Table of Contents:
Introduction
Step 1: Know Thyself
Step 2: Know Your Customer
Step 3: Determine Your Content Marketing Goals
Step 4: Search Engine Optimization
Step 5: Perform a Content Inventory
Step 6: Content Mapping
Step 7: Creating Content
Step 8: The Right Content in the Right Channel
Step 9: Measuring Your Content Strategy’s Success
Some Final Thoughts
A big part of any successful content marketing strategy requires thinking through and documenting what you want to accomplish. I like to break goals down into three areas, organizational, awareness, and revenue.
Content Focused on the Organization
Organization goals align with branding and public relations. It’s not enough in today’s business climate, that you offer good products and services. Additionally, people want to know what your organization stands for and they want to make sure the vendors they do business with are good stewards of their business data, and that their vendors and business partners are socially aware and aren’t going to do or say anything to tarnish their affiliations.
The kinds of content you might publish from an organizational standpoint include press releases, blogs, industry media articles and thought-leadership, social media and press-worthy content highlighting your organization’s social programs and community leadership.
Content Focused on Generating Awareness
Awareness goals ensure there is a constant flow of content and messaging supporting the need for your business. This is also the easiest content area because any content not specifically focused on promoting your products directly (e.g., brochures and product web pages) help generate overall awareness for your brand. Content satisfying these goals include blogs and media articles, social media content, original research, webinars, podcasts, videos, ebooks, and more. Depending on your business, there is a lot of latitude in the types and tone of content in the awareness category.
Content for Growing Revenue
Brochures, datasheets, demo videos, interactive tools, your product web pages, even product documentation; are all types of content designed to help close sales and retain customers. There is nothing fun about updating your product’s Evaluation Guide, but it is extremely important, particularly in high-tech software and SaaS markets, where customers want to dig into a solution’s features to make sure it fits their needs. Also included in this category is content developed for sales-enablement. Most of this content is technical, but it is every bit as important as anything you publish for the top and middle of the funnel.
Maybe your organization needs to build up awareness for your brand or maybe your solution solves a new challenge and you need to build awareness for the fact that there IS a solution on the market. Or maybe you’re in an established industry and need to create content that separates you from your competition.
Whatever the goals are that you identify for the coming future, identifying this up-front will help you identify what specific types of content, and how much content, you need to publish over several quarters or even for the year.
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