Content Marketing Strategy Guide

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Introduction
- Why is content marketing important?
ONE
- Content Marketing Capability Audit and Setting Goals
TWO
- Define Audiences and Personas
  - Discover your “content marketing sweet spot.”
  - How to create personas for content marketing
THREE
- Define your content marketing strategy
FOUR
- Editorial Management
FIVE
- Create compelling content for your content hub
SIX
- Content Distribution
Seven
- Evaluate and Measure ROI

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

ONE.

Audit and Goals SIX.

Content Distribution

SEVEN. Evaluate and

Measure ROI

FIVE.

Content Hub

FOUR.

Editorial Management

THREE.

Strategy

TWO. Dene Audiences

and Personas

Content Marketing Strategy: Seven Steps to Success. Updated March 20th 2016

Content Marketing Strategy

Seven Steps to Success Guide

Contents

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

Why is content marketing important? ....................................................................................5

Dening content marketing ...................................................................................................5

How content marketing supports marketing goals ................................................................5

Create a content hub to give sustained, integration communications ...................................7

About this guide .................................................................................................................. 11

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

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 mar-

keting to deliver? ................................................................................................................ 18

Getting buy-in for content marketing ..................................................................................23

Making the business case and getting buy-in for content marketing .................................25

TWO. Dene Audiences and Personas .............................................29

Discover your “content marketing sweet spot.” ...................................................................29

How to create personas for content marketing ...................................................................30

THREE. Dene your content marketing strategy .............................. 40

Dene the key parts of your content strategy ......................................................................40

Link your strategy to goals .................................................................................................. 41

Dene 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

ONE.

Audit and Goals SIX.

Content Distribution

SEVEN. Evaluate and

Measure ROI

FIVE.

Content Hub

FOUR.

Editorial Management

THREE.

Strategy

TWO. Dene Audiences

and Personas

Content Marketing Strategy: Seven Steps to Success. Updated March 20th 2016

Techniques .........................................................................................................................65

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

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

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

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

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

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

Distribution happens late, but is planned early ................................................................105

Recommended best practices ..........................................................................................105

The role of inuencer in your content marketing outreach ...............................................109

Paid distribution ............................................................................................................... 112

Recommended best practices .......................................................................................... 113

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

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

ONE.

Audit and Goals SIX.

Content Distribution

SEVEN. Evaluate and

Measure ROI

FIVE.

Content Hub

FOUR.

Editorial Management

THREE.

Strategy

TWO. Dene Audiences

and Personas

Content Marketing Strategy: Seven Steps to Success. Updated March 20th 2016

Introduction

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).

In this introduction we explore the benets of content marketing and explain the ‘Content

Marketing blueprint’ which will help you explain to colleagues how to create a powerful content

marketing machine.

Why is content marketing so important?

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.

A content marketing strategy has the benet 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.

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.

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.

Dening content marketing

Joe Pulizzi, founder of the Content Marketing Institute, denes content marketing as:

“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”

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.

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.

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.

ONE.

Audit and Goals SIX.

Content Distribution

SEVEN. Evaluate and

Measure ROI

FIVE.

Content Hub

FOUR.

Editorial Management

THREE.

Strategy

TWO. Dene Audiences

and Personas

Content Marketing Strategy: Seven Steps to Success. Updated March 20th 2016

For us, these are the reasons why content marketing is central to success online:

þShare-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 inuencer today!

þContent 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.

þContent drives purchases. We base our decisions on online content when shopping

online or researching for ofine purchases.

þSyndicated 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 inuencer site.

þUser 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.

þContent 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.

Content marketing supports and integrates all the core digital media channels

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:

þ1. 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.

þ2. 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.

þ3. 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.

þ4. 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 unied content marketing strategy to engage different

audiences.

þ5. 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.

þ6. 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.

þ7. 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.

ONE.

Audit and Goals SIX.

Content Distribution

SEVEN. Evaluate and

Measure ROI

FIVE.

Content Hub

FOUR.

Editorial Management

THREE.

Strategy

TWO. Dene Audiences

and Personas

Content Marketing Strategy: Seven Steps to Success. Updated March 20th 2016

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 SIX.

Content Distribution

SEVEN. Evaluate and

Measure ROI

FIVE.

Content Hub

FOUR.

Editorial Management

THREE.

Strategy

TWO. Dene Audiences

and Personas

Content Marketing Strategy: Seven Steps to Success. Updated March 20th 2016

Create a content hub to give sustained, integration communications

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.

We believe that publishing regularly updated quality blog-style content on a hub like a

magazine or resources area will:

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.

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 sufcient to have regularly curated on a

Facebook page.

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

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

ONE.

Audit and Goals SIX.

Content Distribution

SEVEN. Evaluate and

Measure ROI

FIVE.

Content Hub

FOUR.

Editorial Management

THREE.

Strategy

TWO. Dene Audiences

and Personas

Content Marketing Strategy: Seven Steps to Success. Updated March 20th 2016

your Content Hub to engage your audience and encourage sharing. To reach more people

beyond organic sharing or ‘social media amplication’ involves using inuencer outreach on

Marketing Outposts and Inuencer 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.

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.

2. You need a dened, branded hub to share content

3. You need to invest in seeding content and using inuencers 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.

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

A Content Hub won’t be essential for all businesses. Very small businesses who don’t have

the resources to fuel it may nd 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 .

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:

þCar insurance – Confused.com blog, now positioned as a magazine.

þConsumer brand – L’Oreal’s Makeup.com

þFinancial services – HSBC Expat Explorer

þRetail – Mr Porter’s Journal blog

þTravel – Kuoni Travel inspiration

þSME B2B – American Express Open Forum – advice content incorporating a community

þEnterprise B2B – Adobe CMO.com

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.

How content marketing supports customer management

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 dened

by the Smart Insights RACE planning framework which we have developed to help create

integrated digital plans.

þStage 1 Reach involves building awareness of a brand, its products and services on

other sites and in ofine media and building trafc by driving visits to web presences.

þStage 2 Act stands for interact, your aim is to achieve the initial engagement of your

1 Marketing Insider Group : 99 examples of Content Hubs

ONE.

Audit and Goals SIX.

Content Distribution

SEVEN. Evaluate and

Measure ROI

FIVE.

Content Hub

FOUR.

Editorial Management

THREE.

Strategy

TWO. Dene Audiences

and Personas

Content Marketing Strategy: Seven Steps to Success. Updated March 20th 2016

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.

þStage 3 Convert – Achieve conversion to marketing goals such as new fans, leads or

sales on web presences and ofine.

þStage 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.

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 SIX.

Content Distribution

SEVEN. Evaluate and

Measure ROI

FIVE.

Content Hub

FOUR.

Editorial Management

THREE.

Strategy

TWO. Dene Audiences

and Personas

Content Marketing Strategy: Seven Steps to Success. Updated March 20th 2016

About this guide

The Smart Insights Content Marketing toolkit

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:

þScore your capability using our interactive benchmarking tool which gives you a score for

7 areas of content marketing and then recommends where to focus

þComplete the e-learning which follows a similar structure to this guide with each section

marked off as you complete it

þDownload the editorial planning spreadsheets to create a content plan

þDownload the evaluating content marketing guide which has more details

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

þCampaign planning – structure integrated, content-led campaigns

þEmail marketing – use the contact strategy for content to be delivered by email

þSearch engine optimisation – learn the principles to gain evergreen trafc

þSocial media marketing – best practices for social sharing

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

ONE.

Audit and Goals SIX.

Content Distribution

SEVEN. Evaluate and

Measure ROI

FIVE.

Content Hub

FOUR.

Editorial Management

THREE.

Strategy

TWO. Dene Audiences

and Personas

Content Marketing Strategy: Seven Steps to Success. Updated March 20th 2016

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

approach?

This guide is structured using a tried, tested and trusted content marketing strategy planning

process developed by Stephen Bateman. The methodology encompasses ve stages,

atomised into seven pillars, which make up the steps in this guide:

Diagnose and Plan

Create a strategic

structure for content

marketing.

Ideate

Generate a ow of ideas

and governance for

your content marketing

activity.

Produce

Create your content.

Distribute and

Nurture

Market your marketing.

Measure & Report

Evaluate, improve

and prove content

marketing ROI

Audit Content

Marketing

Capability

Set Goals

for Content

Marketing

Dene

Audiences

Create Buyer

Personas

Buying cycle

analysis

Keyword

analysis

Audit

Existing

Assets

Select

Content

Types

Dene Mix

Dene

Governance

Editorial

management

Create Content

Hub

Use Content

Calendar

Content Factory

Options for

creating

content

Content

Creation

Systems and

Tools Content

Curation

Options for Content

Distribution and Promotion

including Owned, Earned

and Paid

Inuencer Outreach

Identify and

Set Content

Marketing

Metrics and

KPIs

Track and

Report

Content

Marketing

Activity

Step 1

Audit and

goals

Step 2

Audience

and

Personas

Step 3

Content

Strategy

Step 4

Editorial

Step 5

Create content hub

Step 6

Content distribution

Step 7

Evaluate and

measure ROI

Who is this guide for?

This guide is for anyone who is responsible for the quality of marketing content in their

organisation, or their clients.

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.

The planned approach we dene 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 nd it gives them a roadmap to grow their business.

What makes this guide different?

There are many, many great books that persuasively explain “why use content marketing”.

We’re inuenced by many of the specialists on content marketing that we acknowledge

below.

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.

About the authors

Stephen Bateman is a career marketer turned marketing consultant,

author and speaker, and the contributing Content Marketing Strategy

Expert for Smart Insights.

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

ONE.

Audit and Goals SIX.

Content Distribution

SEVEN. Evaluate and

Measure ROI

FIVE.

Content Hub

FOUR.

Editorial Management

THREE.

Strategy

TWO. Dene Audiences

and Personas

Content Marketing Strategy: Seven Steps to Success. Updated March 20th 2016

more protable return on content marketing investment.

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.

Follow Stephen on Twitter @concentricdots or connect on LinkedIn.

Dr Dave Chaffey is the editor of all Smart Insights resources. He has advised

on content marketing and SEO since he created his rst 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.

Acknowledgments – who inspires us?

This guide is our advice rooted and inspired from a number of inuential 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.

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

þDavid Meerman-Scott (www.davidmeermanscott.com), author of “The New Rules of

Marketing & PR”

þAnn Handley (www.marketingprofs.com), a co-author of “Content Rules

þLee Odden of the TopRankBlog.com, author of “Optimize”

þJay Baer (www.ConvinceandConvert.com), author of “The Now Revolution”

þSeth Godin (www.sethgodin.com), author of way too many books to mention!

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

þChris Brogan (www.chrisbrogan.com), author of “Trust Agents”

þMichael Seltzner, author of “Launch” and founder of the Social Media Examiner website

http://www.elevationprinciple.com.

þAltimeter (www.altimeter.com) including Rebecca Lieb, Charlene Li and

Brian Solis (www.briansolis.com), author of “Engage”

þHubspot (www.hubspot.com)

þMarketo (www.marketo.com)

About this revision

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.

