audience are more or less impulsive or rational?

þþ Q. What is the potential for content to attract inbound links to your site to help with SEO?

þþ Step 1. Review how you assess the value of different types of content.
þþ Step 2. Review current use of content within company through plotting on the grid.
þþ Step 3. Review competitor use of these content types through plotting on the grid.
þþ Step 4. Brainstorm future content types possible.

SEVEN. Evaluate and
Measure ROI

þþ Step 5. Use your criteria from Step 1 to select new content types to trial in content
campaigns.

SIX.
Content Distribution

As we mentioned earlier, in the guide the steps in using this tool are simply:

FIVE.
Content Hub

þþ Q. How does content in each sector support your content creation and marketing goals?
Depending on the quadrant(s) that you feel drawn to for your audience, it offers a starting
point for your ideas generation.

Get effective editorial governance in place

ONE.
Audit and Goals
TWO. Define Audiences
and Personas

rr Q. Effective governance in place?

You can see that this commitment needs not only a major investment in content, but also
people resources to manage the publication and promotion of this content.
To help you govern this process successfully, you need discipline and clear guidelines to
oversee and control the tasks, roles, responsibilities, editorial workflow, deadlines, approval
processes, grammar, quality, content style, tone and voice, which are all part of your brand.

Whatever you decide to call your document, it needs to ensure that your content marketing is
strategic, and not characteristic of “random acts of marketing.”

Done correctly editorial governance will:
þþ Guide writers on how to write for a specific target audience
þþ Help writers feel more confident writing
þþ Ensure consistent quality & tone across numerous writers / touch points
þþ Lighten the need for editing and correction
þþ Make the process repeatable and scalable
þþ Improve reader engagement and visitor retention

SEVEN. Evaluate and
Measure ROI

þþ Remove the subjectivity from the review process

SIX.
Content Distribution

The number one objective of content governance is to coordinate the efforts of individuals
internally and/or externally to help fulfil a consistent brand voice.

FIVE.
Content Hub

These guidelines can be referred to as your ‘content marketing strategy governance
document,’ or you have encountered the term ’style guide’ used for editorial governance in
the media industry.

FOUR.
Editorial Management

To get to the level of quality needed to make your content marketing work requires a major
commitment.

THREE.
Strategy

Strategy Recommendation 7 Get senior management commitment to an ongoing content
management initiative
How you achieve this will vary according to the type of company, but we think this is one of
the most important strategy recommendations in this guide.
ONE.
Audit and Goals

As with supporting all major change in a business getting senior managers to support the
initiative is probably the biggest driver of success. If you don’t get this it’s like other business
activities will always take priority and quality of content will suffer.
The questions to ask here are:

TWO. Define Audiences
and Personas

rr Q. Do we have executive support for this content strategy?
rr Q. Who is the ultimate authority on your content strategy, and what are the criteria for
making changes?
rr Q. How will we sustain and evolve your content strategy to achieve your business strategy?
rr Q. Which policies, guidelines and standards should be implemented (as simply as
possible) and policed to assure all content is aligned with any existing internal and
external requirements?

rr Q. Are the right resources and structures in place to support content development?

The final area we will look at in this step is the need for the right management of content
marketing, starting with measurement and then looking at the resources needed to run the show.

Techniques

FOUR.
Editorial Management

Once you have developed this information, and the executive team buys into this essential
background information for your content strategy, then you can start developing the execution
plan.

THREE.
Strategy

rr Q. What are the measures we will use to review content effectiveness and show how
content development is supporting the business?

1. Ideas for defining content Tone and Voice
FIVE.
Content Hub

A technique you can use to identify your brand tone and voice comes from Big Brand
System. It’s designed to make us think about our organisation’s brand as having a specific
tone and voice that matches brand personalty characteristics on a spectrum.

SIX.
Content Distribution
SEVEN. Evaluate and
Measure ROI

In the left column we’ve got brand personalities that are personable and friendly,
spontaneous, modern cutting edge, fun and accessible, and on the right we’ve got brand
64

personalities that are rather more formal:
Corporate, careful thinking, traditional, established and serious.
Working with the brand personality attributes on the spectrum’s you can position your own
brand, and begin the process of generating your own specific brand style guidelines.
ONE.
Audit and Goals

rr Q: Where does your brand live on the spectrum?
Developing brand voice guidelines and a style guide is intrinsic to building a coherent brand
personality.

TWO. Define Audiences
and Personas

MailChimp are well known for injecting humour into their voice.

SIX.
Content Distribution

UK gov makes use of its online style guide to give local councils content writing guidelines
across a multitude of remote sites:

FIVE.
Content Hub

In essence the brand;s voice is spontaneous rather than careful thinking, which is better
suited to a bigger, stuffier energy supplier.

FOUR.
Editorial Management

Here is an example of a brand my agency developed a content marketing strategy for, which
needed to have a simple, no-jargon, clear active voice, which didn’t like “the clever clogs
approach to advising on renewable energy solutions using techno babble, preferring a simple
style and a bit of humour “three cheers for the government, no have not been drinking.”

THREE.
Strategy

SEVEN. Evaluate and
Measure ROI

ONE.
Audit and Goals
TWO. Define Audiences
and Personas

rr Q. Resource for content marketing identified including responsibilities, roles, structures
and process?
In Step One we encouraged you to review your existing content marketing skills and
resource.
Successful content marketing management and workflow is complex, so having the right
resource in place is almost always a challenge. It’s not just web content either, the remit must
be broad enough to cover all content, including on and off your website.

A content marketer is responsible for the planning, creating, and sharing of valuable content
to attract and convert prospects into customers, and customers into repeat buyers. The type
of content he/she shares depends upon what is being sold. In other words, the skills are to
educate people so that they know, like, and trust your brand enough to do business with you.

rr Q. Responsibilities for content marketing defined?
Below are the broad responsibilities for content marketing to think about:
rr Strategy development and leadership. Leads the web content strategy with the wider
team, and turning this into a budgets plan with the resource needed
rr Standards development. Lead standards creation (maybe working with others in
marketing) developing ideas like voice, tone, being relevant
rr Editorial control. Deciding the who, what, how, where and when of what gets published,

SEVEN. Evaluate and
Measure ROI

Responsibilities

SIX.
Content Distribution

If you look back at Altimeter’s Content Marketing Maturity Self-audit grid in Step One, you’ll
notice that with maturity, more skills are developed in-house and collaboration increases
across the organisation.

FIVE.
Content Hub

The resource you need depends on what you need to accomplish, by when and to what
standards; That could mean a small team, or a very able one-person team, which means
someone who can wear all the editorial and marketing hats.

FOUR.
Editorial Management

Do you have the right team in place?

THREE.
Strategy

The Smart Insights content marketing eLearning Toolkit has further guidance on managing
editorial governance, including setting rules for grammar, vocabulary, spelling, punctuation
and syntax.

and ensuring this ties back to the wider organisation (especially marketing)
rr Managing content creators. Managing and organising content creators against the plan
rr Measurement, evaluation and improvement. Specifying the right KPIs and reports to
review and improve. Also relates to social media optimisation
ONE.
Audit and Goals

So these are a selection of the main roles, there is not necessarily a single person in each
role. In a small content marketing set-up, these roles are often covered by just one or two
people.

Roles

TWO. Define Audiences
and Personas

rr Q. Roles for content marketing defined?
When you build or review a team consider these role types:
þþ Listening analysts – ideally before, but even once your start sharing content, it’s
necessary to get a handle on what your audience are talking about in order to add fuel to
that conversation, so listening to the market using free or paid software is important. You
want to keep close to the audience and their issues.

þþ Content reviewers – these are the managers within brand or marketing who sign-off the
content. You need a good workflow system to alert them to what needs to be reviewed so
they can suggest modifications and make sign-off rapidly.

Typically, the key content marketing tasks for a small team are the following:

SEVEN. Evaluate and
Measure ROI

Content marketing has been around for a while, but a content marketer is a newer
phenomenon.

SIX.
Content Distribution

þþ Team leader – someone has to be able to captain and co-ordinate this content army
internally and also ensure that it delivers to the strategy. The leader will also manage
ad-hoc external requirements. This role is sometimes known as a content strategist, this
example from a job description from Logitech gives an idea of the scope of this role.
The person in the lead role would ideally be an “embedded journalist”, someone who
understand the audience and has a nose for (and ability to write) a story.

FIVE.
Content Hub

þþ Conversation agents – or more commonly ‘community managers’, are a unique mix of all
of the above with the added ability to interact meaningfully with your audience wherever
they reside online. One of their key goals is to develop user-originated content as a part
of those conversations.

FOUR.
Editorial Management

þþ Journalists – this role specifically refers to creating fresh content for a new section, blog
or social media presence. I’m a big proponent of David Meerman-Scott’s suggestion of
the importance of journalism skills being brought into marketing, after all isn’t modern
marketing based around storytelling, good research and well executed communications?
Particularly since the requirement will be to curate, co-create and originate content across
pre-agreed topics, that’s a skill in itself.

THREE.
Strategy

þþ Content creators – these skills may be quite diverse including copywriting or even video
animation skills. You will need the most often used skill within your reach and at a low
cost. Advanced business will need a dedicated content creator(s) with multiple skills, of
course.

ONE.
Audit and Goals
TWO. Define Audiences
and Personas

Which translates into the following roles:
THREE.
Strategy

FOUR.
Editorial Management
FIVE.
Content Hub

Here is a diagram from our friends at CoSchedule, a popular Wordpress editorial calendar
plugin, to help you consider your blogging resource:

SEVEN. Evaluate and
Measure ROI

Regardless of whether or not you manage your content marketing in-house or outsource
elements of it, members of your content marketing team need to know their role and have a
clear line of sight into the process. A cloud-based project management tool like Basecamp,
Trello, Content Schedule or Kapost, if you can afford the investment, will help you manage
your remote content marketing production and distribution team.

SIX.
Content Distribution

It’s easy to overlook the range of technical, editorial, marketing and management skills
required for successful content marketing. Take the time to research the required activities
for your project success and understand your organisational needs. Is your project is a pilot
project, or is it an ongoing commitment to content creation?

ONE.
Audit and Goals
TWO. Define Audiences
and Personas
THREE.
Strategy

FOUR.
Editorial Management
FIVE.
Content Hub

Analytical skills to gather strategic business and user insights:
þþ Stakeholder interviews
þþ Content audits and inventories
þþ Content review and analysis
þþ Competitive analysis

SEVEN. Evaluate and
Measure ROI

To help you plan your resource, keep these key content marketing skills in mind:

SIX.
Content Distribution

This is fine for blogging, but you’ll need a wider skills set if you’re going to be producing a
variety of content types and formats. Beyond roles, recognise that good content often needs
commissioning. That might be article writing, e-book type-setting or video filming and editing,
it may be beyond the resource available internally, so plan for those costs (see costing model
in our Content Marketing ROI Guide).

Strategic planning and design to support long-term vision for content:
þþ Content vision and recommendations
þþ Content concepts, examples, and samples
þþ Content governance and process design
ONE.
Audit and Goals

þþ Taxonomy
þþ Information architecture
þþ Content typing and requirements
þþ Writing style guides

TWO. Define Audiences
and Personas

Project management to keep the project on track and budget:
þþ Project plan
þþ Content brief
þþ Content matrix
þþ Content strategy roadmap
Training and presenting skills to educate and inform:
þþ Stakeholder presentations

þþ Content training programs

THREE.
Strategy

þþ Workshop development and delivery

þþ Editing and mentoring

þþ Content management system assessment
þþ Content migration planning and management
þþ Content matrix

FOUR.
Editorial Management

Technical integration to ensure that technology and content work together:

þþ Business analysis
þþ Content modelling
User experience skills to help shape:

FIVE.
Content Hub

þþ Content workflows

þþ User research and success metrics
þþ User journeys
þþ Wireframe development
þþ Information architecture
þþ Wireframes

Content marketing management skills to deliver:
þþ Branding through content
þþ Search engine optimisation
þþ Social media strategy
þþ Content mix
þþ Editorial and content maintenance calendar

SEVEN. Evaluate and
Measure ROI

þþ Content workflows

SIX.
Content Distribution

þþ Personas

þþ Targeted messaging
þþ Web analytics setup and reporting

ONE.
Audit and Goals

Content marketing might be a challenge to one person because it requires a mix or right
and left brain skills (artistic and analytical.) The following graphic from Salesforce Pardon
provides a nice mashup of that multifaceted person.

