Content Marketing – Publish and Manage your Content

Hundreds of articles are devoted to the fact that strategy is the most important part of successful content marketing. Without a strategy, only one-time successes are possible, and more often failures. Building a strategy is a complex, analytical process. You need to dive into the product, audience, goals. But many are not even deterred by this, but by the lack of a model for creating a strategy.

In various studies, it is emphasized that about 30% of companies that have a documented strategy conduct successful content marketing. Others have occasional occasions for joy (for example, the fifteenth publication brought a lot of traffic in two days).

In this article, I will share a simple way to create a strategy using the question and answer method. By asking the right questions, we get the answers that will form the basis of the content marketing strategy. This method is not perfect, but will allow you to start correctly.

But first, a little philosophy.

The right content creates trust.

On the Internet, you can find articles that content marketing is useful for recognition, loyalty, lead generation, etc. But the main thing for what content marketing is needed is trust.

Trust – an open, positive relationship between people, containing confidence in the decency and goodwill of another person with whom the trustee is in one way or another. This is the willingness to interact and exchange confidential information.

Is it possible to measure trust?

Trust seems to be something ephemeral that cannot be measured. However, marketers know that trust always affects two results – speed and cost. When confidence falls, speed decreases, and costs soar upwards.

↓ Trust = ↓ Speed ​​↑ Cost

When confidence grows, speed also increases, and costs decrease.

↑ Trust = ↑ Speed ​​↓ Cost

Content marketing has a positive effect on everything else, but first of all, this is a story about trust, reputation, level of expertise.

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Step One: Determine Content Marketing Goals

There is a well-known marketing funnel from the stages that the audience goes through: awareness, comparison, choice, purchase. Stages may be more.

Content marketing does not have to work through all stages of the funnel. You can have everything with awareness, because the commercials have been on TV for a month now. Or you have an ideal loyalty program and the client doesn’t really need extra help after the purchase.

In any strategy it is better to focus. Tension in one section ultimately creates tension along the entire line, and great success in small matters affects a lot.

How to set goals at this stage?

If you have data about the target audience and its segments, then for each segment it is worth making several tables. For example, segment 1: “Young mothers from the city of Kiev.” The first tab, let it be so called – Goals. Horizontally, you will output all the marketing funnel cycles that you want to work with using KM (content marketing). Vertical questions: Our customers … Our future customers … Our business …

Separately need to say about the audience. Detailed segment description is very important in content marketing. The audience segment needs to be personalized. To do this, there are lots of techniques. Their essence is to bring out the average character (or person) with whom you will communicate with the help of content. Write how he spends the day, his habits, environment, personality characteristics. This is a creative work, which, however, should, if possible, rely on the results of research.

Step two: look for and convey meaning

Good content is born from a bunch: benefit + inspiration.

Where to take this inspiration, which can enthrall the audience, motivate them to follow you?

You know your product and business. In each of the businesses there is something special. Business is a set of processes, but a successful business still has an “idea” or a “meaning”, some call it also a “soul”. Often it is formulated in the form of values, mission, history. It is necessary to convey to the audience a certain legend, for the sake of which all this was started. Something internal and invite her to share it with you.

From such information a great content format is born – storytelling, infographics, inspirational and motivating videos.

Find a story like this and let your content appear in formats, colors, style, presentation, key and content.

We make the second tab and write other questions: Our content is useful to the consumer, because … Our content will inspire, because …

Step three: measure

Content marketing is a qualitative method, it is difficult to measure with quantitative indicators. How to measure inspiration and benefit that give rise to trust? And yet  something is measured .

In the fourth tab, we write:

Our content works because … And for each stage, each segment of the target audience we enter the corresponding metrics. We carry out the preparatory work on their setting.

Step Four: Pain

Go to the next very important tab. It is not for nothing that we have prescribed our characters to the target audience in such detail.

Now, in stages of the marketing funnel, we need to write about their pain, the needs that our content can heal or satisfy.

Here it s best not to invent anything, but to rely on real data.

They can be collected by known methods:

marketing research (own, customized or from open sources);

tests;

web analytics (search data, top publications, time on site pages, etc.);

search analytics, trends;

customer survey call center.

Thanks to this tab, we can use one of the formulas for calculating the amount of content per month:

The number of characters in the target audience is multiplied by the  number of stages of the marketing funnel and the  number of pains.

Thus, each pain, each character is solved at the right stage.

In te future, your healing publications in different versions and formats are sown on the Internet.

Step Five: Content Types and Testing

What is better – videos, articles, blog, newsletter, social networks, infographics, podcasts?

We can confidently say that there is no exact answer. There are many articles on the Internet in which the advantages of one type over another will be described, but you will have it all differently. Therefore, all you need to test.

You can exactly repeat your competitor’s successful content marketing campaign, but this does not guarantee a successful result.

Another mistake is when all possible formats and types of content are implemented at once.

Testing is the long part of implementing content marketing in a company that many ignore and then give up. Because there are no ready models, alas.

For the test and for the subsequent work you need a planned content plan.

We suggest doing it in the form of a table (column names):

Date, Channel, Author, Description, Character, Pain, Funnel Stage, CTA (call), Metric (you can also add a forecast for the metric where it is possible).

For a month or two, you are testing different formats, and then, based on reports, you can focus on the most effective types of content. As a result, it will, at a minimum, save your budget and include in the serious content a game that not every one of your competitors will master.

Step Six: Promotion

In the next tab we write: the content will be promoted with the help of ….

Here, too, take into account the characteristics of the character. For example, many people still very actively communicate in specialized forums.

As a result, you have the necessary tables that need to be filled. All this is drawn up in a document in which the test period and the subsequent stages are separately highlighted.

There are other techniques for building a strategy, but they all boil down to a single goal: to build a system that will be based on understanding the audience and its needs and methods for achieving marketing results with the help of content and its distribution.