ONE.

Audit and Goals SIX.

Content Distribution

SEVEN. Evaluate and

Measure ROI

FIVE.

Content Hub

FOUR.

Editorial Management

THREE.

Strategy

TWO. Dene Audiences

and Personas

Content Marketing Strategy: Seven Steps to Success. Updated March 20th 2016

ONE

Content Marketing Capability Audit and Setting Goals

Introduction

We see the need for setting content marketing goals as essential for success.

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.

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.

The content explosion

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

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.

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

ONE.

Audit and Goals SIX.

Content Distribution

SEVEN. Evaluate and

Measure ROI

FIVE.

Content Hub

FOUR.

Editorial Management

THREE.

Strategy

TWO. Dene Audiences

and Personas

Content Marketing Strategy: Seven Steps to Success. Updated March 20th 2016

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

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.

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

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 rst, before your organisation can.

This why we recommend using our content marketing toolkit to rst assess your existing

content marketing capability

Strategy Recommendation 3 Benchmark your content marketing capability

The rst 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.

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 inuencer and

ONE.

Audit and Goals SIX.

Content Distribution

SEVEN. Evaluate and

Measure ROI

FIVE.

Content Hub

FOUR.

Editorial Management

THREE.

Strategy

TWO. Dene Audiences

and Personas

Content Marketing Strategy: Seven Steps to Success. Updated March 20th 2016

publisher hybrid is not easy, but essential.

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

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 SIX.

Content Distribution

SEVEN. Evaluate and

Measure ROI

FIVE.

Content Hub

FOUR.

Editorial Management

THREE.

Strategy

TWO. Dene Audiences

and Personas

Content Marketing Strategy: Seven Steps to Success. Updated March 20th 2016

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:

The stages in the Altimeter capability model are:

þStand: you haven’t yet realized the value of content marketing as a key component of

your marketing strategy.

þStretch: you understand the benets of content marketing and have started to create

content.

þWalk: now with a solid foundation organizationally that supports content creation, your

content strategy is more fully rened and tweaked. There is also a concerted effort to

connect content development with all parts of the organization’s communication teams.

þJog: your company is seriously committed to content marketing and has a clear strategy.

þRun: 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

ONE.

Audit and Goals SIX.

Content Distribution

SEVEN. Evaluate and

Measure ROI

FIVE.

Content Hub

FOUR.

Editorial Management

THREE.

Strategy

TWO. Dene Audiences

and Personas

Content Marketing Strategy: Seven Steps to Success. Updated March 20th 2016

your content marketing efforts:

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

want your content marketing to deliver?

To make content marketing work, you need to dene 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.

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.

I like to differentiate between goals and smart objectives, the latter being more tangible and

concrete; objectives are more specic, goals top-level aims.

Goals work together with objectives because goals dene top-level targets, and objectives

dene 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

ONE.

Audit and Goals SIX.

Content Distribution

SEVEN. Evaluate and

Measure ROI

FIVE.

Content Hub

FOUR.

Editorial Management

THREE.

Strategy

TWO. Dene Audiences

and Personas

Content Marketing Strategy: Seven Steps to Success. Updated March 20th 2016

awareness.

Objectives

Your objectives translate the goals into specic targets that can be measured. Objectives are

more precise and should be easily measurable.

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.

Setting SMART Objectives

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

10 Design Tests to assess your SMART Objectives

To check you are choosing the right objectives, consider using these 10 measure design

tests developed by performance management specialist Professor Andy Neely.

For SMARTER metrics, ask these questions for your KPIs as you develop them.

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

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?

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

measures it?

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?!

ONE.

Audit and Goals SIX.

Content Distribution

SEVEN. Evaluate and

Measure ROI

FIVE.

Content Hub

FOUR.

Editorial Management

THREE.

Strategy

TWO. Dene Audiences

and Personas

Content Marketing Strategy: Seven Steps to Success. Updated March 20th 2016

10. The gaming test. Is the measure likely to encourage undesirable or inappropriate

behaviours?

These tests show there are additional lters on top of SMART that are useful to choose the

best measure, We particularly like the “So-what test”.

Recommended technique: RACE Framework

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

Metric Reach

audience

Encourage

Action

Convert

to Sale

Engage customers

to Retain & Grow

Tracking

metrics

Unique visitors

New visitors

Visits

Conversation volume

Online opportunity

(lead) volume

Ofine opportunity

(lead) volume

(online inuenced)

Online sales volume

Ofine sales volume

(online inuenced)

E-mail list quality

E-mail response

quality

Transactions

Performance drivers

(diagnostics)

Share of audience

compared to

competitors

Share of search

Brand / direct visits

Bounce rate and

duration measures

Macro-conversion rate

to opportunity and

micro-conversion

efciency

Conversion rate to

Sale

E-mail conversion rate

Active customers %

(site & e-mail active)

Active social followers

Repeat conversion

rate

Customer

Centric

KPIs

Cost per Click and per

Sale

Brand awareness

Conversation

Polarity (sentiment)

Cost per Opportunity

Customer satisfaction

Cost per Sale

Customer satisfaction

Lifetime value

Customer loyalty index

Customer advocacy

index

Products per customer

Business

Value

KPIs

Audience share

Share of conversations

Goal value per visit

Online product

requests

(n, £, % of total)

Revenue per visit

Online originated sales

revenue and prot

(n, £, % of total)

Retained sales growth

and volume

Revenue per 1000

emails sent

ONE.

Audit and Goals SIX.

Content Distribution

SEVEN. Evaluate and

Measure ROI

FIVE.

Content Hub

FOUR.

Editorial Management

THREE.

Strategy

TWO. Dene Audiences

and Personas

Content Marketing Strategy: Seven Steps to Success. Updated March 20th 2016

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.

Here are some ideas on specic goals, which can be tracked within analytics, for all types of

content and optimised to deliver more leads and sales.

The goal comes before the metric: It’s important to remember why we need metrics in the

rst place (see our content marketing ROI guide).

Metrics allow us to measure things, and useful metrics measure the things that show whether

your content marketing is producing acceptable growth or not.

For each goal, you want to try to determine metrics that show whether you’re succeeding or

not.

Let’s look at a few example metrics

Best Practice Tip 2 Select your broad goals and specic objectives

List the goals and corresponding SMART objectives that are most relevant for you, and

check you have them setup in your analytics.

Goals for lead-generation and email communications

rQ. Contact Us or phone call-back thank you page goal?

rQ. Lead-generation thank you page goal?

rQ. Goals for content marketing pages that generate leads e.g. white papers, guides?

ONE.

Audit and Goals SIX.

Content Distribution

SEVEN. Evaluate and

Measure ROI

FIVE.

Content Hub

FOUR.

Editorial Management

THREE.

Strategy

TWO. Dene Audiences

and Personas

Content Marketing Strategy: Seven Steps to Success. Updated March 20th 2016

Goals for site engagement

rQ. Time on site engagement goals?

rQ. Pages viewed engagement goals?

rQ. Videos watched goals?

rQ. Document download goals?

rQ. Customer feedback goals?

Goals for top of funnel product engagement

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.

rQ. Product search page viewed?

rQ. Category page viewed?

rQ. Product page viewed?

Goals showing social engagement or participation with the site

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:

þBlog comments.

þProduct comments, reviews and ratings.

þFavouriting or sharing of pages through social bookmarking.

þSharing 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:

Marketing task Example Comment

Write down what the

business needs to achieve in

next 12 months

Generate £1.6M in additional

sales of primary medical

care products from ideal

buyers on our database by

March 2017

This is a 9% growth rate over

last year

Identify your average

customer value for this target

customer group

£2500 average customer

value / order size

Customers who purchase

from our Advanced

programme spend this

amount with us on average

Calculate the number of

customers you need to

convert in order to reach

your target?

£1.6M / £2500 = 640

customers

This is a realistic number

of new customers for this

product class

What percentage of your

prospective market do you

need to convert to achieve

your objective?

640 / 2200 prospects = 29%

conversion rate

This is a high proportion to

convert, but our sales force

can do this with the help of

content marketing

ONE.

Audit and Goals SIX.

Content Distribution

SEVEN. Evaluate and

Measure ROI

FIVE.

Content Hub

FOUR.

Editorial Management

THREE.

Strategy

TWO. Dene Audiences

and Personas

Content Marketing Strategy: Seven Steps to Success. Updated March 20th 2016

Marketing task Example Comment

Write down what content

marketing needs to do to

help sales achieve the

business goal

Tell compelling success

stories from existing

buyers, engage interest

of prospective buyers

and convert interest into

consideration with supporting

marketing content

The success stories, content

types, routes to customers

and measurement have been

mapped out and the team

can undertake this activity

What marketing budget will

you put on this goal?

We will allocate 10% of the

customer value to generating

each sale = £250 for every

prospect, which provides a

total budget of £160,000

9% of gross revenue is a

standard marketing budget

for us

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

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 nd more help with dening content marketing metrics and

evaluating ROI in Step Seven of this guide.

Getting buy-in for content marketing

Another critical task for a successful content marketing strategy is dening a vision for the

future and then specifying more specic goals which will set goals and targets to improve

your marketing performance.

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.

Recommended approaches to help increase buy-in to content marketing

rQ. Approaches to overcome barriers to internal change reviewed?

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 nd out, what are the main blocks to change, you can overcome them?

The content marketing mission statement

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:

þPosting it: Include the mission statement where it can be found easily

þSpread 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.

ONE.

Audit and Goals SIX.

Content Distribution

SEVEN. Evaluate and

Measure ROI

FIVE.

Content Hub

FOUR.

Editorial Management

THREE.

Strategy

TWO. Dene Audiences

and Personas

Content Marketing Strategy: Seven Steps to Success. Updated March 20th 2016

þThe litmus test: Use the mission statement to decide what content you will and won’t

create.

þOften, a bad judgment in content creation can be xed by running it by the mission

statement.

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.

Do you have a content marketing mission statement?

Anatomy of a content marketing mission statement

Here are some problems to watch for:

þ“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 rm 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.

þ“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 rst, to create the stage for a new approach.

þ“What we do now works just ne...”: 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.

þWe think these strategies from the Content Marketing Institute are also useful guidelines

ONE.

Audit and Goals SIX.

Content Distribution

SEVEN. Evaluate and

Measure ROI

FIVE.

Content Hub

FOUR.

Editorial Management

THREE.

Strategy

TWO. Dene Audiences

and Personas

Content Marketing Strategy: Seven Steps to Success. Updated March 20th 2016

to base your management of change upon:

þRespect 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.

þGet 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.

þEmpower 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:

þTeam managers or supervisors give each of their team members objectives to meet

within a shared 90 day time frame

þEach team member develops their own unique plan and processes that will allow them to

achieve those outcomes

þEach plan is required to include a list of resources and support that the supervisor will

provide, to help the report meet their objectives

þManager, supervisor and report are held mutually accountable for delivering on their

commitments, weekly productive conversations help maintain momentum going toward

the 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?”.