TWO. Define Audiences
and Personas
THREE.
Strategy

FOUR.
Editorial Management
FIVE.
Content Hub
SIX.
Content Distribution
SEVEN. Evaluate and
Measure ROI

FOUR

Editorial Management
ONE.
Audit and Goals

rr Q. Do we have the system to plan your content and the tools to support this?
Now that you have your content hub in place, you need to define what content to share,
when to share it, by whom and how. Not easy! So planning a month ahead, quarter or for the
forthcoming year is an essential framework and discipline.
There are several different types of calendars you can use, depending on your needs:

TWO. Define Audiences
and Personas

1. Editorial calendar: to manage production of your content marketing assets.
2. Timeline calendar: for visual planning and management of content marketing
campaigns.
3. Content calendar: a simpler, quicker way of developing ideas for multiple months
cascading down to weekly operational blog, social media and e-newsletter updates.
4. Repurposing calendar: provides examples of how to show different content formats
on a timeline within a campaign.

THREE.
Strategy

All strategies must be driven by goals and an e-communications strategy is no exception.
Make sure your goals are modelled and measured as described in previous sections. The
key elements of the content marketing e-communications strategy we’ll cover in this section
are:
þþ 2. Guidelines for content types and formats.
þþ 3. Create core content marketing resources.
þþ 4. Review options for creating and sourcing content.
þþ 5. Content atomisation, re-purposing and syndication.
þþ 7. Communicate your content marketing proposition.
You can see that the first three steps help you work towards the creation of the editorial
calendar.

Develop your editorial calendar
An editorial calendar helps both develop the right types of content and schedules content
production.

SEVEN. Evaluate and
Measure ROI

þþ 6. Create and update your editorial calendar.

SIX.
Content Distribution

þþ 1. Guidelines for regular content update frequency.

FIVE.
Content Hub

Another key difference is that communications are two-way – so your communications
strategy needs to consider how to encourage and sustain a two-way dialogue. Yet
another key difference is that you are not only publishing content on your own site or
paying for ad placements, you are syndicating it to third-party sites and encouraging
sharing. This third difference requires Social Media Optimisation (SMO) which we will
cover in Step 6.

FOUR.
Editorial Management

Strategy Recommendation 8 Stay on track with a sustained content production and
sharing activity.
To maintain a strong voice online requires commitment to continuous creation and
distribution of content. But there is also a need to encourage conversation and dialogue
to maintain interest and sharing.

Without an effective editorial calendar and a person to control it, content quality will suffer.
Think of the power of a newspaper or magazine editor like Meryl Streep in The Devil Wears
Prada – this type of power is needed!

ONE.
Audit and Goals
TWO. Define Audiences
and Personas
THREE.
Strategy

This can get complex, and the challenges are quite different to the normal marketing
challenges, so do sit and think this through first.

FIVE.
Content Hub

Key Strategy Recommendation 9 Create a sound editorial calendar and a person to
manage with sufficient authority
An editorial calendar is essential to an effective content strategy to plan for future quality
resources from a range of writers. The person in charge of managing the challenge to
deliver against publication deadlines will need sufficient resource and power within the
organisation to deliver it.

FOUR.
Editorial Management

A team that communicates the big picture works better together, which is the success behind
the big international publishing brands, from whom we can learn a great deal.

SIX.
Content Distribution
SEVEN. Evaluate and
Measure ROI

ONE.
Audit and Goals
TWO. Define Audiences
and Personas
THREE.
Strategy

Tips for developing an integrated editorial calendar

þþ Use a 12 month editorial calendar of your choice: Excel docs, Google Docs or Google
Calendar, Smart Insights http://bit.ly/smart-insights-calendar, Trello, CoSchedule, (WP
plugin)

þþ List your audiences overarching themes (sweet spots)
þþ Keep in mind key industry events, dates, launches, holidays

FOUR.
Editorial Management

Here are some tips to help you get organised to produce your content marketing engine to
keep your audience engaged. These are not rules or an example calendar, just ideas to see
what might work for you. The content ideas for different time periods should be overlaid with
specific themes or topics which you think will work best to engage your audience.

þþ Plan content formats with content matrix
The amount and frequency of editorial output varies enormously from one enterprise to the
next. Here is and example of a small enterprise versus OpenView:

FIVE.
Content Hub

þþ Remember your distribution; Plan this simultaneously

SIX.
Content Distribution
SEVEN. Evaluate and
Measure ROI

You may choose to plan your editorial production in daily, weekly, monthly or quarterly
schedules like this:
Daily (For larger publishers and business with a large audience)
þþ At least 1 (ideally 3) new blog posts
ONE.
Audit and Goals

þþ Tweet updates and ideas
þþ As above, for Facebook if that’s relevant
þþ Respond to others blog posts and comments on your own
þþ Keep up to date with the news

TWO. Define Audiences
and Personas

þþ An article, maybe a how-to
þþ Get involved off-site somewhere (at Smart Insights we use LinkedIn for that)
þþ Maintain any outposts or web assets you se in your marketing
þþ Summarise key news and updates in an e-newsletter
Monthly
þþ Produce a webinar

THREE.
Strategy

þþ Create 2 how-to or interview based videos from an event
þþ Write a meatier blog post, maybe 2 or 3 if you can
þþ Create several strong customer case studies

þþ Create and post presentations to SlideShare
Quarterly

þþ Publish an e-book, guide or white paper (distribute it!)
þþ Attend one big event and interview people

FOUR.
Editorial Management

þþ Most importantly – produce create third-party content, maybe a guest blog post on an
influential third party web site

þþ Produce a video series of 4-5 items
FIVE.
Content Hub

þþ Tie in a promotional mechanic, maybe a simple contest where UGC might feature heavily

Managing your content editorial production
SIX.
Content Distribution

In online content scheduling tools like WordPress CoSchedule and Trello, you can manage
your editorial production workflows with efficiency, since the content team responsible for
drafting, proofing and publishing get ‘alerts” and notifications to act on. We love the free
Trello tool which enables categorisation and workflow for different team members.

SEVEN. Evaluate and
Measure ROI

ONE.
Audit and Goals
TWO. Define Audiences
and Personas
THREE.
Strategy

The value of an editorial board

This process will hep you:

þþ Generate the right content ideas for your target audience

FOUR.
Editorial Management

Running a regular editorial board with key stakeholders is an integral part of your content
governance process, ensuring your content is on time and on message. The benefits are
multiple and you should really be thinking like a newsroom, or even better the fictional cable
Newsroom run by MacKenzie, (Emily Mortimer), who leads an ensemble cast of content
producers focused on actual recent events, who take their collective responsibilities very
seriously.

þþ Co-ordinate many moving pieces / tasks into a structured prices

þþ Meet deadlines and stay the course
þþ Monitor progress toward goal, and create accountability

FIVE.
Content Hub

þþ Manage communication between multiple people / departments, non-silo, drumbeatapproach

þþ Decide on content that fits your brand and audience’s needs
þþ Ensure that all your personas are having content created for them
þþ Get content approved quickly and smoothly
þþ Prevent random acts of content
þþ Review content that is and isn’t working

Stick to the same time and place
Keep a regular meeting slot for the editorial board. A thirty 60 meeting or conference call
bi-weekly is good. You can run it more frequently than this, but any less and you’ll lose
the ability to act quickly on ideas and how well or poorly different pieces of content are
performing. You should invite the key players including:
þþ A company exec who brings the vision of where the organisation is going and what the
customers are looking for at the highest level

SEVEN. Evaluate and
Measure ROI

How to run your editorial board

SIX.
Content Distribution

þþ Make sure your content fits your brand’s themes

þþ A marketer who can check content ideas against strategy and message
þþ A head of sales who has the customer insight and who will tell you what content is
missing / needed

ONE.
Audit and Goals

þþ A copywriter who can garner background information from the meeting to produce the
content
Review ROI
This is your chance to make sure your marketing content is doing the job its supposed to,
and that you’re seeing a return on investment. The whole aim is to create content that gets
results and achieves your goals.

TWO. Define Audiences
and Personas

Listen to your team
Editorial boards are good for ideation, enabling participants to bounce ideas off each other.
The team is reading around key topics, talking to customers and attending in person events,
so they have a lot of relevant content to surface.
Your editorial calendar plays a pivotal role in editorial board meetings, allowing everyone the
opportunity to see the content ideas, the schedule and the deadlines.
You can examine anything that’s bottle-necking in your creation process. The calendar is
updated after the meeting.

THREE.
Strategy

Create your content hub
rr Q. Content hub created?

Essentially it’s a place around which you can grow a network of interested individuals, a
place where interaction or engagement with your content and your brand can take place.
This interaction will happen because of the quality of your content marketing.

Your hub is where your content marketing can generate leads, sales and engagement, and
it intersects your brand with your audience. So it’s important that the hub epitomises your
brand story, that core message or big idea, and that in the outposts you have a connection
back to your story and the wider narrative.
It provides many benefits including:
þþ Helping to show you are an authority in your area, which creates trust with your audience.
þþ SEO advantages with fresh, updated and relevant content.

SEVEN. Evaluate and
Measure ROI

You can increasingly use Facebook as the place to manage your interaction around content,
but Facebook is not an asset you can truly own in terms of features and functions, so that
is risky (your own turf is better as the content repository!). Facebook also remains external
to your main brand presence, so we’d suggest that a hub is the bridge between your
commercial or main website, and external out-posts like Facebook.

SIX.
Content Distribution

Think of the hub as the home for your content, a place for feedback and dialogue and the
connector to a number of out-posts where your brand is present (eg Facebook, SlideShare
etc) and being shared and discussed.

FIVE.
Content Hub

What is it? Content marketing hub
Ideally this is a central branded location where your audience can access your content
marketing and interact with it. It should integrate with your other content.

FOUR.
Editorial Management

What do we mean by a hub? Well we introduced it at the start of the guide where we
explained that it’s a central home for your content. It includes the whole range of your
content: user generated, curated, social etc…

þþ Driving interaction and engagement with your visitors, to help with conversion whether it’s
a sale, enquiry or specific call to action to drive your audience along the sales funnel.
þþ Insight into your content that is resonating with your audience from one central point.

ONE.
Audit and Goals

þþ Visible, easy access to your content. If the efforts of your content marketing are
distributed across different parts of your site or hidden away on a separate microsite
you’re missing an opportunity to create a destination that visitors will return to.
At a physical level the content hub can be:
rr A blog

TWO. Define Audiences
and Personas

rr Your news section
rr An online magazine
rr A resource centre

Recommended best practices
Technique 1: Automatically syndicate your content to different channels

THREE.
Strategy

When Smart Insights launched we used this process to support content sharing across the
main social networks to minimise the resource we needed. Today, we use mainly HootSuite
and Buffer to tailor updates for our different social networks.

FOUR.
Editorial Management

FIVE.
Content Hub

Although we’re advocating saving time here by syndicating, we need to be careful not
just to push or SHOUT – the beauty of social media is that it’s a two-way street enabling

SEVEN. Evaluate and
Measure ROI

Key Strategy Recommendation 10 Use tools to automatically syndicate your content to the
main networks
Use tools to distribute your content, but ensure you have personal participation too. We use
and recommend Hootsuite for this.

SIX.
Content Distribution

So when new content is created it is automagically syndicated to the different social
channels.

conversations and dialogue. So manual interactions with each of the social networks to ask
and answer questions is also recommended as we’ve said before.
Although the hub should encourage sharing best at the level of an individual piece of content
as shown in the syndication lifecycle, you can also encourage sharing of the entire hub:
ONE.
Audit and Goals

Technique 2: Tools to syndicate your content.
There are a range of tools to automatically syndicate your content to your main channels, to
distribute your content and still ensure participation.
Social syndication tools include:

TWO. Define Audiences
and Personas

þþ Hootsuite
þþ Buffer
þþ Sproutsocial
þþ scoop.it – syndication to Twitter and email
þþ Using RSS e.g. managed through Feedburner
þþ Facebook syndication through networkedblogs

THREE.
Strategy

Technique 3: Creating and hosting your hub

1. WordPress.com - Blog updates are managed by WordPress. For a fee you can
have your own domain name. Different standard themes can be applied plus other
plug-ins, but these are limited compared to a hosted version.

2. WordPress hosted by a hosting company - this offers more flexibility and
customisation and is used by most agencies when managing client sites.

FOUR.
Editorial Management

We recommend that you use an open source blog platform, of which WordPress is the most
popular. Drupal and Joomla are the main alternatives which are popular with charities. With
WordPress there are three options:

3. WordPress VIP - Managed hosting of high-traffic sites and brands.

Key Strategy Recommendation 11 Ensure hub encourages conversation
While your hub cab work as a static resource, it’s better if it allows commenting and
conversation between visitors. Comments are the best indicator of audience engagement.

FIVE.
Content Hub

Examples of best practice content hubs

SIX.
Content Distribution
SEVEN. Evaluate and
Measure ROI

ONE.
Audit and Goals
TWO. Define Audiences
and Personas
THREE.
Strategy

Recommended Tools and Services

SIX.
Content Distribution

Uberflip is an alternative for creating a hub with a collection of resources, such as this
example from Monetate. Inn this example Monetate were able to aggregate content channels
including video, eBooks, white papers and blog articles into a single, responsive content hub.
This approach can reduce the overall cost of creating content and managing your resource
centre, but the monthly fee is fairly high.

FIVE.
Content Hub

The main website is good which includes a resources section, highlighting valuable content,
but it also has a separate news section which doesn’t reference the blog clearly. The blog,
developed on a different platform is on the right below and is better at integration since it has
the company brand information. It does link back to the main site, but doesn’t give a ‘reason
to click’.

FOUR.
Editorial Management

DELL

SEVEN. Evaluate and
Measure ROI

ONE.
Audit and Goals
TWO. Define Audiences
and Personas
THREE.
Strategy

þþ Supporting content marketing with ready-made tweets and customisable e-newsletters,
which can be added to existing marketing channels or completely managed
Atom’s content donuts serving Tech, StartUp, Marketing, Small Business and Law each
showcase their content resource model:

FIVE.
Content Hub

þþ Quickly acquiring substantial amounts of top quality relevant content by licensing at low
cost

FOUR.
Editorial Management

Atom offer off-the-shelf powered resource centres for banks, professional services firms,
consultancies, and business support organisations, as an alternative to creating and
delivering their own content from scratch. Something that that solicitors and other so called
“boring industries” struggle with, so this can be a beneficial solution providing two key
benefits:

SIX.
Content Distribution
SEVEN. Evaluate and
Measure ROI

ONE.
Audit and Goals
TWO. Define Audiences
and Personas
THREE.
Strategy

FOUR.
Editorial Management

ContentOro acts as a content aggregator, but differentiates itself by working solely with
publishers to help license content from their books as immediately available, expertly written
content for websites that need content fast.

FIVE.
Content Hub
SIX.
Content Distribution
SEVEN. Evaluate and
Measure ROI

The platform extracts and enhances book content for use on the web and to integrate with
e-commerce, a type of business that notoriously fails to produce customer-centric content,
and over produce product-centric content that often leads to SEO malpractices.

Benefits:
þþ Quickly find expert content and images to fill your production schedule
þþ Engage visitors on their interests and issues on your website more easily with expert
content that does not sell
ONE.
Audit and Goals

þþ Build Authority Quickly
þþ Create your ultimate guide quickly with access to expert licensed content
þþ Jump ahead of the competition from a late start by providing more information quicker
þþ Improve SEO and Get Found in Search

TWO. Define Audiences
and Personas

As long as there is a strategy behind the selection of expert content, these solutions are
legitimate and helpful for brands short on editorial and marketing knowledge and manpower,
that need to build engagement and trust with audiences on their content hubs, faster than
they otherwise could.

THREE.
Strategy

Having these off the peg ready-to-buy solutions is helpful, but they don’t beat originating
your own content even if this is the most time consuming way to source expert content, and
it should really represent an minimum of 20% of what you generate, and in time become
the majority of the content that you own, since you are unlikely to own anything you buy or
licence for very long, nor have the exclusivity to it. We examine content creation solutions
more closely in section five.

Your content hub and SEO
rr Q. Have we selected the best location for our blog?

The 3 main blog hosting options
The three options are straightforward. Let’s take some examples:

FOUR.
Editorial Management

If you get this decision wrong, you may fail to get the hoped for SEO benefits you have
worked hard to convince your colleagues about. But, if you get it right you can almost
immediately see new, incremental visits you wouldn’t have attracted without the blog.

1. Subfolder – http://www.domain.com/blog e.g. http://www.econsultancy.com/blog
3. Separate domain – http://www.newdomain.com
Our post5 explains the pros and cons in more detail, but we would advise that an integrated
sub-folder approach is best in most cases.

rr Q. Suitable blogging platform selected?
Our suggestion is that everything in this guide can be most easily built up from a blog or a
similar method of grouping and sharing content. Blogs are the front line for content marketing
– everything else can be added over time in terms of richer features, functionality and of
course deeper variations of content.
5

Smart Insights: Which is best for Blog SEO - subfolder, subdomain or separate domain

SEVEN. Evaluate and
Measure ROI

Guidance on using a blogging platform as your content hub

SIX.
Content Distribution

Best Practice Tip 20 Carefullly consider whether you host your blog as a subfolder,
subdomain or separate domain
A subfolder of your main domain is best if you want incremental traffic straightaway while a
subdomain or separate domain can be best for SEO if you wait a long time to create links
and then link back to the main site.

FIVE.
Content Hub

2. Subdomain – http://blog.domain.com e.g. http://blog.zopa.com

A blog can and should be the place where your brand can share thoughts, words, ideas and
information with the world. There are also a myriad of tools that make this cheap, if not free:
Wordpress, TypePad, Blogger and Moveable Type. Here are some issues to consider in
using a blogging platform for SEO:
ONE.
Audit and Goals

The benefits to making your content efforts blog orientated are numerous:
þþ You have one repository to manage and tie content together from other channels or social
networks
þþ You can listen and interact, and garner feedback from your audience
þþ You can inspire and capture comments about the content that you share

TWO. Define Audiences
and Personas

þþ You have a place to build a schedule and process it
þþ Blogs have categories and specialist tags that can help with SEO and help users find
interesting topics
þþ You’re easy to share with others through many free plugins (we recommend Wordpress
for the best plugins)
þþ You are increasingly more findable in search engines with fresh blog content

THREE.
Strategy

Best Practice Tip 21 Use blog categories and topics to help with SEO and findability of
content
Carefully define a taxonomy of preferred categories and topics that content writers are
aware of (if you don’t they may create their own)

It’s important that the hub epitomises your brand story, that core message or big idea, and
that in the outposts you have a connection back to your story and the wider narrative. A great
example is Eloqua.com (before they were acquired by Oracle), they centred their brand story,
their narrative targeted at marketers, to be all about revenue the word “revenue”. So, in turn
you’ll see that the ‘revenue’ word is used across their marketing:

“The revenue stream” – Their Twitter page
“The revenue hub” – Their Slideshare page

Social objects and content marketing for interaction

The problem is that nobody cares about your Brand X, they care about themselves. And,
as we know, that issue is compounded by how cluttered the internet is which in turn makes
gaining traction or cut-through so hard in digital marketing. Brands no longer have that first
communication (broadcast) advantage to steer the conversation like they possibly did twenty
6

Gaping void: Social Objects for beginners

SEVEN. Evaluate and
Measure ROI

The concept of ‘social objects’ came about in 2005, coined by Jyri Engestrom, an
anthropologist studying human interactions online, who said that those objects are “the
reason people connect with each particular other and not something else”. The concept has
been well popularized by Hugh Macleod at The Gaping Void6, he suggested that you might
more easily call a social object a ‘sharing device’ instead. Hugh’s material is great to inform
understanding of where marketing has come from, and subsequently where it has moved to
– and how content marketing fits into the picture.

SIX.
Content Distribution

It’s also more natural to see how that tight positioning influences Eloqua’s content choices, curated
or otherwise – using considered and tight positioning will naturally help keep you on track.

FIVE.
Content Hub

“It’s all about the revenue” – Their blog

FOUR.
Editorial Management

Remember the intersection between brand and audience

or more years ago – though in truth there was more likely just less choice.

ONE.
Audit and Goals

The simple point is that humans require ‘objects’ to interact around, they always have, these
objects specifically aid in conversation and so sharing with other people, whether that’s
talking about the latest iPhone, Harry Potter movie or the weather yesterday. The interesting
thing about the social object is the not the object itself, but the conversations that happen
around them that ultimately form social networks. Smart marketers now need to learn how to
develop and use social objects in order to be a part of the conversation, to fuel sharing and
form networks of people that are interested in their brand.
Social objects, content marketing and your hub

TWO. Define Audiences
and Personas

rr You can use valuable information as an effective social object – brands need to provide
information to the consumer who wants to learn, make a choice about or discuss
something, blogs are an obvious way to do this.
rr You can be worth talking about, ideally the product/service should be but then we don’t all
work for Apple, in which case we need to create an object to fuel conversation or word of
mouth. Content can do this particularly well when it’s hinged around a big idea. Look at
Old Spice guy as a great example, or the Lynx Fallen Angels campaign.

THREE.
Strategy

rr Ensure that your content, the social object, is inherently shareable so that the network
can easily form around it. The more comments, Likes, shares you can illicit, the better.

Running an effective blog or content hub
So, your hub is up and running, what’s next? There are two main areas to review. First
an internal point-of-view looking at managing the blog or content hub to meet business
communications goals. Second, and arguably most important to the future of your content
initiative, an external approach looking at how to engage your audience.

rr Q. Approach to managing blog to meet communications goals reviewed?

1. Blog purpose. Connect back to that brand intersection between your content
and the audience – the core message - the big idea. The blog has to have a real
purpose.

3. Blog position. Have a position, what topics will you cover and what voice and tone
will you employ? We’d suggest that you write as you speak and generally be human
though in some instances (a technical blog maybe) that wouldn’t be so effective.
Generally, don’t over think this, be natural.
4. Maintain the ‘big idea’. Always focus on that intersection, the ‘big idea’, issue,
cause or core message that is bigger than you and your product, the one that your
audience is passionate about and can get behind. Illustrate your impact in relation
to this idea or cause. When you talk about how your products and services are

SEVEN. Evaluate and
Measure ROI

2. Plan for outcomes. What action do you want your visitor to take? It’s better to create
the path for people to consume more with well placed calls to action – all a part of
effective blog design.

SIX.
Content Distribution

There are numerous great guides on blogging so we won’t dig deep in this area, suffice
to say there are basics that work, we’ve listed these blog strategy issues here to consider
against your current or future blog:

FIVE.
Content Hub

Managing the blog to meet business communications goals

FOUR.
Editorial Management

Remember, the person that you want to be talking about your brand is not doing it for the
money, people will only talk about you if it serves as a social object, a hook to move the
conversation along, after all people don’t just talk - they talk about something, they don’t just
share - they share something that they perceive to be of value.

connected to the big idea, make sure the focus remains on that big idea.
There’s little worse than a blog that starts out great and as you browse, it you find
that the last post was 60 days ago, or worse 2 years. Be reliable and factor blogging
in every other day as a part of the editorial schedule we cover in Step 4.
ONE.
Audit and Goals

6. Keep it fresh. Consider a range of topics within the big idea as well as formats –
whether it’s polls, how-to’s or interviews, and of course a blog post does not have to
be text based.

TWO. Define Audiences
and Personas

7. Be interesting. This approach motivates sharing and really requires the creative and
journo types in your team to step up. There are proven formats like “10 steps to…”,
but there’s the controversial and creative too – which will most likely help in a more
viral nature.
8. Categorize and tag. Ensure this is done for every post, it makes your content easy
to browse and Google loves it too, append posts with tags too.

Managing the blog to engage your audience
rr Q. Approach to audience engagement reviewed?

THREE.
Strategy

There’s a tendency to put the bulk of your personal time and the bulk of your budget and
resource into your site but reaching outwards is more important and more challenging.

Consider these outreach approaches to use both within your content hub and beyond and on
other sites:

þþ It’s a team job. Disperse the responsibility for content creation among several individuals

SEVEN. Evaluate and
Measure ROI

þþ Feed your fans. Give them an incentive to be a fan and to evangelise. Make them
feel good about being a fan. Listen to them, interact with them, and relate to their
experiences. Use social media tools to converse in real time. Create community,
identity and connection. Hear and implement their ideas and requests, and make good
use of their contributions. Give them a sense of ownership in your successes. Show
appreciation, and make big gestures. Demonstrate that you are thinking about them and
their needs.

SIX.
Content Distribution

þþ Shift control to your fans. Help them expose others to your content, social objects
and ultimately your brand. Provide them with the understanding, tools and inspiration
to create content with you. Let them comment and write in their own voices, and let that
independent perspective shine through. Give them ownership, and trust them to create
good content that will resonate with the community. Promote their content, and help them
be successful through integrating free tools such as the Facebook Comments plugin or
paid versions such as Gigya.com.

FIVE.
Content Hub

þþ Become part of the community. Find ways to interact with the audience you want to
reach. Monitor their online conversations and (crucially) identify the influential active
members that are on your hub. Go to other sites that are active, participate in their
conversations, and even comment on their blogs. Develop a blogging persona with whom
they can connect and relate. Address their experiences and the issues they’re facing.
Assist them through your content. Talk about your brand, product and service only in
the context of that larger topic, demonstrate how your offering is a practical part of the
solution.