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

rQ. Business case for change dened?

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.

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.

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.

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.

missinng

URL

ONE.

Audit and Goals SIX.

Content Distribution

SEVEN. Evaluate and

Measure ROI

FIVE.

Content Hub

FOUR.

Editorial Management

THREE.

Strategy

TWO. Dene Audiences

and Personas

Content Marketing Strategy: Seven Steps to Success. Updated March 20th 2016

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 1. Little content = little conversation

We know that developing a marketing plan is about rstly understanding your audience’s

unmet needs. Whether customers, potential customers or inuencers. 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.

Reason 2. Marketing is publishing

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 benets. 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.

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

Being “active” in social media is not a marketing goal, just like “more natural search trafc”

can lead to distraction about what matters – getting the right trafc - 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?

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 gure out where

best to publish and share your content to power link-building and drive conversation in the

right places.

Reason 4. Content is currency

Fascinating, useful, educational and entertaining content is shared through social media. It’s

the currency, the rewood – 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.

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

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

ONE.

Audit and Goals SIX.

Content Distribution

SEVEN. Evaluate and

Measure ROI

FIVE.

Content Hub

FOUR.

Editorial Management

THREE.

Strategy

TWO. Dene Audiences

and Personas

Content Marketing Strategy: Seven Steps to Success. Updated March 20th 2016

Feed or an inuencer’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.

Some of the approaches that we have found effective to highlight the business opportunity

and/or the threat are, in order of effectiveness:

r1. Demonstrating success through a pilot or existing activity. This shows real-world results

specically for your company so tends to work best, if you have demonstrable success.

yYou may already have examples of success across different areas:

ySales increases through SEO

yNew visitors acquired through social media activity

yConversion increases through reviews and ratings

yIncreased existing customer engagement and sales through content shared through

email marketing or social media

r2. 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.

r3. Model improved results through a cost-benet. 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.

Best Practice Tip 4 Create a conversion model to show value generated

A spreadsheet conversion model will give you specic ideas for how you can increase sales

value or the number of visitors to the site through the customer lifecycle.

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.

ONE.

Audit and Goals SIX.

Content Distribution

SEVEN. Evaluate and

Measure ROI

FIVE.

Content Hub

FOUR.

Editorial Management

THREE.

Strategy

TWO. Dene Audiences

and Personas

Content Marketing Strategy: Seven Steps to Success. Updated March 20th 2016

r4. Use benchmarking statistics or change in consumer behaviour to show how the

technique is effective.

For content marketing, you should show how consumers use different information types

that inuence sale (e.g. reviews and ratings, blogs, social media comments), ideally for your

industry.

ONE.

Audit and Goals SIX.

Content Distribution

SEVEN. Evaluate and

Measure ROI

FIVE.

Content Hub

FOUR.

Editorial Management

THREE.

Strategy

TWO. Dene Audiences

and Personas

Content Marketing Strategy: Seven Steps to Success. Updated March 20th 2016

TWO

Dene Audiences and Personas

Discover your “content marketing sweet spot.”

rQ. Dene how content supports your brand and audience needs

This step ows 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.

We think dening 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!

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

Best Practice Tip 5 Dene 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.”

Uncovering your sweet spot and creating content focused on the relevancy sweet spot has

several key benets that can be summed up in the following points:

þIt shows people you care and makes you stand out as memorable.

þIt means you won’t create content for a void, but to ll an identied sweet spot, where

otherwise there would be a gap.

ONE.

Audit and Goals SIX.

Content Distribution

SEVEN. Evaluate and

Measure ROI

FIVE.

Content Hub

FOUR.

Editorial Management

THREE.

Strategy

TWO. Dene Audiences

and Personas

Content Marketing Strategy: Seven Steps to Success. Updated March 20th 2016

þIt sets you apart from your competitors, and helps your prospective customers choose

you.

þIt’s transparent, authentic, credible, and about being more of what you are.

þIt 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

unprotable marketing.

þIt’s about how much better and more empowered you make your customers feel.

þIts underpins your content marketing mission statement (see previous chapter.)

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.

How to create personas for content marketing

What is a persona?

The original denition of a buyer persona was developed by user experience agency

Foviance/Seren, who said: “A persona is a ctional character that communicates the primary

characteristics of a group of users, identied 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”.

What is it? Web design personas

A thumbnail summary of the characteristics, needs, motivations and environment of typical

site users.

Ardath Albee, a persona specialist, puts it another way: “A persona puts a face on an

otherwise faceless segment.”

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.

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 brieng personas.

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

ONE.

Audit and Goals SIX.

Content Distribution

SEVEN. Evaluate and

Measure ROI

FIVE.

Content Hub

FOUR.

Editorial Management

THREE.

Strategy

TWO. Dene Audiences

and Personas

Content Marketing Strategy: Seven Steps to Success. Updated March 20th 2016

audience, without in-depth research. May be design or marketing-oriented and be

narrative based or based on a summary of goals and characteristics.

2. Web design or Customer experience personas. Created specically 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 char-

acteristics, behaviour and perception of a brand.

4. Buyer personas vs sales personas. Typically focus on buyers, so are often known

as ‘Buyer Personas’. Within B2B it can be useful to dene sales personas to help

develop the selling narrative.

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:

þ1. Name. It’s usual to give personas a name to refer to them based on their characteris-

tics. Example: Jan Jones

þ2. Label. It helps to give a label summarising the characteristics too. Example: Head of

Production

þ3. Demographic characteristics. For example, age, gender, social group. Example:

Age: 36

þ4. 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 prole, join a larger company at a more senior levels.

þ5. 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.

þ6. 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 justications.

þ7. Information needs. Related to buyer behaviour, the information used to take

decisions. This can be summarised on a mental model map. Example: ROI justication

with break-even point

þ8. Platform usage. For example, use of device type or social network, usually in the

context of purchase.

þ9. Customer journey maps. A separate technique with examples in our persona toolkit

and eLearning Toolkit.

þ10. Perceptions. Perceptions of need for product or service or competitors which can be

plotted on a perceptual map.

ONE.

Audit and Goals SIX.

Content Distribution

SEVEN. Evaluate and

Measure ROI

FIVE.

Content Hub

FOUR.

Editorial Management

THREE.

Strategy

TWO. Dene Audiences

and Personas

Content Marketing Strategy: Seven Steps to Success. Updated March 20th 2016

Benets of personas

1. A Persona works as a Relevance Tool

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

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 !

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.

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.

A 5 step process for effective persona creation

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

Step 1: Research and collate your audience insight data

A. Data your business collects

þ1. Proling from on-site data capture e.g. online forms – compare to ‘ofine audiences’…

þ2. Customer prospect and sales database – prole or cluster analysis used to identify

groups

þ3. Customer surveys e.g. ofine or delivered by email or prompted by an online tool like

Hotjar

ONE.

Audit and Goals SIX.

Content Distribution

SEVEN. Evaluate and

Measure ROI

FIVE.

Content Hub

FOUR.

Editorial Management

THREE.

Strategy

TWO. Dene Audiences

and Personas

Content Marketing Strategy: Seven Steps to Success. Updated March 20th 2016

þ4. Google Analytics now has a demographic assessment. Under Audience - background.

þ5. Social media page proling, e.g. your Facebook or Twitter page insights or LinkedIn

company page

B. Primary qualitative marketing research

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.

þKeyword search behaviour from Google (https://adwords.google.com/select/Keyword-

ToolExternal

Step 2: Cut the cake – dene the personas that work for you

The most difcult 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.

This process is about nding 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 sufcient, indeed 3 or 4 may be

ne.

Step 3: Constructing Personas

The typical output is a summary of the needs and wants of a ctional character. For us, these

are 5 key areas to the description You may not mention each area specically, but make it

clear for any reader to understand based on your description.

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.

þBody: 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

þPsyche: we all have an overall attitude towards life and our surroundings which also

inuence the way we meet technology e.g. is the persona introvert or extrovert

þBackground: we all have a social background, education, upbringing which inuences our

abilities, attitudes and understanding of the world

þEmotions and attitudes towards technology including platforms such as browsers, mobile

and social media tools

þPersonal traits: this one is tricky, in ctional writing there is a distinction between at

characters and rounded characters. The at character is characterized by having only

one character trait and is difcult to engage in. The rounded character has more than one

character trait, is not predictable and easier to engage with.

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

ONE.

Audit and Goals SIX.

Content Distribution

SEVEN. Evaluate and

Measure ROI

FIVE.

Content Hub

FOUR.

Editorial Management

THREE.

Strategy

TWO. Dene Audiences

and Personas

Content Marketing Strategy: Seven Steps to Success. Updated March 20th 2016

of course benet to be nalised by a single person to ensure homogeneity in writing and

presentation.

Step 4: Develop Scenarios

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.

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:

þWhat are your customers’ content preferences?

þHow do they discover, consume and share content?

þWhat are they looking for on search engines and discussing on the social web?

þCan they be grouped into audience segments based on their preferences and content

discovery and consumption behaviors?

Step 5: Generate Proles, share and get team buy-in

Develop a completed prole format that you can consistently build for each prole, here’s a

very short example with content marketing in mind:

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

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

Participation: Join, Collect

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?

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 nd anomalies in the descriptions.

Techniques

1. Mental Model Map Gap analysis

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.

ONE.

Audit and Goals SIX.

Content Distribution

SEVEN. Evaluate and

Measure ROI

FIVE.

Content Hub

FOUR.

Editorial Management

THREE.

Strategy

TWO. Dene Audiences

and Personas

Content Marketing Strategy: Seven Steps to Success. Updated March 20th 2016

2. Mapping content to buying cycle customer journey mapping

A useful technique for showing which touch points personas can be inuenced through.

ONE.

Audit and Goals SIX.

Content Distribution

SEVEN. Evaluate and

Measure ROI

FIVE.

Content Hub

FOUR.

Editorial Management

THREE.

Strategy

TWO. Dene Audiences

and Personas

Content Marketing Strategy: Seven Steps to Success. Updated March 20th 2016

3. XY Characteristic mapping

4. Buyer person content mapping

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.

ONE.

Audit and Goals SIX.

Content Distribution

SEVEN. Evaluate and

Measure ROI

FIVE.

Content Hub

FOUR.

Editorial Management

THREE.

Strategy

TWO. Dene Audiences

and Personas

Content Marketing Strategy: Seven Steps to Success. Updated March 20th 2016

5. Buyer personality and behaviour

This technique, rst 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

ONE.

Audit and Goals SIX.

Content Distribution

SEVEN. Evaluate and

Measure ROI

FIVE.

Content Hub

FOUR.

Editorial Management

THREE.

Strategy

TWO. Dene Audiences

and Personas

Content Marketing Strategy: Seven Steps to Success. Updated March 20th 2016

Example Personas

ONE.

Audit and Goals SIX.

Content Distribution

SEVEN. Evaluate and

Measure ROI

FIVE.