FOUR.
Editorial Management

Key Strategy Recommendation 12 Practice outreach to your audience and influencers to
maintain engagement with the blog
Ensure you spend sufficient type interacting with your community outside your blog.

internally, even motivate individuals within your organization to contribute to the company
blog by casually discussing potential ideas/topics with them, running contests, and getting
key stakeholders (like the CEO) involved. Hire freelance talent to produce a volume of
content more quickly on a regular basis – this may be important for a new launch or
campaign.
ONE.
Audit and Goals

þþ Optimise your content. It’s important to remember why you’re doing this, the
commercial reasons. So ensure that you’re tracking what works, Pay attention to open
and click rates to maintain a pulse on whether the content is resonating with your
audience and influencing tangible outcomes like reach, fan, follower, lead and customer
volumes that you can attribute back to all the content efforts. Link to your content from
your various social media profiles to draw people back to your hub and build SEO, at the
end of the day we’re still marketing.

TWO. Define Audiences
and Personas

As well as encouraging sharing and participation within your own community, it’s also really
important to identify key influencers, which is why we outline this strategy in detail in the
Content marketing e-learning toolkit.

THREE.
Strategy
FOUR.
Editorial Management

FIVE.
Content Hub
SIX.
Content Distribution
SEVEN. Evaluate and
Measure ROI

FIVE

Create compelling content for your content hub
ONE.
Audit and Goals

Review options for creating and sourcing content
rr Q. Options for creating and sourcing content reviewed?

TWO. Define Audiences
and Personas

You will notice that some of the content sourcing options we looked at earlier involve the
creation of original content and some are adding value to existing content by summarising
and/or aggregating it.
Best Practice Tip 22 Balance creation of original content and content curation
You can create engagement through content curation, but original content tends to be most
engaging and most shared.
Let’s look at what’s involved in content creation, content co-creation and curation.

THREE.
Strategy

Content creation
rr Q. Options of sources for original content creation reviewed?

FOUR.
Editorial Management

Originating your owned content is the most effective and most time consuming to create
content, and it should ideally represent a minimum of 20% of what you generate, and in time
become the majority of the content that you create. The Content Marketing ROI guide has
costings for content creation you can use to work your cost of creation out.
Primary fuel and Nuclear fuel

The issue is not that they have nothing to say, it’s more likely that they’ve not identified the
pain points or problems that their audiences. There is no quick fix to this, hence the extent

SEVEN. Evaluate and
Measure ROI

As a strategy creating your own content is much more proactive, focused on being
the resource – giving your brand the best chance in both SEO and social marketing
programmes. The reason we say this is that you are establishing yourself as the source, not
only for your audience, but other influencers seeking content that they can curate and share
– so it’s so powerful for reach. Also, the more content you create, the more content you have
to atomise and share across marketing in different formats, but more on that shortly. The
most obvious response when I hear people talk about content origination is “we have nothing
to say”. This is especially true of people who work in so-called “boring industries” like finance,
insurance and law.

SIX.
Content Distribution

At its core Michael’s process - The Elevation Principle - is all about focusing on the needs
of people with content. His formula is simple: Great content plus other people minus
marketing messages equals growth. The number one reason creating and sharing great
content helped Michael grow his business is because it established him as the trusted
resource for writing white papers. Winning that trust was his biggest marketing obstacle. His
lesson: Create primary and nuclear fuel. Don’t expect anything in return.

FIVE.
Content Hub

In his book “Launch” Michael Seltzner, founder of the Social Media Examiner website,
attributes his marketing success to two forms of content that he created and gave away to
attract customers: “Primary fuel”, content he created to keep his business moving forward
and “Nuclear fuel”, the special content he used to attract the hundreds of thousands of
visitors per month, many of whom later gladly purchased his services (to create a $3 Million
turnover business).

of this guide, however, our list of 25 ideas at the end of this section will help if you’re in that
boat!
Overcome procrastination to jump-start your content marketing productivity
ONE.
Audit and Goals

In Linchpin, Seth Godin named our inner resistance our Lizard Brain, pointing out that “the
higher the stakes, the more objections your Lizard Brain will raise”.
Empty pages and blank screens invite doubt and uncertainty, which is the number one
enemy standing in the way of content marketing production.

TWO. Define Audiences
and Personas

To overcome this form of resistance the brain needs to focus on clear answers to questions
about your goals, your audiences and their problems.
Roger C. Parker, founder and CEO of Published And Profitable provides an Express
Content Planner worksheet, which addresses the hardest part of any content marketing
project, namely, overcoming inertia and getting started.
Here’s how it works: The faster you choose a topic and identify an approach, the sooner you
can begin to write. The sooner you begin to write, the more time you’ll have for editing and
revision, which is where the bulk of your content production time is required.

THREE.
Strategy

Adapted from a work sheet Roger C. Parker created for a book on coaching clients, the
Express Content Planner works equally well for all types of content marketing projects,
including articles, blog posts, eBooks, presentations, list-building reports, speeches, and
white papers.

FOUR.
Editorial Management

On a single sheet of paper, the worksheet combines a reader persona and space to help you
identify a logical series of steps that readers can take to solve a problem or achieve a goal.

FIVE.
Content Hub

SIX.
Content Distribution
SEVEN. Evaluate and
Measure ROI

ONE.
Audit and Goals
TWO. Define Audiences
and Personas
THREE.
Strategy

These steps become the framework for your project.

FOUR.
Editorial Management

The above sample worksheet, filled-in for an interior design company, can quickly help
develop the framework for helpful, relevant, reader-friendly content. Once you identify
the specific steps in the persona scenario, it becomes relatively easy to “fill in the blanks”
by describing what needs to be done in each step, as well as adding appropriate details,
examples, and tips.
A numbered sequence of steps helps guide your writing, which helps you create “win-win”
situations for both you and your reader. The numbered steps also add to the visual appeal
of your project, allowing you to break up the paragraphs of your content logically, using
oversized numbers and attention-getting subheads.
þþ Call to action: In the article’s conclusion, readers can either download an information
package, visit a showroom, attend an event, or request an appointment.

þþ Goals & problems: This gives you space to add more details and to narrow the topic
from the broad “home remodeling” topic to a specific aspect of remodeling (i.e., “kitchen
remodeling”). This section also provides space to describe the reader’s experience and
knowledge.

þþ Steps needed to achieve desired goal: Once the content’s purpose and title have been
identified, it’s simply a matter of identifying the steps — or necessary actions — to take
the readers on a journey from where they are now (confused, uncertain, owning outdated
appliances) to where they want to be (enjoying a new kitchen and, potentially, a higher
home resale value.)

SEVEN. Evaluate and
Measure ROI

þþ Desired change: In most cases, once the reader’s characteristics and goals have been
identified, the desired change often becomes obvious (i.e., What’s the best way to
achieve the goal?). At this point, all that’s needed is to create a title that restates the
reader’s goal and how the content is going to help him / her achieve it.

SIX.
Content Distribution

þþ Characteristics: This section provides a context for creating an engaging story describing
the prospects and the context of their home remodeling in more detail (e.g., improving
their living space and, hopefully, increasing their home’s resale price for possible sale in 3
to 5 years).

FIVE.
Content Hub

Sections of the Express Content Planner worksheet are:

For more creative ways to use the Express Content Planner worksheet visit the author’s
website www.publishedandprofitable.com.

Fundamental content creation techniques
ONE.
Audit and Goals

The majority of content entails writing and word smithing, and for this reason we are going to
review several writing techniques that work, time and again.
Many successful writers start as copy writers and ad people. Writing adverts seems to teach
disciplines that don’t come naturally, like being succinct and economical, and using words
that have emotional impact to express things in a more memorable way.

TWO. Define Audiences
and Personas

It’s true that the content in content marketing needs to be conversational and authentic in
nature if it’s to engage, but that does not mean it should be rough and ready, or too long to
winded. On the contrary.
A common technique in writing is to start wide, like an upside down iceberg, and to narrow
progressively. Hemingway used to apply the rule of 10, which means get rid of 10% of
our words, then another 10%! This sort of approach is demonstrated in my 5 step content
creation system below, in which I categorise, sequence, write and then review, first the body
text, the conclusion and finally the introduction, in that order:

THREE.
Strategy
FOUR.
Editorial Management

How to create great content
Great content for content marketing purposes is characterised by six key attributes:

SEVEN. Evaluate and
Measure ROI

Great content starts with creating your story, and to paraphrase Seth Godin in his book “All
Marketers Are Liars”, you need to create your story based on the beliefs of your audience
and then find creative and relevant ways to frame your story in the form of fantastic content
that is aligned to your brand.

SIX.
Content Distribution

Great content

FIVE.
Content Hub

ONE.
Audit and Goals
TWO. Define Audiences
and Personas
THREE.
Strategy

In this section we’ll walk through the techniques one step at a time, to achieve these
attributes in your content marketing.
1 Tips for creating attractive content

FOUR.
Editorial Management

Needless to say the noise competing for our attention on the web is greater than at any
previous time, and will only get worse. The web is also a visual environment and we should
not skimp on visuals:

FIVE.
Content Hub

SIX.
Content Distribution

þþ canva.com for creating images and graphics.
þþ Infographic tools including piktochart.com if you don’t have a graphic designer
þþ Scapple for brain dumps and mind mapping

SEVEN. Evaluate and
Measure ROI

Whether it’s photographic, iconographic, animation or video, there are tools to help you
create better visual content:

Words are also key to attracting attention, and David Ogilvy, “the most sought-after wizard in
today’s (1962) advertising industry,” did not experience the web, but worked by the principle
that five times as many people read the headlines of articles as read the body.

ONE.
Audit and Goals

Hence he advocated 20% of time spent on creating content be dedicated to creating a
compelling headline.
In the example below, he crafts a headline around the point that “at 60 miles an hour, the
loudest noise in a Rolls Royce comes from the electric clock.”
This is even more apposite today with the short ephemeral life of so much content like
updates and tweets.

TWO. Define Audiences
and Personas

To help marketers make their content attractive, Content Schedule has devised a savvy
online tool to analyse the impact of headlines, by scoring them against the choice of
emotional and power words.
Here are some examples of words like “You”, “Yours” and “How to,” which are found to attract
considerably more than other words, identified in the Rippen survey:

THREE.
Strategy
FOUR.
Editorial Management
FIVE.
Content Hub

SIX.
Content Distribution
SEVEN. Evaluate and
Measure ROI

2. Tips for creating discoverable content in Google – See our SEO guide for more detail
93

1. Focus one content piece on one long tail keyword phrase.
2. Include keyword phrase in your title, 55 characters
3. Add keyword to URL
4. Use only one H1 and several H2s
ONE.
Audit and Goals
TWO. Define Audiences
and Personas
THREE.
Strategy
FOUR.
Editorial Management

5. Include keyword phrase in your meta description, 155 characters
6. Optimise image, with keyword phrase Alt tag
7. Write for purpose and a human audience
8. Avoid duplicate content
9. Avoid “keyword stuffing”
10. Add Google authorship

FIVE.
Content Hub

3. Tips for creating consumable content

SIX.
Content Distribution
SEVEN. Evaluate and
Measure ROI

4. Tips for creating consumable content
94

ONE.
Audit and Goals
TWO. Define Audiences
and Personas
THREE.
Strategy

5. Tips for creating evergreen content

FOUR.
Editorial Management

This is one of the most important content creation techniques of all types of all, since
evergreen content is not time sensitive and remains relevant for a very long time after it’s
published. Evergreen content is the content you will put the most effort into perfecting, that
will attract the most searches, and that will have the greatest longevity. Evergreen content
articles are well researched, authoritative, unbiased, over 1000 words long, referenced and
linked, with comments from readers and detailed and in depth views of a particular matter
preferable from influencers, unlike newsy or trending content that is time-sensitive.

Content co-creation
5

What is it? Content co-curation
Creation of a content resource using different authors from across different companies or
departments.

You could say content co-creation also involves getting customers to create long-form
user-generated content, so this is worth considering too.

SEVEN. Evaluate and
Measure ROI

Two of the best examples are Mashable or the American Express OpenForum.com web site.
The brand is leveraging lots of experts to create a site that benefits everyone in terms of
business and personal brand building. It really requires one lead in the project, someone with
reach or the content who wants to find someone missing (or whom would simply value) more
of one of those two things. Of course you’re relinquishing some control over message, but it’s
overall a good win.

SIX.
Content Distribution

Co-created content is worth mentioning here. It’s a little different and a great option for
quick or first tentative steps into content marketing. Although it’s used differently in different
contexts, for us, this is where a number of contributors come together under one brand to
publish for mutual gain. You could say – “that’s just guest blogging” and you’d be right. But
it’s a more systematic way of doing this.

FIVE.
Content Hub

rr Q. Options for co-creation of content reviewed?

Best Practice Tip 23 Identify trusted partners and customers who can support you in your
content generation efforts
Through having a range of authors you can add variety and reach as they promote their
content. But you may have issues of managing content consistency and quality.
ONE.
Audit and Goals

Content curation

TWO. Define Audiences
and Personas

Content curation is the act of continually identifying, selecting and sharing the most relevant
online content or resources that match the needs of your audience. It is a proven, painless
and cost-effective way to help position your organisation as the go-to resource, for both your
content and that which you curate.

THREE.
Strategy
FOUR.
Editorial Management

Curation benefits:
þþ Build an element of trust and authority in your market
þþ Speed to get up and going if you use RSS, for example
þþ SEO benefits
þþ Hard to get wrong if you know your market (but conversely easy to copy)
Content curation is still hard work – not least because you still need to generate your own

SEVEN. Evaluate and
Measure ROI

So, you’re still adding value, though strategically it’s more about being a news destination.
The upside is that you can employ this approach along with co-creation and licensed content
when you’ve got limited resources in the creation department.

SIX.
Content Distribution

What is it? Content curation
Creation of new content based on other sources. Through summarizing, aggregating or
distilling information you can still add value for your audience and it’s less time-consuming
than original content creation.

FIVE.
Content Hub

Content curation itself is not new, especially using RSS aggregators that have been around
forever, but adding the crucial human element – the embedded journalist – and armed with
some free or cheap software, you are able to select, filter and judge the truly useful stuff and
interweave your own original content.

original work too but because it still costs – it’s people doing work. The worst bit of curated
content is that there’s usually a LOT of people doing (or potentially able to do) the same
thing, it’s one of the easier options which is why it should be packaged with original work.

Licensed content
ONE.
Audit and Goals

rr Q. Options for licensing content creation reviewed?

TWO. Define Audiences
and Personas

This content type is very popular in a wide range of industries and has proven to be very
successful for many brands. If your content requirements run deeper than your full-time
resources, third-party help to create all the content required for the project could be the
solution.
Articles, images, videos, and audio are all widely available for licensing purposes online
and can be used to support your original or curated options. Alternatively you can outsource
content completely. In case you missed them, see our solution providers for licensed content
in section four: managing your content hub.

Outsourced content creation
rr Q. Have we reviewed our options for outsourcing content creation?

THREE.
Strategy

This is a deceptively attractive option where you can outsource your content marketing
completely. You agree an editorial calendar of content, the products or services you’re
looking to promote and the keyword phrases you’re targeting with SEO.

FOUR.
Editorial Management

It’s not the case that you can outsource and forget though. Licensed content still requires
a certain amount of editorial oversight and guidance as your company’s standards and
guidelines must be met. After experiencing engagement with this type of content we think it’s
probably best used sparingly in terms of the long term cost / benefit. The disadvantages of
outsourcing content generation are:
þþ Understanding of customer needs or market is poor giving problems of relevance
þþ Can lack passion to give an authentic brand voice
þþ Quality of content is poor, so fails to engage or deliver sharing

User generated content (UGC)

rr Q. Options for outsourcing content reviewed?

That said UGC is exciting, varied and often very rich in its breadth, it also “speaks” to
other users since UGC is “people like me”. Varieties of UGC to consider as part of content
marketing include:

Best Practice Tip 24 Use Product reviews and ratings through other channels
Opportunities to incorporate “top-rated” or interesting tips from reviews and ratings into
email marketing, blogs and social channels are often missed.

SEVEN. Evaluate and
Measure ROI

Product reviews and ratings. Important for retail sites where systems like www.
bazaarvoice.com provide an infrastructure. Think about how you can leverage reviews and
ratings in other channels – a trick that is often missed.

SIX.
Content Distribution

Though this idea sounds fantastic (free content from users) it’s no magic bullet and does
need careful management. UGC is the hardest since you are garnering it from people who
visit your website.

FIVE.
Content Hub

þþ Return-on-investment may be poor if it doesn’t deliver for the reasons above!

ONE.
Audit and Goals

Curated UGC. Spinebreakers is a great, if extreme, example of this featured on our blog.7
Anna Rafferty of Penguin explains the approach: Rafferty explains: “During the website
development Penguin recruited hundreds of teenagers from every area and background for
focus groups and usability testing. The teenagers made every decision, choosing the URL
and the nature of the brand themselves. We decided not to make any assumptions”. The
site is now run by three tiers of teenagers, or “crews” as they elected to be called, who have
varying levels of control over the site”.

TWO. Define Audiences
and Personas
THREE.
Strategy
FOUR.
Editorial Management

no url

7
8

Penguin crowdsourcing example
Smart Insights: E-permission marketing

SEVEN. Evaluate and
Measure ROI

UGC campaigns which encourage writing of content or upload. For examples brands
have encouraged users to upload images or media upload, often from mobiles. Vauxhall
encouraged drivers to describe their favourite drive and then locate it on a Google Maps (a
classic mashup). Princess Cruises used a classic “blog to win” or “share to win” campaign8
asking readers about their favourite travel destination.

SIX.
Content Distribution

Crowd-sourced ideas. Asking for new product or content ideas can create content. You
can use a crowd-soucing platform like Uservoice (www.uservoice.com) or you can ask more
informally. For example Tee-shirt vendor Howies asked the question “What would you want
Howies to do for you?” which attracted over 60 responses.

FIVE.
Content Hub

ONE.
Audit and Goals
TWO. Define Audiences
and Personas
THREE.
Strategy
FOUR.
Editorial Management

Content atomisation, repurposing and syndication
Now you’re in a place where you know who you are talking to and what content you’re
creating.
What is it? Content atomization
Breaking down content into smaller chunks and repurposing them to distribute your
messages across the web and social platforms.

SEVEN. Evaluate and
Measure ROI

With UGC you need to resource to not only build your platform but to also to encourage
interaction, respond and moderate. You also need to take the rough with the smooth since
a small % will be negative. The point with negativity is that it’s happening already so better
that you can interact and ensure your own perspective, and rally your fans to share their
perspective too.

SIX.
Content Distribution

The campaign engaged the audience through their interest in travel destinations and used
Facebook as the heart of this, but encouraging participation through seeding using other
digital marketing channels like blogs and email.

FIVE.
Content Hub

You should think about how you can make use of this content beyond your site. To “sweat
your content assets”. You’ll need to think about:
rr The right partner sites or networks to share content?
rr How to incentivise partners to take your content?
ONE.
Audit and Goals

rr Whether repurposing or creation of different formats is required – for articles it may just
need a change of post title or perhaps an infographic can be produced summarising a
survey?
rr Whether advertising can be used to seed and share your content?

TWO. Define Audiences
and Personas

The challenge then is how do you maximise the efficiency of it all? With ebooks, blogs, videos,
photos, webinars, podcasts and apps all up for grabs you want to be open to it all – everything
that you do needs to work as a part of a whole – avoiding focusing on one thing (just a text based
blog) is therefore important, treat these content types as parts of an ecosystem.
Content atomisation or the repurposing of content is an obvious strategy in sharing your
story and making content go further – Jay Baer calls this idea “getting more bait in the water”
- a word of caution though, we don’t want to literally re-purpose, we’re about re-developing
content appropriate for different media so this is planned and not an afterthought to simply
“get that blog post onto our facebook page”.

THREE.
Strategy

Hinge content around a ‘big hairy audacious content idea’ (BHACI)

FOUR.
Editorial Management

The big idea is another concept that comes from David Ogilvy, back in the days of mad men
and 60’s advertising, when he suggested marketing needed a single core message, or big
idea, in order to be understood by, and motivating to the consumer.
When content marketing is used as a technique for campaigning and driving demand, such as with
thought leadership, it too needs a BHACI, or core message, to be powerful enough to fuel a number
of different content ideas at the tactical level, and sustain interest over time as in the example of
Doug Kessler, at Velocity Partners, who, when he decided he needed to reengage marketers,
decided to stir up the world of lacklustre B2B marketing. In this example he chose to put a 52 page
rant, which he called the B2B marketing manifesto, at the heart of his content marketing:

FIVE.
Content Hub

SIX.
Content Distribution

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Based around the concept of a BUACI, a 52 page white paper or ebook of this kind, can be
atomised into a variety of spin offs like blog posts, video and slide decks etc..:

ONE.
Audit and Goals
TWO. Define Audiences
and Personas
THREE.
Strategy

25 Ideas for atomising your content

þþ Conversations are taking place across the Internet, so listen in and learn more about your
brand, competitors and market – this will give you ideas for content in the process and
improve the story you are telling
þþ Demonstrate your knowledge - tie your story to hot topics, profile new products, services,
and provide insight and ideas via your blog
þþ You might also provide industry secrets, “behind the scenes” in articles – a short guide or
ebook – and do that by attending industry events and summarizing the main take-aways
þþ Ask other team members who deal with customers, sales agents and customer

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þþ Create a customer FAQ and also answer audience questions in forums or Q&As – simple
and immediately valuable. If you can, film talking with them at events, just generally be
close to your customer – they’re the gold source for your ideas!

SIX.
Content Distribution

The advantage is you keep costs low and test your messages and concepts, as described
in the ROI Guide, this can only be sensible. There isn’t a right or wrong way here, only what
makes sense, in a larger business already running a big idea in marketing (that’s working) it
makes more sense to jump straight in.

FIVE.
Content Hub

It may be easier and less daunting to maintain the big idea but start small when implementing
it, so develop the blog posts first, run some interviews or webinars and then grow into the
bigger piece.

FOUR.
Editorial Management

The process is that your BHACI provides the basis for a lot more content in different shapes
and sizes, not cut and pasted directly, but with some simple re-purposing into other formats
for different channels and different audiences with different learning and consumption
preferences. And, each piece of atomised content, used on or off of your web site, provides
a reason to link back to the main piece, the original ebook. In the Velocity example, the
ancillary workbooks were found to perform extremely well as lead capture devices, which
were gated, whilst the larger manifesto was not, since the purpose of the central content item
was to drive the demand in open channels.

operatives – what are the common questions, pain-points and praise that your
organization picks up on?

ONE.
Audit and Goals

þþ Monitor the referring keywords to your web site and blog – it will reveal or at least allude
to what your customers are looking for, some of the more odd search terms might even
give you an dead for a blog post
þþ Do some research in Google, and using the Adwords Keyword tool to see a broader view
of what’s going on, of course industry news, blogs

TWO. Define Audiences
and Personas

þþ Delve deep in social networks like Facebook, Twitter, Slideshare and LinkedIn – they
provide rich sources of information as well as content that you can share with your
network
þþ Review others content – books, ebooks, presentations
þþ Tackle the “Top 10” or “7 steps” on topics of real interest – consider these in Slideshare
http://www.slideshare.net
þþ Opt for other opinions such as staff or customer ‘picks’ related to products, services or
advice in your industry

THREE.
Strategy

þþ Develop an interesting or topical slant on a topic or idea to breakthrough the generic
mass of information. The Olympics are coming soon – “what are the five lessons digital
marketers could learn from top athletes”
þþ Involve your community directly. This may be as simple as highlighting consistent
contributors on your blog or maybe you can create a contest to garner interaction and a
wealth of user-generated content (videos, photos, comments)

FOUR.
Editorial Management

þþ Develop guides on specific areas of “best practice” – just as Smart Insights does – these
are great for giving it structure. Upload selected documents (including how-to’s, guides or
articles to Scribd (http://www.scribd.com)
þþ Write ebooks – imagine several guides combined to form one ebook, let alone a lot of
blog posts. Ebooks epitomise the idea of content atomization

þþ Expert interviews with influential figures – staff or external experts in video format, with
an accompanying transcript in your blog. Think about live videos and interviews using
Ustream (http://www.ustream.tv)

þþ Invite guest content form other experts who are independent – guest blog posts are the
classic way to do it easily and quickly, you can do this on other blogs as well, of course
þþ Open up internal process, explain your product development cycle or supply chain
process through photos or graphics

þþ Develop curated feeds of content from others – be the go-to source for industry relevant
news. This could be a feed you manage from multiple sources using RSS feeds or tools
like Curata (http://www.getcurata.com/), Eqentia (http://www.eqentia.com/) and Loud3r
(http://www.loud3r.com/)
þþ Post photos (ideally real time) of events attended and new products on Flickr (http://www.
flickr.com) and pull the Flickr feed to you web site or blog

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þþ Humanise your business by curating content of staff and team members – the tweets of
everyone in your team

SIX.
Content Distribution

þþ Explainer videos, like text in blogs, or guides, are a great way to cover a series of
“How-to”s – these can give valuable context to your product or service. Common Craft
(http://www.commoncraft.com) have pioneered this

FIVE.
Content Hub

þþ Create templates and simple tools that your audience might use to speed up a part of
their job, or make better decisions – maybe an accountant might pre-configure an Excel
sheet to attract new clients

þþ Update the Wikipedia (http://www.wikipedia.org) pages for your company and products –
and, if you can, topics in your market

ONE.
Audit and Goals
TWO. Define Audiences
and Personas
THREE.
Strategy
FOUR.
Editorial Management
FIVE.
Content Hub

SIX.
Content Distribution
SEVEN. Evaluate and
Measure ROI

103

SIX

Content Distribution
ONE.
Audit and Goals

Creating content for content marketing success is only half the battle. The other half of
content marketing success relies on great content promotion and distribution. In other
words, to excel at content marketing, you have to market tour marketing.