Content Hub

FOUR.

Editorial Management

THREE.

Strategy

TWO. Dene Audiences

and Personas

Content Marketing Strategy: Seven Steps to Success. Updated March 20th 2016

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

ONE.

Audit and Goals SIX.

Content Distribution

SEVEN. Evaluate and

Measure ROI

FIVE.

Content Hub

FOUR.

Editorial Management

THREE.

Strategy

TWO. Dene Audiences

and Personas

Content Marketing Strategy: Seven Steps to Success. Updated March 20th 2016

THREE

Dene your content marketing strategy

rQ. 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.

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 dene 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.

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

questions in mind:

rQ. 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.

rQ. 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.

rQ. 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 t?

rQ. 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.

rQ. What will provide your consumer most benet personally and professionally? Your aim

is to add maximum value.

Dene the key parts of your content strategy

rQ. Content strategy components dened?

These are what we see as the key elements of a content strategy:

þQ. Dene 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.

þQ. Dene what customer value your content types should deliver. Using the personas, as

described in Step 2, to dene the problems and opportunities that your content is going to

address.

þQ. Dene 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 nance though it can cover health and lifestyle too.

þQ.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.

ONE.

Audit and Goals SIX.

Content Distribution

SEVEN. Evaluate and

Measure ROI

FIVE.

Content Hub

FOUR.

Editorial Management

THREE.

Strategy

TWO. Dene Audiences

and Personas

Content Marketing Strategy: Seven Steps to Success. Updated March 20th 2016

þQ. Core brand messages. What are the core brand messages communicated through

those dened topics or conveyed through the content?

þQ. 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

rQ. Strategy linked to SMART goals?

In the rst 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:

þTarget - 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 rst question is not how many,

but who - who are your key inuencers?

þCreate 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 dene those audience

pain points.

þPublish 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.

Act – encourage participation and sharing of your content

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:

þCreate 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 ts 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.

þBe 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 nd more of the same.

þMake 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.

ONE.

Audit and Goals SIX.

Content Distribution

SEVEN. Evaluate and

Measure ROI

FIVE.

Content Hub

FOUR.

Editorial Management

THREE.

Strategy

TWO. Dene Audiences

and Personas

Content Marketing Strategy: Seven Steps to Success. Updated March 20th 2016

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:

þValue - 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 ofine (attend an event or visit a store) or online (go

to your customer community service or Facebook page).

þInteract - 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.

þPromote - 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 notications only available via

Twitter or Facebook – and promote access to those in emails or on brochures, Starbucks

are masters of this.

Engage - develop advocacy and referral

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

þBuild 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.

þIntegrate - 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.

þSocial 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 nd it here, right on our doorstep if

we’re open to employ it as a process within the business. Only one benet of that is our

ability to continually improve content and communications.

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.

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:

rQ. What are the core audience types? There’s likely more than one, for example the

consumer of the product or service, and also key inuencers like industry bloggers and

ONE.

Audit and Goals SIX.

Content Distribution

SEVEN. Evaluate and

Measure ROI

FIVE.

Content Hub

FOUR.

Editorial Management

THREE.

Strategy

TWO. Dene Audiences

and Personas

Content Marketing Strategy: Seven Steps to Success. Updated March 20th 2016

journalists.

rQ. What is the story or the crucial messages that the content must communicate?

rQ. What must your content enable the audience to do that helps achieve your goals?

rQ. 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

Dene the value you will offer your audience through your content

rQ. Content value dened?

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 proles in clear statements that everybody in the team can

understand, for example:

“the potential customer needs evidence that we understand their problem well before they’ll

buy, share or recommend us”

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

This is an example of the intersection that Joe Pulizzi talks about, along with an approach of

how to address it.

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”.

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.

The key element of a strategy is to decide where you will focus your efforts, so make sure

your analysis is sufciently 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 nd the underlying principle of the problem, [to] come up with a beautiful elegant solution

that works”

ONE.

Audit and Goals SIX.

Content Distribution

SEVEN. Evaluate and

Measure ROI

FIVE.

Content Hub

FOUR.

Editorial Management

THREE.

Strategy

TWO. Dene Audiences

and Personas

Content Marketing Strategy: Seven Steps to Success. Updated March 20th 2016

Steve Jobs

Specifying the value your content offers

rQ. Do we get the sell-inform-entertain-share balance right?

Next, get more specic about the content value. We think the Sell-Inform-Entertain balance

is useful here, because it reects different content needs for different types of customers in

different markets.

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:

B2B Proposition B2C Proposition

Make my work easier Make my life easier

Help me develop Help me learn / have fun

Make me look good Make me look good

Give me a great deal Give me a great deal

Content types and formats

rQ. Different potential content types reviewed?

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

personas.

Content formats vary and choice of content formats is dependent on your goal, and how your

target market would nd 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)

ONE.

Audit and Goals SIX.

Content Distribution

SEVEN. Evaluate and

Measure ROI

FIVE.

Content Hub

FOUR.

Editorial Management

THREE.

Strategy

TWO. Dene Audiences

and Personas

Content Marketing Strategy: Seven Steps to Success. Updated March 20th 2016

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

In this sense content can be viewed as being either a) lightweight, frequent and by denition

less demanding and less expensive to create, and b) heavyweight, but with greater, longer

lasting impact.

Lightweight content Heavyweight content

þBlog post / checklist

þArticle / Interview

þPress Release (media announcements)

þPodcast

þHandheld video

þCase Study

þPrice guide

þWebcast

þInfographic

þWhite Paper

þeBook

þProfessional Video

þMobile App

þInteractive quiz or assessment

þEvent

Overall, the key is to be efcient with the media chosen, and start with tangible and useful

topics that your audience can understand.

In her book “Content Rules”, Ann Handley talks about Content Campres, Chris Brogan also

uses this analogy and it’s a useful in visualising the challenge.

You layer on the twigs, sticks and logs only when the re 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

rQ. Approach for seeding interest in content reviewed?

Anne talks about nding 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.

ONE.

Audit and Goals SIX.

Content Distribution

SEVEN. Evaluate and

Measure ROI

FIVE.

Content Hub

FOUR.

Editorial Management

THREE.

Strategy

TWO. Dene Audiences

and Personas

Content Marketing Strategy: Seven Steps to Success. Updated March 20th 2016

Best Practice Tip 7 Light your content marketing re 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.

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 re” with a purpose to add value

to conversation over blatantly trying to poach trafc. It’s common sense really.

Twigs and logs - With the tinder in place, you can then lay the twigs and logs onto that

campre – 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

5. Q&As and FAQs

Content Matrix

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.

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:

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

rQ. 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.

rQ. What is the potential for content to attract inbound links to your site to help with

SEO?

ONE.

Audit and Goals SIX.

Content Distribution

SEVEN. Evaluate and

Measure ROI

FIVE.

Content Hub

FOUR.

Editorial Management

THREE.

Strategy

TWO. Dene Audiences

and Personas

Content Marketing Strategy: Seven Steps to Success. Updated March 20th 2016

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

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

þStep 2. Review current use of content within company through plotting on the grid.

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

þStep 4. Brainstorm future content types possible

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

campaigns.

A closer look at different content formats

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.

1. Regular blog posts categorised by audience need and intent

The staple approach. HubSpot have invested in good quality posts enforced through style

guides. They are often dened to target specic 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!

ONE.

Audit and Goals SIX.

Content Distribution

SEVEN. Evaluate and

Measure ROI

FIVE.

Content Hub

FOUR.

Editorial Management

THREE.

Strategy

TWO. Dene Audiences

and Personas

Content Marketing Strategy: Seven Steps to Success. Updated March 20th 2016

2. Webinars and streamed media

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.

And, of course, they practice permission marketing through proling all webinar attendees.

It’s nice they ask the softer question of “what is your biggest marketing challenge” – good for

follow-up phone calls.

ONE.

Audit and Goals SIX.

Content Distribution

SEVEN. Evaluate and

Measure ROI

FIVE.

Content Hub

FOUR.

Editorial Management

THREE.

Strategy

TWO. Dene Audiences

and Personas

Content Marketing Strategy: Seven Steps to Success. Updated March 20th 2016

Best Practice Tip 8 Practice permission marketing

Make sure you encourage sign-up in return for your most valuable content and use this to

prole your audience and follow-up by email or phone.

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

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

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.

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 efcient 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 efciency, anyone at a PC can attend a “lunchtime brieng on lead generation”, for

example.

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.

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 trafc 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

ONE.

Audit and Goals SIX.

Content Distribution

SEVEN. Evaluate and

Measure ROI

FIVE.

Content Hub

FOUR.

Editorial Management

THREE.

Strategy

TWO. Dene Audiences

and Personas

Content Marketing Strategy: Seven Steps to Success. Updated March 20th 2016

will you follow up with attendees?

2. Have a good speaker and presenter! They are going to make this work ultimately – go

nd new talent with big ideas that ts 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.

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.

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.

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.

2. Ebooks, guides, whitepapers, research and infographics

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.

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.

Hubspot example: Hubspot’s free resources have sufcient depth to be useful and they

always feature appealing headlines and covers. They also use interactive tools.

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.

ONE.

Audit and Goals SIX.

Content Distribution

SEVEN. Evaluate and

Measure ROI

FIVE.

Content Hub

FOUR.

Editorial Management

THREE.

Strategy

TWO. Dene Audiences

and Personas

Content Marketing Strategy: Seven Steps to Success. Updated March 20th 2016

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

4 Hubspot: Inbound marketing kit.

ONE.

Audit and Goals SIX.

Content Distribution

SEVEN. Evaluate and

Measure ROI

FIVE.

Content Hub

FOUR.

Editorial Management

THREE.

Strategy

TWO. Dene Audiences

and Personas

Content Marketing Strategy: Seven Steps to Success. Updated March 20th 2016

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:

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.

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.

3. Add credibility where possible, seek out people to involve for casual comments are

as more serious co-authors. If they don’t conlict it will lighten the load and provide a

win-win in both credibility and more reach within their network.

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.

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.

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 benets of populating the

tweet for them, for example.

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 rst 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

ONE.

Audit and Goals SIX.

Content Distribution

SEVEN. Evaluate and

Measure ROI

FIVE.

Content Hub

FOUR.

Editorial Management

THREE.

Strategy

TWO. Dene Audiences

and Personas

Content Marketing Strategy: Seven Steps to Success. Updated March 20th 2016

you “want leads” then the answer is there, however if you want to build a brand to

generate interested trafc in the medium term… you decide!

3. The importance of video

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:

þUser generated video that you edit together or just share – maybe create a contest based

on video entries

þShoot your own video to help communicate an idea or concept succinctly

þThink 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.

They now also have a YouTube channel.

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.

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:

þYouTube (http://www.youtube.com/my_webcam): Use your webcam to record directly to

the YouTube site.

þFacebook (http://www.facebook.com/VideoApp?v=info): Use your webcam and the

Facebook Video application to record directly to your Facebook Prole or Page. Quickly

access this feature via the Video tab on your Prole/Page.