TWO. Define Audiences
and Personas

Rather than trying to produce more or better content, we recommend you focus more effort,
tome and budget on achieving better distribution of your content. By doing this you can
actually step down content production, and step up distribution to get better results.
Studies have found that poor content promotion and distribution is the source of poor
content marketing ROI, because insufficient planning and time has been spent on reaching
audiences and influencers who play a key role in endorsing, amplifying and extending your
marketing reach.
In this section, we will outline techniques to help you:
þþ disseminate your content to existing and new audiences, to ensure its being read and shared.

THREE.
Strategy

þþ plan and roll-out your influencer strategy to maximise reach.
þþ consider the options for owned, earned and paid distribution channels to increase
shareability and reach.
þþ maximise content visibility and share ability through social media optimisation

FOUR.
Editorial Management

Distribution happens late, but is planned early
Deciding which platforms and channels to share on, who to target and reach, and whether
you should invest in paid media are all important elements that you need to think about early
in the game, not once you’ve created tour content, but at the outset, when you are setting
your goals and picking your metrics.

FIVE.
Content Hub

Owned, earned and paid distribution channels are important to promote and distribute your
content. The goals can vary from generating site visits, to leads, sales or purely raising
awareness with a new, broader audience. We all hear that ‘Content is King,’ but ‘Distribution
is the Crown Prince’.

Recommended best practices
1. Plan you content promotion strategy before your content creation.
2. Undertake audience and channel research before you begin your distribution.
‘Listening first before you promote and identify which channels are being used’.

4. Only promote high-impact, high-quality content which has a purpose.
In the early stages you can do the following
þþ Spend time watching your existing customers: identify the channels they are in.
þþ Search channels for existing communities where your audiences hang out (we call these
watering holes.)
þþ Monitor hashtags relevant to your industry on Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest and Instagram
to identify what is important to your audiences and influencers.

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3. Focus on helpful content: As discussed in other topics, consider monitoring relevant
hashtags on key platforms including Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest and Instagram and
do your research.

SIX.
Content Distribution

Technique 1: Understand the 4 key distribution rules:

Technique 2: Segment your audience

ONE.
Audit and Goals

Consider segmenting your audience by type or channels to help you prioritise who to
reach and which content will be relevant. Understand where they are in the buyer cycle,
their motivations, what content they share and from where and any demographics that are
available. Your persona mapping which you did earlier on will help you with this.
1. Existing subscribers (customers, suppliers, influencers, enquiries etc.) in your own
channels. Likely to be quite warm to your content already!.
2. Occasional audiences: Need further convincing and trust creating.

TWO. Define Audiences
and Personas

3. Influencers: May not have seen your brand but are key experts in your industry or
sector, who would be interested in your content to share with their network.

Technique 3: Set your distribution goal
þþ Think about what your promotion should do and if you are looking at influence or / and
control over your content? Influence (earned media) and Control (owned and paid media).
þþ Like all goals and KPIS, consider if you are looking for Visibility (Awareness), CTRs (Drive
enquiries), SEO (Search), Shareability (Likes, Shares, Follows) and Control.

THREE.
Strategy

Technique 4: Assess your distribution channels

FOUR.
Editorial Management

Using a selection criteria weighting system, assess the opportunity for each channel based
on its influence, visibility, response (CTR), search, share ability, and the amount of control it
gives you. The following is an assessment of Facebook as a channel for organic reach, since
obviously it’s paid model is another story altogether.

FIVE.
Content Hub

The “Why?” template below is another useful tool that will help you to determine both your
distribution goals and your corresponding choice of channel(s).

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Technique 5: Audit your distribution channels

SIX.
Content Distribution

ONE.
Audit and Goals
TWO. Define Audiences
and Personas

Using the Why? template:
THREE.
Strategy

1. Put “WHY?” at top of a page
2. List your distribution channels down left side
3. State marketing / business objectives for each channel
4. Do your usage & goal align with the audience / strengths of the channel?

FOUR.
Editorial Management

5. Is the channel score optimal?
6. Will channel generate the best ROE / ROI?

Technique 6: Prioritise the content distribution channels you are using
Dave Chaffey created the Smart Insights Content Distribution matrix to help teams and
agencies discuss where their priorities for digital content distribution should lie.

FIVE.
Content Hub
SIX.
Content Distribution

SEVEN. Evaluate and
Measure ROI

106

This infographic is aimed at helping marketers to review the effectiveness of different types
of Paid, Owned and Earned media to promote or distribute their content in generating site
visits, leads or sale compared to the level of investment in applying the media measured as
paid media costs or the costs of marketing team members.
ONE.
Audit and Goals

Here are the steps we recommend to using it:
Step 1. Current use of media for content distribution

TWO. Define Audiences
and Personas

Start by marking up the current or past use of different paid-owned-earned media options for
your business. Plot each media type on the horizontal axis based on its importance in the
number of leads or sales you can attribute to it from a low-level of effectiveness on the left to
the highest volume on the right. Next consider cost effectiveness on the vertical axis based
on the time or money spent on promotion from lowest cost (or better overall return-on-investment) at the bottom to highest at the top.

THREE.
Strategy

To take a couple of examples, in this case, long-tail SEO, shown in the bottom right quadrant,
is one of the most effective techniques since it produces a high volume of leads or sales at
relatively low levels of investment. Compare this to paid distribution options shown in the top
left quadrant, such as LinkedIn Promoted posts which have a relatively low-level of volume,
but highest costs/poorest ROI).
Colour-coding can help distinguish the techniques you use.

FOUR.
Editorial Management

Of course, using the matrix requires businesses to be already set up to measure content
marketing effectiveness as explained in our guides to calculating content marketing ROI and
the 7 Steps guide to Google Analytics for marketers.
Step 2. Review promotion gap against competitor or sector use of content distribution
techniques
This step is easier to explain, but harder to mark up in practice. Here you review the full
range of paid-owned and earned media options available to you, in particular. those you
aren’t using now. You have to assess what you think they could contribute in advance of a
test to prove or disprove your hypothesis.

FIVE.
Content Hub

In this step you can also consider how other businesses are using content distribution in
your sector. Since you wont have access to their analytics, this can only be based on an
assessment of the types of techniques you see them using and any results you hear them
reporting.

Finally, you can discuss which options could be worth trialling in future tests, based on your
discussion. There will likely be several new options, so it’s a case of reviewing and setting up
a schedule of what to trial and test . An additional use of this visual will be to consider new
content partners who can be compared in a similar way.

SIX.
Content Distribution

Step 3. Select and prioritise new methods of content promotion

SEVEN. Evaluate and
Measure ROI

107

Technique 7: Create a promotion plan, which is mindful of your channels, your audiences,
their content preferences and their routines and their willingness to give you their time.

ONE.
Audit and Goals
TWO. Define Audiences
and Personas
THREE.
Strategy

The role of influencer in your content marketing outreach
FOUR.
Editorial Management

An influencer is a person who has built a loyal following, whose opinion is trusted, and
who is disposed and willing to put your content in front of their audiences. The best way to
identify the influencers in your market is o search the bios on Followerwonk, and then sort
the results by Klout score. A person’s following does not dictate their influence, since it is the
engagement they drive with their audiences that matters most.
They can be early advocates of your product or service, consumer groups, customers,
professional industry associations, suppliers, business partners, Thought Leaders and
Journalists.

FIVE.
Content Hub

Best Practice Tip 25 Segment and prioritise your influencers
Think about different types of influencer and assess the benefits that they will offer you how influential are they? Is a long-term collaboration possible? Will they be open to working
with a company like yours?

SIX.
Content Distribution

Influencers use social media in different ways: Some post comments on user forums; Within
Twitter and LinkedIn, they can have conversations with you and mention you to others (LI
groups); within Facebook, they can respond to your posts as well as creating their own posts
(depending on how you set your permissions); review your services within blogs and link to
your articles or for example, in Pinterest can re-pin your content.

SEVEN. Evaluate and
Measure ROI

108

ONE.
Audit and Goals
TWO. Define Audiences
and Personas
THREE.
Strategy
FOUR.
Editorial Management

Some of these interactions can also take place off-line, as Journalists and Editors can then
ask to interview you, for editorial or even to be a guest speaker.

FIVE.
Content Hub

Influencers can give both positive and negative comments on your brand, so plan with
caution. On a plus note, they are seen to be unbiased and a trusted advocate so can be very
powerful in sharing or reviewing your content.

Recommended best practices

1. Search Twitter “bios” using Followerwonk
2. Categorise Followerwonk bio results for keywords using the Klout weighting column
3. Follow, list, listen, and share influencer updates, and get to know their interests

4. Promote their content
5. Comment on their posts / updates
7. Let them know their opinion is valued
8. Ask them to contribute
Here are a few alternative ways to get started finding your influencers:
þþ Competitor’s fans and followers.
þþ Influential industry experts and bloggers.
þþ Influencers on LinkedIn and SlideShare.

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6. Demonstrate your knowledge - add value

SIX.
Content Distribution

Find your influencers and identifying their power

þþ Bitly.com network to see who is sharing content.
þþ Hootsuite allows you to create and View Twitter lists to monitor influencer groups.
þþ Facebook influence: Identify Facebook influencers based using Page Insights and the
‘virality measure’.
ONE.
Audit and Goals

How to reach out to your influencers
1. Seek smaller numbers of the right people
2. Offer social share buttons on your blog
3. Repurpose content for different channels

TWO. Define Audiences
and Personas

4. Optimise promotion around keywords
5. Ask influencers for opinions
6. Create crumbs & snippets for mega sharing
7. Curate relevant content
How to engage with your influencers

THREE.
Strategy

Once you have found your influencers, you need to engage with them. Consider promoting
their content, commenting on their posts/updates or asking them to contribute to discussions.
Like all social media, it’s important to acknowledge their interaction.
5 steps to engage:
Step 1: Identify “conversation triggers” to join in.

FOUR.
Editorial Management

Step 2: Reply to content they have posted and share.
Step 3: Check your content strategy is ready to convert them into brand advocates.
Step 4; Identify ways you could partner with them. Now you are ready to ask for advice or
ask them to take part in something.
Less is more for mobile:

FIVE.
Content Hub

rr Consider media choice. Select content that makes best use of mobile phones’ small
screen size. Use alternate content formats such as video and audio to conserve space.
rr Take a short cut. Create shorter ‘content bursts’ from your existing long-form content, and
cut the jargon in the process: Keep copy tight and to the point

Lighten file size: Images and other large files can impact accessibility and download times,
so use them wisely and in moderation.
rr Encourage sharing: Mobile audiences are tech savvy and avid sharers, so make it easy
for users to involve their friends and share content.

rr Opt for longer pages: Scrolling is much faster than waiting for multiple pages to load, so
limit the number of clicks required to fully engage with your content.
Choose one size fits all. Different devices have different screen sizes and resolutions, so
create an interface that “scales to fit” different devices.
Seamlessly route users to the right site. Auto-detect for devices and serve up the
appropriate interface so that the experience is smooth whether a laptop, smartphone or tablet
is used.
Know the limits. Be mindful of technologies that aren’t recognized by certain mobile

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rr Design for finger surfing: Remember that users are navigating the screen by pinching and
zooming, rather than clicking.

SIX.
Content Distribution

Create content for mobile needs. Consider what types of information your audience wants
and needs to access, especially when they’re out and about.

platforms (e.g., Flash on the Apple iPhone/iPad).
Monitor and measure the impact of your influencer marketing: listen for improvement

ONE.
Audit and Goals

After all of this effort you need to be able to keep the content campfire burning, right? As
Chris Brogan says, content is the campfire around which conversation take place – you don’t
want to loose this community so it’s important that you maintain relevance and build ideas to
grow your content. That’s where the listening comes in.

TWO. Define Audiences
and Personas

Keep an eye on your influencers’ content and how it’s being shared as tactics can change.
When setting objectives like all campaigns, ensure you set out KPIS to monitor your
influencers:
þþ Are they sharing your content?
þþ Who are they reaching ?
þþ Is there interaction with your content?
þþ Is traffic being driving to your website etc?
þþ Are your CTAS being clicked on?

THREE.
Strategy

Set up a listening dashboard. There are many software options available, some paid and
many free. Free will often suffice and you can always try some of the paid services for size,
such as Lithium, Social Mention and Radian 6, and curated RSS feeds like Eqentia and
Loud3r. The key free options are well known:

FOUR.
Editorial Management

rr Google Alerts – simple and effective alerts to newly ‘read’ content that Google has
noticed, all you have to do is set the terms (maybe competitor names, industry terms)
and the settings.
rr Google Reader – a great RSS reader, perfect for pulling all the blog feeds that you want
to follow into one place, you can even apply PostRank software to show you which are
most popular, a great time saver.
rr Twitter Search – the “canary in the coal mine” – you can collate search queries easily into
an RSS feed and add that to your Google Reader account as well

FIVE.
Content Hub

For more detailed information see our Influencer Outreach Guide

Paid distribution
LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter have each increased the sophistication of their paid models,
and decreased the reach and impact of their unpaid options.
þþ Facebook (lookalike targeted advertising).
þþ Twitter (ads, promoted tweets).

þþ LinkedIn (Sponsored updates and targeted advertising)
þþ Stumbleupon and Reddit to distribute content which can be picked up by keywords.
þþ Display advertising and remarketing.
þþ Video content sharing tools: ie YouTube and Vimeo.
þþ Google PPC.

Why is it important?
If you are short of time and you have the budget, paid advertising can provide your brand
with a fast way to reach a bigger audience. although you must ensure you have relevant,

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þþ Content discovery platforms including Outbrain Taboola.

SIX.
Content Distribution

There is a range of paid reach available depending on your goals, timeframe and budget:

updated content and a compelling valued proposition for it to be successful to boost your
amplification.

Recommended best practices
ONE.
Audit and Goals

Technique 1: Choosing the right paid advertising
It’s important to have undertaken your keyword analysis and thorough research, before
committing your budget and rolling out your campaign.
1. Define your objectives for your amplification plan.

TWO. Define Audiences
and Personas

2. Set goals on how to achieve them.
3. Agree your social media platform which would suit your business.
4. Decide what ad suits.
5. Do your buyer insight research and keyword research.
6. Decide what your message and what outcome you want to achieve

Technique 2: Types of paid advertising

THREE.
Strategy

We will cover the main ones here in outline only since we have individual guides on each of
these you can access from the relevant toolkit.
1. Google Adwords in Search
PPC advertising is used by brands to generate new traffic to their website that may

FOUR.
Editorial Management

not be picked up by organic search, in a very targeted way. Planning, keyword
analysis and ROI evaluation is crucial, along with the message since it can be an expensive
but effective way of advertising given you pay for CTRs.
2. Google AdWords – Display network
For some this is known as remarketing, and you can create text or rich media
adverts to maximise reach online and position your ads on websites [9]which fit

FIVE.
Content Hub

your persona.
3. Google AdWords – YouTube
YouTube is the 2nd largest search engine [10]on the web (2015), so popular for

4. Display Ad Networks including programmatic
Networks are available to offer content assets to different audiences. These can and should
be evaluated for initial awareness and retargeting after a first visit. For example, HubSpot
use Netline for distribution of its B2B assets.

We have guides covering advertising and organic distribution options for each of the main
social networks. These offer initial advertising and follow-up retargeting.

Recommended further reading
þþ Read our acquisition guide for a top-level view of creating a digital media plan.
þþ Our digital media cheatsheet available in the members area will help you review the
details of paid media options available.

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5. Social Networks – Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and LinkedIn

SIX.
Content Distribution

placing ads where you can target by category[11], channel or pages.

Don’t forget retargeting
Retargeting enables you to serve follow-up ads on search engines, social media and
publisher sites. It is a powerful way to re-engage visitors who have engaged with your
content.
ONE.
Audit and Goals

Best Practice Tip 26 Set up retargeting to re-engage site visitors
Retargeting can encourage site visitors to return to your site to consume more content or to
encourage them to purchase.

TWO. Define Audiences
and Personas

The best known Retargeting options are the Google Display Network used from Google
AdWords (and explained in our AdWords guide) and the social media retargeting options
from Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn described in our guides to these networks.

THREE.
Strategy
FOUR.
Editorial Management
FIVE.
Content Hub
SIX.
Content Distribution

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SEVEN

Evaluate and Measure ROI
ONE.
Audit and Goals

For many business owners and directors on the board of a business, content marketing is
not a given. Therefore, making a compelling business case for resources and investment in
content marketing is critical.

TWO. Define Audiences
and Personas

Getting successful buy-in and budget will include finance, skilled staff, commitment to
endorse it from senior management to embed it in the organisation and show return on
investment.
This means measuring, evaluating and reporting on short, medium and long term results,
so it’s about being creative, showing strong examples of what’s happening in the industry,
case studies and tangible figures from success stories that demonstrate a compelling and
unequivocal case.
If you don’t make the business case effectively then it’s likely…
þþ You won’t have enough resource to manage content marketing

THREE.
Strategy

þþ You won’t have a regular stream of engaging, relevant content
þþ You’re content marketing efforts will wither and die

FOUR.
Editorial Management

We cover content marketing ROI in absolute detail looking at costs of content production and
disseminating, in our 36 page specialist Content Marketing ROI Guide, but in this chapter we
review the broad strokes of an approach to help you present the business and get buy-in.

What is ROI?
ROI is a hard metric that measures the absolute return on every dollar or pound invested
(cost) whilst evaluating a range of hard and softer metrics. This is because content marketing
impacts the buyer journey at each stage of the buying cycle from early awareness, through
consideration to action.

FIVE.
Content Hub
SIX.
Content Distribution

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SEVEN. Evaluate and
Measure ROI

How to measure ROI for content marketing?

ONE.
Audit and Goals

In order to measure content marketing ROI you need to know what you are spending to
determine your investment or cost. These costs are covered in detail in our specialist content
marketing ROI guide, and you can not begin to evaluate ROI without an accurate record of
your costs.
To measure ROI you need to establish KPIs at the start of your plan, without which you will
unable to measure your activity throughout your campaign, to enable to you review, refine
and improve your digital marketing activity. The beauty is that measurement is really time and
accurate.

TWO. Define Audiences
and Personas

KPIs can include:
þþ Hard sales, downloads, enquiries and off-line activities.
þþ Softer engagement metrics: open rates for emails, views of your LI profile,
þþ Commercial measures: Financial indicators.
þþ Audience share sales and leads.

THREE.
Strategy

þþ Satisfaction ratings and reviews. You can use different customer feedback software27
like 4Q and Kampyle so you get overall ratings of your content and feedback on specific
content.
þþ Tactical measures: Interaction with your brand: To include Views, Clicks, Tweets, Likes,
Followers and Pins.
þþ Brand measures or keyphrase mentions, sentiment and share of market mentions of
competitors or site traffic.

FOUR.
Editorial Management

KPIs using RACE
The RACE framework will help you plan your KPIs and outcomes all along the marketing
funnel:

FIVE.
Content Hub
SIX.
Content Distribution

þþ Unique visitors.
þþ Audience share .
þþ Brand buzz .
þþ Share of search.
þþ Share of voice.
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SEVEN. Evaluate and
Measure ROI

1. REACH : Build awareness on other sites and in offline media and drive to your web
presences. KPIS:

2. ACT : Encourage audiences to interact with brand on your website or other online
presence. KPIS:
þþ Click-though rates – CTR s.
ONE.
Audit and Goals

þþ Bounce rate.
þþ Session stickiness .
þþ Social profile growth.
þþ Key engagement actions.

TWO. Define Audiences
and Personas

3. CONVERT : Achieve conversion to marketing goals such as leads on web presences and
offline. KPIs:
þþ Conversion rate .
þþ Sign ups and registrations .
þþ Feeds and social media subscriptions .
þþ Trials .
þþ “Ripples”.

THREE.
Strategy

4. ENGAGE : Build customer and fan relationships to achieve retention goals. KPIS:
þþ Return visitors

FOUR.
Editorial Management

þþ Frequency/recency reports
þþ Sentiment
þþ Advocates

Four Buckets
We’re big fans of Jay Baer’s Four Bucket KPIs.

FIVE.
Content Hub
SIX.
Content Distribution

A. Consumption Metrics

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SEVEN. Evaluate and
Measure ROI

This fundamental data point is easy to derive through Google Analytics, YouTube insights, or
similar. The metric tells you how many people consumed your content, measured as page
views, downloads, or views.
B. Sharing Metrics
ONE.
Audit and Goals

This metric tells you how successful your content is at getting consumers to share it with
others through social sharing like tweets, Retweets, “likes”, LinkedIn shares, Google+ shares
etc ... Free social sharing monitors like www.sharedcount.com will provide with an accurate
realtime measure of how often your content is shared with others across all social networks.

TWO. Define Audiences
and Personas

C. Lead Generation Metrics
Whether you require registration before allowing people to read/watch/download your
content, or whether you’re measuring leads generated after content is consumed, this is the
metric that determines whether or not your content marketing effort is making financial sense.

THREE.
Strategy

If you host a lead form on your site, you can measure this by determining how many people
went to the lead form immediately after consuming your content. You can also set a browser
cookie and track when someone fills out that lead form after viewing your content, even if
there is a 30 or 60-day interval between those events. If your leads are handled via phone,
you can install a simple script that shows a different (trackable) phone number when people
have first watched a video, downloaded a presentation, etc. This metric tells you many
content consumers on your website turn into leads.

FOUR.
Editorial Management

D. Sales Metrics
This metric will tell you how often your content consumers turn into customers. If you’re using
a customer and prospect database, such as Salesforce, you’ll want to note in the prospect
record that the potential customer consumed content pieces X, Y, and Z. Then, when your
sales team turns that prospect into a sale, determine the projected revenue and profit
(lifetime value if you can) of that customer, and assign it to the content pieces that drove the
sale.

FIVE.
Content Hub

Sales are the ultimate goal of most businesses, and you can you find examples of specific
outstanding content pieces that have helped businesses convert prospects into sales, by
searching the stories of content marketing agencies that have written about their successes
online.

SIX.
Content Distribution

One such content marketing agency success story is provided by Lee Odden (TopRank) on
SlideShare. The success story details the effectiveness of a piece entitled “29 Secrets About
Content Marketing & The Underground Agents Who Shared Them.”
rr Q. KPIs set for content marketing?
To help you select your KPIs, we’ve taken the full range of measures covered, from hard
sales to softer engagement metrics, and combined them into the table below.

þþ Tactical measures: These include the views, clicks, interactions with your content - so
involves the social shares such as Likes and Tweets. You might also use link shortening
tools to help measure, at Smart Insights we use PostRank rating and also metrics from

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SEVEN. Evaluate and
Measure ROI

þþ Commercial measures: These are the harder business or commercial measures and
what usually takes the longest to be demonstrable. These are the measures for the senior
managers although they may well also need to know about Likes! Think audience share,
sales, leads or at least clear indicators from people such satisfaction ratings or % that
fed back. Remember that these need to be incremental and ideally attributable to your
content marketing.

Facebook Insights. These are hard indicators that your content is visible and worth
sharing - so very key.

ONE.
Audit and Goals

þþ Brand measures: These are easier for bigger brands or where there’s less competition,
simply because the tools seem to work better in that space. Think brand or keyphrase
mentions, sentiment, share of market mentions over competitors and certainly site traffic.
These are the bigger needles to get moving and often require a bit more momentum.
The key evaluation questions to ask are:

TWO. Define Audiences
and Personas

1. How will you measure return and what are the measurements that tell the return on
content spend? How will you illustrate the value clearly to the wider business?
2. What actions do you want your customers to take as a result of interacting with
content?
3. How will you measure audience behaviour in order to know how we will make
changes to navigation and content to help them along the way?
4. How will you (at the right time) put them on the path to purchase, and what is the
conversion point?