þUstream (http://www.ustream.tv): Record live streaming video from this site. Share via a

ONE.

Audit and Goals SIX.

Content Distribution

SEVEN. Evaluate and

Measure ROI

FIVE.

Content Hub

FOUR.

Editorial Management

THREE.

Strategy

TWO. Dene Audiences

and Personas

Content Marketing Strategy: Seven Steps to Success. Updated March 20th 2016

unique URL and embed codes. Ustream applications are also available for downloading

to your computer and mobile phone.

þLivestream (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.

þqik (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.

þVYou (http://vyou.com): Video Q&A site, where you can record video answers to the

questions other users ask.

þWetoku (http://www.wetoku.com): Create side-by-side video interviews to embed across

the web.

4. Audio, podcasts and video podcasts

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.

Editing is straight forward and important too. You can cut the wafe 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.

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.

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”

ONE.

Audit and Goals SIX.

Content Distribution

SEVEN. Evaluate and

Measure ROI

FIVE.

Content Hub

FOUR.

Editorial Management

THREE.

Strategy

TWO. Dene Audiences

and Personas

Content Marketing Strategy: Seven Steps to Success. Updated March 20th 2016

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.

Best Practice Tip 15 Include authoritative celebrity or industry gures 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

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.

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.

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 specic 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.

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.

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.

HubSpot example: Hubspot bills these as “communities” on different platforms – either

owned “inbound.org” or independent – such as the Linked In group for Hubsport

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.

How to audit and inventory your marketing content

rQ. 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.

ONE.

Audit and Goals SIX.

Content Distribution

SEVEN. Evaluate and

Measure ROI

FIVE.

Content Hub

FOUR.

Editorial Management

THREE.

Strategy

TWO. Dene Audiences

and Personas

Content Marketing Strategy: Seven Steps to Success. Updated March 20th 2016

The purpose of your content audit is to

6. See how well you’re covering the topics that are important to your audience

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

8. Help you nd gaps that you can ll with new content pieces

9. Identify great pieces of content that can be repurposed into other formats to reach

even more prospects

ONE.

Audit and Goals SIX.

Content Distribution

SEVEN. Evaluate and

Measure ROI

FIVE.

Content Hub

FOUR.

Editorial Management

THREE.

Strategy

TWO. Dene Audiences

and Personas

Content Marketing Strategy: Seven Steps to Success. Updated March 20th 2016

Technique 1 – Reviewing your internal story

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:

The CDA pyramid shows the critical importance of having content to support the different

rational stages in the customer buying cycle.

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

ONE.

Audit and Goals SIX.

Content Distribution

SEVEN. Evaluate and

Measure ROI

FIVE.

Content Hub

FOUR.

Editorial Management

THREE.

Strategy

TWO. Dene Audiences

and Personas

Content Marketing Strategy: Seven Steps to Success. Updated March 20th 2016

and allow people to make an emotional connection with your business

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 condence and that you emerge with a

clear story to make decisions as you move forwards.

Technique 2: Benchmarking and key tools

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 nd

problems and identify new opportunities. Take a look at Step 7 for our detailed suggestions

on how you review content effectiveness with Google Analytics.

Perform external analysis to compliment your internal audit

rQ. Have we benchmarked current content effectiveness and content gaps against

competitors?

Once you have the completed the internal story, it’s important to perform a similar process

externally to see what you’re missing.

Undertake an external analysis of your competitors and key inuencers 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.

rMarket research – ideally ensure that somebody different does this so that you avoid

conrmation 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

ONE.

Audit and Goals SIX.

Content Distribution

SEVEN. Evaluate and

Measure ROI

FIVE.

Content Hub

FOUR.

Editorial Management

THREE.

Strategy

TWO. Dene Audiences

and Personas

Content Marketing Strategy: Seven Steps to Success. Updated March 20th 2016

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.

rSocial 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 inuence 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.

rKeyword 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 trafc to your website. Brainstorm and use web analytics

tools to identify valuable keywords sending trafc already to you or known others.

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?

Once you have the list bring in to discovery tools to learn what’s most popular:

þGoogle KeyWord Tool (https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal)

þSEMRush (http://www.semrush.com/)

þWordStream (http://www.wordstream.com/)

þMajestic SEO (http://www.majesticseo.com)

þUbersuggest (http://ubersuggest.org/) for multilingual queries.

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”.

ONE.

Audit and Goals SIX.

Content Distribution

SEVEN. Evaluate and

Measure ROI

FIVE.

Content Hub

FOUR.

Editorial Management

THREE.

Strategy

TWO. Dene Audiences

and Personas

Content Marketing Strategy: Seven Steps to Success. Updated March 20th 2016

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 qualiers like “tips and tools”.

Once you have some ideas at this top-level, get more specic. 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 specic guide from Google – we recommend it).

rCompetitor 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.

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.

ONE.

Audit and Goals SIX.

Content Distribution

SEVEN. Evaluate and

Measure ROI

FIVE.

Content Hub

FOUR.

Editorial Management

THREE.

Strategy

TWO. Dene Audiences

and Personas

Content Marketing Strategy: Seven Steps to Success. Updated March 20th 2016

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 le, tools like that include Integrity. Once all data is recorded

you need to organise it and get a sense of popularity.

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:

þUnique identier (for every document, video or web page)

þURL / document name

þPage title

þTopic covered

þAn indicator of popularity:

þPage views or unique visitors

þDownloads

þBounce rate

þContent type (text, video, PDF download etc)

þThe owner of the content

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 condence and the business’ condence to invest more in the right areas.

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.

Consider these as ways of questioning:

þTop gripes that customers have

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

þTop questions when in buying mode

þThe question is now simple – what are you currently missing in your content that those

customers would really value in knowing?

Dene the content topic ‘gaps’ and priorities

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.

Best Practice Tip 18 Dene content gaps and priorities

The output from your keyword research and competitor analysis should show the scale of

your opportunities.

ONE.

Audit and Goals SIX.

Content Distribution

SEVEN. Evaluate and

Measure ROI

FIVE.

Content Hub

FOUR.

Editorial Management

THREE.

Strategy

TWO. Dene Audiences

and Personas

Content Marketing Strategy: Seven Steps to Success. Updated March 20th 2016

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 x, 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 ndable on the site or just isn’t resonating with your

audience at all in communications terms.

Develop your Keyword Glossary

Next, create a list of your keywords and phrases to reect 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:

þPrimary and secondary demand phrases grouped by type of keyphrase

þKeyword data (popularity, competitiveness, etc.)

þCompetitive research – who is ranking well on those terms

þWebsite categories and where keywords sit in relation to them

Map keywords to all site content (downloads, images, video, social content, web pages) –

ensure you leverage all the keyword effort!

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 difcult to manage. Once you have grouped keyphrases in a way

that reects customer behaviour, then you can map these groups against potential content

types.

The best way to summarise the types of qualiers is through writing out the semantics of a

sentence like this:

<qualier> + <core term> + <post modier>

Common qualiers for content marketing are:

þHow to

þGuide to

þTips

Common post-modiers are:

þEbook

þDownload

þCalculator

Technique 4. Identifying your content gaps and priorities

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.

ONE.

Audit and Goals SIX.

Content Distribution

SEVEN. Evaluate and

Measure ROI

FIVE.

Content Hub

FOUR.

Editorial Management

THREE.

Strategy

TWO. Dene Audiences

and Personas

Content Marketing Strategy: Seven Steps to Success. Updated March 20th 2016

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:

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

þQ. 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.

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

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

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

þStep 2. Review current use of content within company through plotting on the grid.

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

þStep 4. Brainstorm future content types possible.

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

campaigns.

ONE.

Audit and Goals SIX.

Content Distribution

SEVEN. Evaluate and

Measure ROI

FIVE.

Content Hub

FOUR.

Editorial Management

THREE.

Strategy

TWO. Dene Audiences

and Personas

Content Marketing Strategy: Seven Steps to Success. Updated March 20th 2016

Get effective editorial governance in place

rQ. Effective governance in place?

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

commitment.

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 workow, deadlines, approval

processes, grammar, quality, content style, tone and voice, which are all part of your brand.

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.

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.”

The number one objective of content governance is to coordinate the efforts of individuals

internally and/or externally to help full a consistent brand voice.

Done correctly editorial governance will:

þGuide writers on how to write for a specic target audience

þHelp writers feel more condent writing

þEnsure consistent quality & tone across numerous writers / touch points

þRemove the subjectivity from the review process

þLighten the need for editing and correction

þMake the process repeatable and scalable

þImprove reader engagement and visitor retention

ONE.

Audit and Goals SIX.

Content Distribution

SEVEN. Evaluate and

Measure ROI

FIVE.

Content Hub

FOUR.

Editorial Management

THREE.

Strategy

TWO. Dene Audiences

and Personas

Content Marketing Strategy: Seven Steps to Success. Updated March 20th 2016

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.

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:

rQ. Do we have executive support for this content strategy?

rQ. Who is the ultimate authority on your content strategy, and what are the criteria for

making changes?

rQ. How will we sustain and evolve your content strategy to achieve your business strategy?

rQ. 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?

rQ. What are the measures we will use to review content effectiveness and show how

content development is supporting the business?

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

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.

The nal 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

1. Ideas for dening content Tone and Voice

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 specic

tone and voice that matches brand personalty characteristics on a spectrum.

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

ONE.

Audit and Goals SIX.

Content Distribution

SEVEN. Evaluate and

Measure ROI

FIVE.

Content Hub

FOUR.

Editorial Management

THREE.

Strategy

TWO. Dene Audiences

and Personas

Content Marketing Strategy: Seven Steps to Success. Updated March 20th 2016

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 specic brand style guidelines.

rQ: Where does your brand live on the spectrum?

Developing brand voice guidelines and a style guide is intrinsic to building a coherent brand

personality.

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.”

In essence the brand;s voice is spontaneous rather than careful thinking, which is better

suited to a bigger, stufer energy supplier.

MailChimp are well known for injecting humour into their voice.

UK gov makes use of its online style guide to give local councils content writing guidelines

across a multitude of remote sites:

ONE.

Audit and Goals SIX.

Content Distribution

SEVEN. Evaluate and

Measure ROI

FIVE.

Content Hub

FOUR.

Editorial Management

THREE.

Strategy

TWO. Dene Audiences

and Personas

Content Marketing Strategy: Seven Steps to Success. Updated March 20th 2016

The Smart Insights content marketing eLearning Toolkit has further guidance on managing

editorial governance, including setting rules for grammar, vocabulary, spelling, punctuation

and syntax.

Do you have the right team in place?

rQ. Resource for content marketing identied 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 workow 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.

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.

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.

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.

Responsibilities

rQ. Responsibilities for content marketing dened?