THREE.
Strategy

5. What is your process for content marketing optimisation and how does this relate to
content marketing optimisation?

FOUR.
Editorial Management

6. Which keyphrases related to content are most effective at driving visits and
outcomes? Ensure that you have an idea of what audience personas or segments
those keywords relate to so you know who you’re writing content for. When you
identify high bouncing keywords try surveying those users on exit or placing calls to
action directly on the page to ask for feedback. Tools like Kampyle can help with that.
7. Which referring partner sites or social networks have helped with link generation
and measurement (for SEO) and the driving of traffic, referenced above as a part of
SMO?

FIVE.
Content Hub

8. How does content viewed on click-paths or journeys affect marketing outcomes? This
reviews the value that a user is finding on your website and whether it’s influencing
leads or sales.
9. Are you increasing the percentage of engaged users?

Using Google Analytics Actionable analytics for content marketing
SIX.
Content Distribution

rr Q. We’re using our analytics effectively to review content marketing?

Measuring cost
rr Q. Full range of costs of content marketing reviewed?

no url

Strategy Recommendation 13 Ensure the full-range of costs are reviewed when assessing
ROI
Content has many direct and hidden costs across creation, syndication and maintenance,
so make sure you use the range of content.

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SEVEN. Evaluate and
Measure ROI

Of course, you also need to factor in the not inconsiderable costs of producing, promoting
and distributing the content assets. Online content can also produce cost savings through
web-self service as people download promotional material or access support information. If
these are important for your type of content these should be modeled too.

So, don’t forget the hidden costs. With content marketing you have:
ýý Planning costs
ýý Authoring costs – staff time or agencies
ýý Design and other production costs
ONE.
Audit and Goals

ýý Syndication costs
ýý Bought media costs for paid-for placements
ýý Moderation and curation costs

TWO. Define Audiences
and Personas

Setting KPIs for content marketing
rr Q. Have we set KPIs set for content marketing?
Users need to find your content, share it, or better still use it, before your marketing efforts
can be measured for effectiveness. Jay Baer groups content marketing metrics into four
easy-to-memorise categories that every content marketer needs to measure to determine
their content marketing effectiveness:

Reach
audience

Encourage
Action

Convert
to Sale

Engage
customers to
Retain & Grow

Tracking
metrics

rr Unique visitors

rr Online opportunity
(lead) volume

rr Online sales volume

rr E-mail list quality

rr Offline sales volume
(online influenced)

rr E-mail response
quality

rr New visitors
rr Visits
rr Conversation volume

Performance
drivers
(diagnostics)

rr Transactions
rr Conversion rate to
Sale

rr Active customers %
(site & e-mail active)

rr E-mail conversion rate

rr Active social followers

rr Brand / direct visits

rr Macro-conversion
rate to opportunity
and
micro-conversion
efficiency

rr Cost per Click and
per Sale

rr Cost per Opportunity

rr Cost per Sale

rr Lifetime value

rr Customer satisfaction

rr Brand awareness

rr Customer satisfaction

rr Customer loyalty
index

rr Repeat conversion
rate

SIX.
Content Distribution

rr Conversation
Polarity (sentiment)

FIVE.
Content Hub

rr Bounce rate and
duration measures

rr Share of audience
compared to competitors
rr Share of search

Customer
Centric
KPIs

rr Offline opportunity
(lead) volume
(online influenced)

FOUR.
Editorial Management

Metric

THREE.
Strategy

Here’s the table – mark the ones which are most relevant for you. You’ll see that since the
measures are commercial they apply across the whole customer lifecycle and across digital
marketing activities. That’s why we provide blank templates for this tool within our digital
marketing strategy toolkit.9

rr Customer advocacy
index
rr Products per customer

rr Audience share

rr Goal value per visit

rr Revenue per visit

rr Share of conversations

rr Online product
requests
(n, £, % of total)

rr Online originated sales
revenue and profit
(n, £, % of total)

rr Retained sales
growth and volume
rr Revenue per 1000
emails sent

Combining measurements and social media optimisation
no url

As you can see from the table above, content marketing KPIs go hand in hand with social
9

Smart Insights: Digital Marketing Strategy Toolkit.

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119

SEVEN. Evaluate and
Measure ROI

Business
Value
KPIs

media marketing; content fuels social media. The two come together when working on social
media optimisation (SMO). Since SMO centres on the distribution of social objects and their
ability to rise to the top of any related search query it’s closely related to content marketing
and SEO.
ONE.
Audit and Goals

Brian Solis believes that:
SEO + SMO = Amplified Findability in the traditional and social web10
We think that’s a great way to summarise it.

TWO. Define Audiences
and Personas

So since tracking within SMO is also important, how do you do it? At the centre of a SMO
programme are social objects. Social objects represent the content we market via social
media - images, videos, blog posts, comments, status updates, wall posts, and all related
activity that creates the potential for online conversations. It follows then, that the goal
of SMO is to measure, monitor and improve the visibility of social objects as a means to
connecting with individuals who are proactively seeking additional information and direction.

THREE.
Strategy

Given that social objects are contextualized through keywords, titles, descriptions, and/
or tags so the measures here are not so different to SEO in terms of inbound links, as well
as referring web sites where your content, the social objects, are placed. So you need
to develop an analytics dashboard that reviews your effectiveness within this content
eco-system.

Using Google Analytics: Actionable analytics for content marketing
rr Q. We’re using our analytics effectively to review content marketing?

FOUR.
Editorial Management

Here are our recommendations on some of the key questions to ask for which you need to
review the analytics to get the answer:
rr Q. Which keyphrases related to content are most effective at driving visits and outcomes?
Ensure that you have an idea of what audience personas or segments whom those
keywords relate to as well, so you know who you’re writing content for. When you identify
high bouncing keywords try surveying those users on exit or placing calls to action
directly on the page to ask for feedback, tools like Kampyle can help with that.

FIVE.
Content Hub

rr Q. Which referring partner sites or social networks have helped with link generation
and measurement (for SEO) and the driving of traffic, referenced above as a part of
SMO. Check for traffic volumes from those domains and how those users (segmented
by referring domain) bounce and click through the site - are their needs being met? Of
course, you want more of the traffic that’s generating results and to understand how you
might also improve journeys for those that bounce highest, starting with landing pages.
From an SEO perspective you should review the number and quality of links that your
content generates using these types of backlink benchmarking software.

SIX.
Content Distribution

rr Q. Are we increasing the % of engaged users? Engagement can be short or longer-term
- it might be that someone has viewed more than 3 pages on the site, per session, this is
better than time on site. You can consider improving that by designing site journeys that
are for specific audiences and creating multiple routes to the important content.

rr Q. What are the satisfaction ratings for our content? Use different customer feedback
software like 4Q and Kampyle so you get overall ratings of your content and feedback
on specific content. 4Q is great since it shows you what people were looking for against
10

Brian Solis: SMO is the New SEO.

Content Marketing Strategy: Seven Steps to Success. Updated March 20th 2016
120

SEVEN. Evaluate and
Measure ROI

rr Q. How does content viewed on click-paths or journeys affect marketing outcomes?
This reviews the value that a user is finding on your web site and whether it’s influencing
leads or sales. In the next section we will show you how to use Advanced Segments to
precisely show how content is affecting sales.

what whether they were successful and how satisfied they were.
Best Practice Tip 27 Assess satisfaction levels with content
Don’t forget to assess the value of content through asking customers how they rate your
content – you can only tell so much from analytics systems.
ONE.
Audit and Goals

The general rule of optimisation is to monitor and test and don’t stop! Websites and web
based content are not brochures, they’re never ‘done’. Focus on testing and trying new
things where the analytics and customer feedback data indicates the best opportunity to
improve.

TWO. Define Audiences
and Personas
THREE.
Strategy
FOUR.
Editorial Management
FIVE.
Content Hub
SIX.
Content Distribution

To assess the effectiveness of our content marketing, we need to isolate the effect of
particular content you have invested in in creating incremental leads or sales. To help do
this, it’s best if your site structure is setup right to measure effectively - I use the engineering
term DFA “Design for Analysis” to prompt site designers to think about this. I›ll take some
examples from ClickThrough Marketing who I have helped provide content for – we created a
series of printed 101 guides introducing search marketing concepts.
no url

To separate your content marketing content from other product or service content you can
use these approaches:

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SEVEN. Evaluate and
Measure ROI

Some examples of how to review content marketing effectiveness in
Google Analytics

þþ 1. Setup your content on a separate content marketing campaign domain or
subdomain. This can be the quickest way to get up and running with content marketing,
if you want to use a funky design or a simple landing page which isn’t possible through
your main content management system. At ClickThrough we setup a separate domain
initially http://www.101guideseries.com with its own Google Analytics tags.
ONE.
Audit and Goals
TWO. Define Audiences
and Personas

Generally though, the next approach of grouping your content for content marketing in a
subfolder is better since then your content is integrated with your main site content and
users can view your content marketing and browse and return to view information about
your products and services. It’s also easier to track with a single domain although you can
call the Google Analytics “SetAllowLinker” function to link tracking with cookies across
domains or subdomains11.

THREE.
Strategy
FOUR.
Editorial Management
FIVE.
Content Hub

Best Practice Tip 28 Group content marketing resources to help users and for trackability
11

Google Analytics tracking reference

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SEVEN. Evaluate and
Measure ROI

You can also use this approach if you want to evaluate the contribution of the content
of your blog to leads and sales if you have it in a separate folder (/blog/) of your main
site. This is the approach that we now use at ClickThrough where we have a /resources/
folder. This folder has sub-folders /resources/blog/, /resources/downloads/, etc. This
has the benefit you can easily review the popularity of the different content types using
the Google Analytics Content Drilldown approach and use the GA $Index value to see
which content is generating most value through “Assists”. But to do this you need to put
a nominal value against each content type , e.g. article download = $1, Webinar = $2 or
simply set them to $1. See our post on creating goals in Google Analytics.

SIX.
Content Distribution

þþ 2. Use sub-folder(s) on your main site to group your content. This is probably
the most common approach for content marketing where you group all your content
marketing like PDFs in one or more folders. In a moment I’ll show you how to use
Advanced Segments to track how this content influences leads and sales.

Through grouping content marketing resources you can both highlight the value to users
and measure it more effectively.

ONE.
Audit and Goals
TWO. Define Audiences
and Personas
THREE.
Strategy
FOUR.
Editorial Management
FIVE.
Content Hub

þþ 3. Use custom variables to define content value. This is a more advanced technique,
which can work best if your content marketing content is distributed around the site.

SIX.
Content Distribution

You can use a function call on a content page to set page-level custom variables to
record a visit to section or group of content. You can also set Visitor-level custom
variables to record when content has been viewed across sessions and influenced a lead
or purchase.

So, how do we use Advanced Segments to determine how the content affects conversion and
value generated? The method is to specify the page or pages of our content within a Content
Marketing Advanced Segment and then compare the value generated to other content on the
site. See our post on using Segments in Google Analytics12 for more detail.

Smart Insights: Segments in Google Analytics

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123

SEVEN. Evaluate and
Measure ROI

Using Google Analytics Advanced Segments to determine the value generated
through content

Best Practice Tip 29 Use advanced segments to determine the value of your content
Create advanced segments for your different groups of content so you can more easily see
how they contribute to site outcomes.
ONE.
Audit and Goals

I’ll use a different example here, the content marketing content in this example is a website
conversion calculator I have made available as a free download on SmartInsights.com with
optional signup to our e-newsletter. I can assess the number of conversions generated
by this through creating an advanced segment specifying the page as «/conversion-model-spreadsheets/» (this could equally be all pages within a subfolder) as shown below.
Effectively this gives us a segment which only shows visits which included a visit to this page
(or folder) - so we can isolate the impact on visitors who viewed this content.

TWO. Define Audiences
and Personas
THREE.
Strategy
FOUR.
Editorial Management
FIVE.
Content Hub
SIX.
Content Distribution

The final step is to see what proportion of goals are delivered in visits which included a
vist to the spreadsheets page. To do this, simply go to the goals report available from the
left sidebar in Google Analytics and then compared the Viewed Spreadsheets segment
to All Visits. Here we can see that c38% of goal completions are generated through the
spreadsheet so it is effective in generating a fair proportion of goal completions.

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SEVEN. Evaluate and
Measure ROI

You can see that this page has around 600 visits in this period. Creating the segment also
lets us see variation through time of people visiting the subfolder, although we can see that
through the Top Content or better the Content Drilldown approach also.

You can also see the value this equates to.
So, that’s the end of this edition of the content marketing guide. We hope you have found it
useful in developing your content strategy. Please let us know how you found it so we can
improve in future versions.
ONE.
Audit and Goals
TWO. Define Audiences
and Personas
THREE.
Strategy
FOUR.
Editorial Management

If you have any questions, do use the community section in the members area and we’ll be
happy to answer them.

FIVE.
Content Hub
SIX.
Content Distribution

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Measure ROI

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