Below are the broad responsibilities for content marketing to think about:

rStrategy development and leadership. Leads the web content strategy with the wider

team, and turning this into a budgets plan with the resource needed

rStandards development. Lead standards creation (maybe working with others in

marketing) developing ideas like voice, tone, being relevant

rEditorial control. Deciding the who, what, how, where and when of what gets published,

ONE.

Audit and Goals SIX.

Content Distribution

SEVEN. Evaluate and

Measure ROI

FIVE.

Content Hub

FOUR.

Editorial Management

THREE.

Strategy

TWO. Dene Audiences

and Personas

Content Marketing Strategy: Seven Steps to Success. Updated March 20th 2016

and ensuring this ties back to the wider organisation (especially marketing)

rManaging content creators. Managing and organising content creators against the plan

rMeasurement, evaluation and improvement. Specifying the right KPIs and reports to

review and improve. Also relates to social media optimisation

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

rQ. Roles for content marketing dened?

When you build or review a team consider these role types:

þListening 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.

þContent 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.

þJournalists – this role specically 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.

þContent reviewers – these are the managers within brand or marketing who sign-off the

content. You need a good workow system to alert them to what needs to be reviewed so

they can suggest modications and make sign-off rapidly.

þConversation 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.

þTeam 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.

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

phenomenon.

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

ONE.

Audit and Goals SIX.

Content Distribution

SEVEN. Evaluate and

Measure ROI

FIVE.

Content Hub

FOUR.

Editorial Management

THREE.

Strategy

TWO. Dene Audiences

and Personas

Content Marketing Strategy: Seven Steps to Success. Updated March 20th 2016

Which translates into the following roles:

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?

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.

Here is a diagram from our friends at CoSchedule, a popular Wordpress editorial calendar

plugin, to help you consider your blogging resource:

ONE.

Audit and Goals SIX.

Content Distribution

SEVEN. Evaluate and

Measure ROI

FIVE.

Content Hub

FOUR.

Editorial Management

THREE.

Strategy

TWO. Dene Audiences

and Personas

Content Marketing Strategy: Seven Steps to Success. Updated March 20th 2016

This is ne 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 lming and editing,

it may be beyond the resource available internally, so plan for those costs (see costing model

in our Content Marketing ROI Guide).

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

Analytical skills to gather strategic business and user insights:

þStakeholder interviews

þContent audits and inventories

þContent review and analysis

þCompetitive analysis

ONE.

Audit and Goals SIX.

Content Distribution

SEVEN. Evaluate and

Measure ROI

FIVE.

Content Hub

FOUR.

Editorial Management

THREE.

Strategy

TWO. Dene Audiences

and Personas

Content Marketing Strategy: Seven Steps to Success. Updated March 20th 2016

Strategic planning and design to support long-term vision for content:

þContent vision and recommendations

þContent concepts, examples, and samples

þContent governance and process design

þTaxonomy

þInformation architecture

þContent typing and requirements

þWriting style guides

Project management to keep the project on track and budget:

þProject plan

þContent brief

þContent matrix

þContent strategy roadmap

Training and presenting skills to educate and inform:

þWorkshop development and delivery

þStakeholder presentations

þContent training programs

þEditing and mentoring

Technical integration to ensure that technology and content work together:

þContent management system assessment

þContent migration planning and management

þContent matrix

þBusiness analysis

þContent workows

þContent modelling

User experience skills to help shape:

þUser research and success metrics

þPersonas

þUser journeys

þWireframe development

þInformation architecture

þWireframes

þContent workows

Content marketing management skills to deliver:

þBranding through content

þSearch engine optimisation

þSocial media strategy

þContent mix

þEditorial and content maintenance calendar

ONE.

Audit and Goals SIX.

Content Distribution

SEVEN. Evaluate and

Measure ROI

FIVE.

Content Hub

FOUR.

Editorial Management

THREE.

Strategy

TWO. Dene Audiences

and Personas

Content Marketing Strategy: Seven Steps to Success. Updated March 20th 2016

þTargeted messaging

þWeb analytics setup and reporting

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.

ONE.

Audit and Goals SIX.

Content Distribution

SEVEN. Evaluate and

Measure ROI

FIVE.

Content Hub

FOUR.

Editorial Management

THREE.

Strategy

TWO. Dene Audiences

and Personas

Content Marketing Strategy: Seven Steps to Success. Updated March 20th 2016

FOUR

Editorial Management

rQ. 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 dene 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:

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.

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.

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.

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:

þ1. Guidelines for regular content update frequency.

þ2. Guidelines for content types and formats.

þ3. Create core content marketing resources.

þ4. Review options for creating and sourcing content.

þ5. Content atomisation, re-purposing and syndication.

þ6. Create and update your editorial calendar.

þ7. Communicate your content marketing proposition.

You can see that the rst 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.

ONE.

Audit and Goals SIX.

Content Distribution

SEVEN. Evaluate and

Measure ROI

FIVE.

Content Hub

FOUR.

Editorial Management

THREE.

Strategy

TWO. Dene Audiences

and Personas

Content Marketing Strategy: Seven Steps to Success. Updated March 20th 2016

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!

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.

Key Strategy Recommendation 9 Create a sound editorial calendar and a person to

manage with sufcient 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 sufcient resource and power within the

organisation to deliver it.

This can get complex, and the challenges are quite different to the normal marketing

challenges, so do sit and think this through rst.

ONE.

Audit and Goals SIX.

Content Distribution

SEVEN. Evaluate and

Measure ROI

FIVE.

Content Hub

FOUR.

Editorial Management

THREE.

Strategy

TWO. Dene Audiences

and Personas

Content Marketing Strategy: Seven Steps to Success. Updated March 20th 2016

Tips for developing an integrated editorial calendar

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

specic themes or topics which you think will work best to engage your audience.

þUse 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)

þList your audiences overarching themes (sweet spots)

þKeep in mind key industry events, dates, launches, holidays

þPlan content formats with content matrix

þRemember your distribution; Plan this simultaneously

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:

ONE.

Audit and Goals SIX.

Content Distribution

SEVEN. Evaluate and

Measure ROI

FIVE.

Content Hub

FOUR.

Editorial Management

THREE.

Strategy

TWO. Dene Audiences

and Personas

Content Marketing Strategy: Seven Steps to Success. Updated March 20th 2016

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)

þAt least 1 (ideally 3) new blog posts

þTweet updates and ideas

þAs above, for Facebook if that’s relevant

þRespond to others blog posts and comments on your own

þKeep up to date with the news

þAn article, maybe a how-to

þGet involved off-site somewhere (at Smart Insights we use LinkedIn for that)

þMaintain any outposts or web assets you se in your marketing

þSummarise key news and updates in an e-newsletter

Monthly

þProduce a webinar

þCreate 2 how-to or interview based videos from an event

þWrite a meatier blog post, maybe 2 or 3 if you can

þCreate several strong customer case studies

þMost importantly – produce create third-party content, maybe a guest blog post on an

inuential third party web site

þCreate and post presentations to SlideShare

Quarterly

þPublish an e-book, guide or white paper (distribute it!)

þAttend one big event and interview people

þProduce a video series of 4-5 items

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

Managing your content editorial production

In online content scheduling tools like WordPress CoSchedule and Trello, you can manage

your editorial production workows with efciency, since the content team responsible for

drafting, proong and publishing get ‘alerts” and notications to act on. We love the free

Trello tool which enables categorisation and workow for different team members.

ONE.

Audit and Goals SIX.

Content Distribution

SEVEN. Evaluate and

Measure ROI

FIVE.

Content Hub

FOUR.

Editorial Management

THREE.

Strategy

TWO. Dene Audiences

and Personas

Content Marketing Strategy: Seven Steps to Success. Updated March 20th 2016

The value of an editorial board

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 benets are

multiple and you should really be thinking like a newsroom, or even better the ctional 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.

This process will hep you:

þGenerate the right content ideas for your target audience

þCo-ordinate many moving pieces / tasks into a structured prices

þManage communication between multiple people / departments, non-silo, drumbeat-

approach

þMeet deadlines and stay the course

þMonitor progress toward goal, and create accountability

þDecide on content that ts your brand and audience’s needs

þMake sure your content ts your brand’s themes

þEnsure that all your personas are having content created for them

þGet content approved quickly and smoothly

þPrevent random acts of content

þReview content that is and isn’t working

How to run your editorial board

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:

þA company exec who brings the vision of where the organisation is going and what the

customers are looking for at the highest level

ONE.

Audit and Goals SIX.

Content Distribution

SEVEN. Evaluate and

Measure ROI

FIVE.

Content Hub

FOUR.

Editorial Management

THREE.

Strategy

TWO. Dene Audiences

and Personas

Content Marketing Strategy: Seven Steps to Success. Updated March 20th 2016

þA marketer who can check content ideas against strategy and message

þA head of sales who has the customer insight and who will tell you what content is

missing / needed

þA 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.

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.

Create your content hub

rQ. Content hub created?

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…

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 benets including:

þHelping to show you are an authority in your area, which creates trust with your audience.

þSEO advantages with fresh, updated and relevant content.

ONE.

Audit and Goals SIX.

Content Distribution

SEVEN. Evaluate and

Measure ROI

FIVE.

Content Hub

FOUR.

Editorial Management

THREE.

Strategy

TWO. Dene Audiences

and Personas

Content Marketing Strategy: Seven Steps to Success. Updated March 20th 2016

þDriving interaction and engagement with your visitors, to help with conversion whether it’s

a sale, enquiry or specic call to action to drive your audience along the sales funnel.

þInsight into your content that is resonating with your audience from one central point.

þVisible, 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:

rA blog

rYour news section

rAn online magazine

rA resource centre

Recommended best practices

Technique 1: Automatically syndicate your content to different channels

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.

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

channels.

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.

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

ONE.

Audit and Goals SIX.

Content Distribution

SEVEN. Evaluate and

Measure ROI

FIVE.

Content Hub

FOUR.

Editorial Management

THREE.

Strategy

TWO. Dene Audiences

and Personas

Content Marketing Strategy: Seven Steps to Success. Updated March 20th 2016

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:

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:

þHootsuite

þBuffer

þSproutsocial

þscoop.it – syndication to Twitter and email

þUsing RSS e.g. managed through Feedburner

þFacebook syndication through networkedblogs

Technique 3: Creating and hosting your hub

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:

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 exibility and

customisation and is used by most agencies when managing client sites.

3. WordPress VIP - Managed hosting of high-trafc sites and brands.

Examples of best practice content hubs

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.

ONE.

Audit and Goals SIX.

Content Distribution

SEVEN. Evaluate and

Measure ROI

FIVE.

Content Hub

FOUR.

Editorial Management

THREE.

Strategy

TWO. Dene Audiences

and Personas

Content Marketing Strategy: Seven Steps to Success. Updated March 20th 2016

DELL

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’.

Recommended Tools and Services

Uberip 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.

ONE.

Audit and Goals SIX.

Content Distribution

SEVEN. Evaluate and

Measure ROI

FIVE.

Content Hub

FOUR.

Editorial Management

THREE.

Strategy

TWO. Dene Audiences

and Personas

Content Marketing Strategy: Seven Steps to Success. Updated March 20th 2016

Atom offer off-the-shelf powered resource centres for banks, professional services rms,

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 benecial solution providing two key

benets:

þQuickly acquiring substantial amounts of top quality relevant content by licensing at low

cost

þSupporting 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:

ONE.

Audit and Goals SIX.

Content Distribution

SEVEN. Evaluate and

Measure ROI

FIVE.

Content Hub

FOUR.

Editorial Management

THREE.

Strategy

TWO. Dene Audiences

and Personas

Content Marketing Strategy: Seven Steps to Success. Updated March 20th 2016

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.

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.

ONE.

Audit and Goals SIX.

Content Distribution

SEVEN. Evaluate and

Measure ROI

FIVE.

Content Hub

FOUR.

Editorial Management

THREE.

Strategy

TWO. Dene Audiences

and Personas

Content Marketing Strategy: Seven Steps to Success. Updated March 20th 2016

Benets:

þQuickly nd expert content and images to ll your production schedule

þEngage visitors on their interests and issues on your website more easily with expert

content that does not sell

þBuild Authority Quickly

þCreate your ultimate guide quickly with access to expert licensed content

þJump ahead of the competition from a late start by providing more information quicker

þImprove SEO and Get Found in Search

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.

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 ve.

Your content hub and SEO

rQ. Have we selected the best location for our blog?

If you get this decision wrong, you may fail to get the hoped for SEO benets 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.

The 3 main blog hosting options

The three options are straightforward. Let’s take some examples:

1. Subfolder – http://www.domain.com/blog e.g. http://www.econsultancy.com/blog

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

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.

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 trafc 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.

Guidance on using a blogging platform as your content hub

rQ. 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

ONE.

Audit and Goals SIX.

Content Distribution

SEVEN. Evaluate and

Measure ROI

FIVE.

Content Hub

FOUR.

Editorial Management

THREE.

Strategy

TWO. Dene Audiences

and Personas

Content Marketing Strategy: Seven Steps to Success. Updated March 20th 2016

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:

The benets to making your content efforts blog orientated are numerous:

þYou have one repository to manage and tie content together from other channels or social

networks

þYou can listen and interact, and garner feedback from your audience

þYou can inspire and capture comments about the content that you share

þYou have a place to build a schedule and process it

þBlogs have categories and specialist tags that can help with SEO and help users nd

interesting topics

þYou’re easy to share with others through many free plugins (we recommend Wordpress

for the best plugins)

þYou are increasingly more ndable in search engines with fresh blog content

Best Practice Tip 21 Use blog categories and topics to help with SEO and ndability of

content

Carefully dene a taxonomy of preferred categories and topics that content writers are

aware of (if you don’t they may create their own)

Remember the intersection between brand and audience

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:

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

“The revenue stream” – Their Twitter page

“The revenue hub” – Their Slideshare page

It’s also more natural to see how that tight positioning inuences Eloqua’s content choices, curated

or otherwise – using considered and tight positioning will naturally help keep you on track.

Social objects and content marketing for interaction

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 ts into the picture.

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 rst

communication (broadcast) advantage to steer the conversation like they possibly did twenty

6 Gaping void: Social Objects for beginners

ONE.

Audit and Goals SIX.

Content Distribution

SEVEN. Evaluate and

Measure ROI

FIVE.

Content Hub

FOUR.

Editorial Management

THREE.

Strategy

TWO. Dene Audiences

and Personas

Content Marketing Strategy: Seven Steps to Success. Updated March 20th 2016

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

The simple point is that humans require ‘objects’ to interact around, they always have, these

objects specically 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

rYou 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.

rYou 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.

rEnsure 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.

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.

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.

Managing the blog to meet business communications goals

rQ. Approach to managing blog to meet communications goals reviewed?

There are numerous great guides on blogging so we won’t dig deep in this area, sufce

to say there are basics that work, we’ve listed these blog strategy issues here to consider

against your current or future blog:

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.

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.

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

ONE.

Audit and Goals SIX.

Content Distribution

SEVEN. Evaluate and

Measure ROI

FIVE.

Content Hub

FOUR.

Editorial Management

THREE.

Strategy

TWO. Dene Audiences

and Personas

Content Marketing Strategy: Seven Steps to Success. Updated March 20th 2016

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 nd

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.

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.

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

rQ. Approach to audience engagement reviewed?

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.

Key Strategy Recommendation 12 Practice outreach to your audience and inuencers to

maintain engagement with the blog

Ensure you spend sufcient type interacting with your community outside your blog.

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

other sites:

þBecome part of the community. Find ways to interact with the audience you want to

reach. Monitor their online conversations and (crucially) identify the inuential 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.

þShift 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.

þFeed 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.

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

ONE.

Audit and Goals SIX.

Content Distribution

SEVEN. Evaluate and

Measure ROI

FIVE.

Content Hub

FOUR.

Editorial Management

THREE.

Strategy

TWO. Dene Audiences

and Personas

Content Marketing Strategy: Seven Steps to Success. Updated March 20th 2016

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.

þOptimise 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 inuencing 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 proles to draw people back to your hub and build SEO, at the

end of the day we’re still marketing.

As well as encouraging sharing and participation within your own community, it’s also really

important to identify key inuencers, which is why we outline this strategy in detail in the

Content marketing e-learning toolkit.

ONE.

Audit and Goals SIX.

Content Distribution

SEVEN. Evaluate and

Measure ROI

FIVE.

Content Hub

FOUR.

Editorial Management

THREE.

Strategy

TWO. Dene Audiences

and Personas

Content Marketing Strategy: Seven Steps to Success. Updated March 20th 2016

FIVE

Create compelling content for your content hub

Review options for creating and sourcing content

rQ. Options for creating and sourcing content reviewed?

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.

Content creation

rQ. Options of sources for original content creation reviewed?

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

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).

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.

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 inuencers 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 nance,

insurance and law.

The issue is not that they have nothing to say, it’s more likely that they’ve not identied the

pain points or problems that their audiences. There is no quick x to this, hence the extent

ONE.

Audit and Goals SIX.

Content Distribution

SEVEN. Evaluate and

Measure ROI

FIVE.

Content Hub

FOUR.

Editorial Management

THREE.

Strategy

TWO. Dene Audiences

and Personas

Content Marketing Strategy: Seven Steps to Success. Updated March 20th 2016

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

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.

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 Protable 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.

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.

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.

ONE.

Audit and Goals SIX.

Content Distribution

SEVEN. Evaluate and

Measure ROI

FIVE.

Content Hub

FOUR.

Editorial Management

THREE.

Strategy

TWO. Dene Audiences

and Personas

Content Marketing Strategy: Seven Steps to Success. Updated March 20th 2016

These steps become the framework for your project.

The above sample worksheet, lled-in for an interior design company, can quickly help

develop the framework for helpful, relevant, reader-friendly content. Once you identify

the specic steps in the persona scenario, it becomes relatively easy to “ll 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.

Sections of the Express Content Planner worksheet are:

þCall to action: In the article’s conclusion, readers can either download an information

package, visit a showroom, attend an event, or request an appointment.

þCharacteristics: 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).

þGoals & problems: This gives you space to add more details and to narrow the topic

from the broad “home remodeling” topic to a specic aspect of remodeling (i.e., “kitchen

remodeling”). This section also provides space to describe the reader’s experience and

knowledge.

þDesired change: In most cases, once the reader’s characteristics and goals have been

identied, 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.

þSteps needed to achieve desired goal: Once the content’s purpose and title have been

identied, 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.)

ONE.

Audit and Goals SIX.

Content Distribution

SEVEN. Evaluate and

Measure ROI

FIVE.

Content Hub

FOUR.

Editorial Management

THREE.

Strategy

TWO. Dene Audiences

and Personas

Content Marketing Strategy: Seven Steps to Success. Updated March 20th 2016

For more creative ways to use the Express Content Planner worksheet visit the author’s

website www.publishedandprotable.com.

Fundamental content creation techniques

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.

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, rst the body

text, the conclusion and nally the introduction, in that order:

Great content

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 nd creative and relevant ways to frame your story in the form of fantastic content

that is aligned to your brand.

How to create great content

Great content for content marketing purposes is characterised by six key attributes:

ONE.

Audit and Goals SIX.

Content Distribution

SEVEN. Evaluate and

Measure ROI

FIVE.

Content Hub

FOUR.

Editorial Management

THREE.

Strategy

TWO. Dene Audiences

and Personas

Content Marketing Strategy: Seven Steps to Success. Updated March 20th 2016

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

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:

Whether it’s photographic, iconographic, animation or video, there are tools to help you

create better visual content:

þcanva.com for creating images and graphics.

þInfographic tools including piktochart.com if you don’t have a graphic designer

þScapple for brain dumps and mind mapping

ONE.

Audit and Goals SIX.

Content Distribution

SEVEN. Evaluate and

Measure ROI

FIVE.

Content Hub

FOUR.

Editorial Management

THREE.

Strategy

TWO. Dene Audiences

and Personas

Content Marketing Strategy: Seven Steps to Success. Updated March 20th 2016

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 ve times as many people read the headlines of articles as read the body.

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.

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, identied in the Rippen survey:

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

ONE.

Audit and Goals SIX.

Content Distribution

SEVEN. Evaluate and

Measure ROI

FIVE.

Content Hub

FOUR.

Editorial Management

THREE.

Strategy

TWO. Dene Audiences

and Personas

Content Marketing Strategy: Seven Steps to Success. Updated March 20th 2016

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

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 stufng”

10. Add Google authorship

3. Tips for creating consumable content

4. Tips for creating consumable content

ONE.

Audit and Goals SIX.

Content Distribution

SEVEN. Evaluate and

Measure ROI

FIVE.

Content Hub

FOUR.

Editorial Management

THREE.

Strategy

TWO. Dene Audiences

and Personas

Content Marketing Strategy: Seven Steps to Success. Updated March 20th 2016

5. Tips for creating evergreen content

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 inuencers, unlike newsy or trending content that is time-sensitive.

Content co-creation

rQ. Options for co-creation of content reviewed?

Co-created content is worth mentioning here. It’s a little different and a great option for

quick or rst 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.

What is it? Content co-curation

Creation of a content resource using different authors from across different companies or

departments.

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 benets 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 nd 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.

You could say content co-creation also involves getting customers to create long-form

user-generated content, so this is worth considering too.

ONE.

Audit and Goals SIX.

Content Distribution

SEVEN. Evaluate and

Measure ROI

FIVE.

Content Hub

FOUR.

Editorial Management

THREE.

Strategy

TWO. Dene Audiences

and Personas

Content Marketing Strategy: Seven Steps to Success. Updated March 20th 2016

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.

Content curation

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.

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, lter and judge the truly useful stuff and

interweave your own original content.

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.

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.

Curation benets:

þBuild an element of trust and authority in your market

þSpeed to get up and going if you use RSS, for example

þSEO benets

þHard 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

ONE.

Audit and Goals SIX.

Content Distribution

SEVEN. Evaluate and

Measure ROI

FIVE.

Content Hub

FOUR.

Editorial Management

THREE.

Strategy

TWO. Dene Audiences

and Personas

Content Marketing Strategy: Seven Steps to Success. Updated March 20th 2016

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

rQ. Options for licensing content creation reviewed?

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

rQ. Have we reviewed our options for outsourcing content creation?

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.

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 / benet. The disadvantages of

outsourcing content generation are:

þUnderstanding of customer needs or market is poor giving problems of relevance

þCan lack passion to give an authentic brand voice

þQuality of content is poor, so fails to engage or deliver sharing

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

User generated content (UGC)

rQ. Options for outsourcing content reviewed?

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.

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:

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.

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.

ONE.

Audit and Goals SIX.

Content Distribution

SEVEN. Evaluate and

Measure ROI

FIVE.

Content Hub

FOUR.

Editorial Management

THREE.

Strategy

TWO. Dene Audiences

and Personas

Content Marketing Strategy: Seven Steps to Success. Updated March 20th 2016

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”.

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.

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.

7 Penguin crowdsourcing example

8 Smart Insights: E-permission marketing

no url

ONE.

Audit and Goals SIX.

Content Distribution

SEVEN. Evaluate and

Measure ROI

FIVE.

Content Hub

FOUR.

Editorial Management

THREE.

Strategy

TWO. Dene Audiences

and Personas

Content Marketing Strategy: Seven Steps to Success. Updated March 20th 2016

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.

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.

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.

ONE.

Audit and Goals SIX.

Content Distribution

SEVEN. Evaluate and

Measure ROI

FIVE.

Content Hub

FOUR.

Editorial Management

THREE.

Strategy

TWO. Dene Audiences

and Personas

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100

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:

rThe right partner sites or networks to share content?

rHow to incentivise partners to take your content?

rWhether 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?

rWhether advertising can be used to seed and share your content?

The challenge then is how do you maximise the efciency 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”.

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

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:

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 SIX.

Content Distribution

SEVEN. Evaluate and

Measure ROI

FIVE.

Content Hub

FOUR.

Editorial Management

THREE.

Strategy

TWO. Dene Audiences

and Personas

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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.

It may be easier and less daunting to maintain the big idea but start small when implementing

it, so develop the blog posts rst, run some interviews or webinars and then grow into the

bigger piece.

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.

25 Ideas for atomising your content

þCreate a customer FAQ and also answer audience questions in forums or Q&As – simple

and immediately valuable. If you can, lm talking with them at events, just generally be

close to your customer – they’re the gold source for your ideas!

þConversations 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

þDemonstrate your knowledge - tie your story to hot topics, prole new products, services,

and provide insight and ideas via your blog

þYou 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

þAsk other team members who deal with customers, sales agents and customer

ONE.

Audit and Goals SIX.

Content Distribution

SEVEN. Evaluate and

Measure ROI

FIVE.

Content Hub

FOUR.

Editorial Management

THREE.

Strategy

TWO. Dene Audiences

and Personas

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operatives – what are the common questions, pain-points and praise that your

organization picks up on?

þMonitor 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

þDo 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

þDelve 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

þReview others content – books, ebooks, presentations

þTackle the “Top 10” or “7 steps” on topics of real interest – consider these in Slideshare

http://www.slideshare.net

þOpt for other opinions such as staff or customer ‘picks’ related to products, services or

advice in your industry

þDevelop 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 ve lessons digital

marketers could learn from top athletes”

þInvolve 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)

þDevelop guides on specic 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)

þWrite ebooks – imagine several guides combined to form one ebook, let alone a lot of

blog posts. Ebooks epitomise the idea of content atomization

þCreate 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-congure an Excel

sheet to attract new clients

þExpert interviews with inuential gures – 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)

þExplainer 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

þInvite 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

þOpen up internal process, explain your product development cycle or supply chain

process through photos or graphics

þHumanise your business by curating content of staff and team members – the tweets of

everyone in your team

þDevelop 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/)

þPost photos (ideally real time) of events attended and new products on Flickr (http://www.

ickr.com) and pull the Flickr feed to you web site or blog

ONE.

Audit and Goals SIX.

Content Distribution

SEVEN. Evaluate and

Measure ROI

FIVE.

Content Hub

FOUR.

Editorial Management

THREE.

Strategy

TWO. Dene Audiences

and Personas

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þUpdate the Wikipedia (http://www.wikipedia.org) pages for your company and products –

and, if you can, topics in your market

ONE.

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Content Distribution

SEVEN. Evaluate and

Measure ROI

FIVE.

Content Hub

FOUR.

Editorial Management

THREE.

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and Personas

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SIX

Content Distribution

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.

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 insufcient planning and time has been spent on reaching

audiences and inuencers who play a key role in endorsing, amplifying and extending your

marketing reach.

In this section, we will outline techniques to help you:

þdisseminate your content to existing and new audiences, to ensure its being read and shared.

þplan and roll-out your inuencer strategy to maximise reach.

þconsider the options for owned, earned and paid distribution channels to increase

shareability and reach.

þmaximise content visibility and share ability through social media optimisation

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.

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

Technique 1: Understand the 4 key distribution rules:

1. Plan you content promotion strategy before your content creation.

2. Undertake audience and channel research before you begin your distribution.

‘Listening rst before you promote and identify which channels are being used’.

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.

4. Only promote high-impact, high-quality content which has a purpose.

In the early stages you can do the following

þSpend time watching your existing customers: identify the channels they are in.

þSearch channels for existing communities where your audiences hang out (we call these

watering holes.)

þMonitor hashtags relevant to your industry on Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest and Instagram

to identify what is important to your audiences and inuencers.

ONE.

Audit and Goals SIX.

Content Distribution

SEVEN. Evaluate and

Measure ROI

FIVE.

Content Hub

FOUR.

Editorial Management

THREE.

Strategy

TWO. Dene Audiences

and Personas

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Technique 2: Segment your audience

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, inuencers, enquiries etc.) in your own

channels. Likely to be quite warm to your content already!.

2. Occasional audiences: Need further convincing and trust creating.

3. Inuencers: 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

þThink about what your promotion should do and if you are looking at inuence or / and

control over your content? Inuence (earned media) and Control (owned and paid media).

þLike all goals and KPIS, consider if you are looking for Visibility (Awareness), CTRs (Drive

enquiries), SEO (Search), Shareability (Likes, Shares, Follows) and Control.

Technique 4: Assess your distribution channels

Using a selection criteria weighting system, assess the opportunity for each channel based

on its inuence, 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.

Technique 5: Audit your distribution channels

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).

ONE.

Audit and Goals SIX.

Content Distribution

SEVEN. Evaluate and

Measure ROI

FIVE.

Content Hub

FOUR.

Editorial Management

THREE.

Strategy

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and Personas

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Using the Why? template:

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?

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.

ONE.

Audit and Goals SIX.

Content Distribution

SEVEN. Evaluate and

Measure ROI

FIVE.

Content Hub

FOUR.

Editorial Management

THREE.

Strategy

TWO. Dene Audiences

and Personas

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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.

Here are the steps we recommend to using it:

Step 1. Current use of media for content distribution

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-invest-

ment) at the bottom to highest at the top.

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.

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.

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.

Step 3. Select and prioritise new methods of content promotion

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.

ONE.

Audit and Goals SIX.

Content Distribution

SEVEN. Evaluate and

Measure ROI

FIVE.

Content Hub

FOUR.

Editorial Management

THREE.

Strategy

TWO. Dene Audiences

and Personas

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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.

The role of inuencer in your content marketing outreach

An inuencer 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 inuencers 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 inuence, 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.

Best Practice Tip 25 Segment and prioritise your inuencers

Think about different types of inuencer and assess the benets that they will offer you -

how inuential are they? Is a long-term collaboration possible? Will they be open to working

with a company like yours?

Inuencers 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.

ONE.

Audit and Goals SIX.

Content Distribution

SEVEN. Evaluate and

Measure ROI

FIVE.

Content Hub

FOUR.

Editorial Management

THREE.

Strategy

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and Personas

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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.

Inuencers 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

Find your inuencers and identifying their power

1. Search Twitter “bios” using Followerwonk

2. Categorise Followerwonk bio results for keywords using the Klout weighting column

3. Follow, list, listen, and share inuencer updates, and get to know their interests

4. Promote their content

5. Comment on their posts / updates

6. Demonstrate your knowledge - add value

7. Let them know their opinion is valued

8. Ask them to contribute

Here are a few alternative ways to get started nding your inuencers:

þCompetitor’s fans and followers.

þInuential industry experts and bloggers.

þInuencers on LinkedIn and SlideShare.

ONE.

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Content Distribution

SEVEN. Evaluate and

Measure ROI

FIVE.

Content Hub

FOUR.

Editorial Management

THREE.

Strategy

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and Personas

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þBitly.com network to see who is sharing content.

þHootsuite allows you to create and View Twitter lists to monitor inuencer groups.

þFacebook inuence: Identify Facebook inuencers based using Page Insights and the

‘virality measure’.

How to reach out to your inuencers

1. Seek smaller numbers of the right people

2. Offer social share buttons on your blog

3. Repurpose content for different channels

4. Optimise promotion around keywords

5. Ask inuencers for opinions

6. Create crumbs & snippets for mega sharing

7. Curate relevant content

How to engage with your inuencers

Once you have found your inuencers, 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.

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:

rConsider 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.

rTake 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

Create content for mobile needs. Consider what types of information your audience wants

and needs to access, especially when they’re out and about.

Lighten le size: Images and other large les can impact accessibility and download times,

so use them wisely and in moderation.

rEncourage sharing: Mobile audiences are tech savvy and avid sharers, so make it easy

for users to involve their friends and share content.

rDesign for nger surng: Remember that users are navigating the screen by pinching and

zooming, rather than clicking.

rOpt 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 ts all. Different devices have different screen sizes and resolutions, so

create an interface that “scales to t” 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

ONE.

Audit and Goals SIX.

Content Distribution

SEVEN. Evaluate and

Measure ROI

FIVE.

Content Hub

FOUR.

Editorial Management

THREE.

Strategy

TWO. Dene Audiences

and Personas

Content Marketing Strategy: Seven Steps to Success. Updated March 20th 2016

111

platforms (e.g., Flash on the Apple iPhone/iPad).

Monitor and measure the impact of your inuencer marketing: listen for improvement

After all of this effort you need to be able to keep the content campre burning, right? As

Chris Brogan says, content is the campre 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.

Keep an eye on your inuencers’ 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

inuencers:

þAre they sharing your content?

þWho are they reaching ?

þIs there interaction with your content?

þIs trafc being driving to your website etc?

þAre your CTAS being clicked on?

Set up a listening dashboard. There are many software options available, some paid and

many free. Free will often sufce 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:

rGoogle 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.

rGoogle 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

Content Marketing Strategy Guide

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