Transcript Content Marketing Primer

Content Marketing Primer
December 2015
Communicating With Your Audience Without Selling.
Content Marketing Primer
Introduction
How can marketers influence buyers at any customer touchpoint point along the
buyer journey? The answer is, “With Content Marketing.”
Is content marketing for real? Is it actually something new? Maybe?
It’s because of the diversity in medium and context that content marketing has
come to the forefront. As it should, because with so many points by which to
connect with and engage consumers, content touches all of them. It is at these very
touchpoints that content begins to affect the buyer journey.
Like many of our clients are asking, you probably are, too: What exactly is content
marketing. How is it done? Is it necessary? Answers to those questions and more
are contained herein.
This Primer is a quick general overview with some solid nuggets of info that will help
you get your content game on.
Content Marketing Primer
What is Content Marketing?
Content marketing is a “strategic marketing approach focused on creating and
distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearlydefined audience — and, ultimately, to drive profitable customer action.” - The Content
Marketing Institute
Furthermore, the Content Marketing Institute says that the purpose of content
marketing is to attract and retain customers by “consistently creating and curating
relevant and valuable content with the intention of changing or enhancing consumer
behavior.”
The understanding behind content marketing is that by providing valuable
information to consumers along their purchase pathway, they will become buyers and
maybe even evangelists for your brand.
Yet, it’s a lot easier said than it is done and this is where a content marketing strategy
comes in handy.
Content Marketing Primer
What IS a Content Marketing Strategy?
A content marketing strategy is the blueprint of a digital marketing campaign and
determines how content will be used in a strategic manner for the planning,
production, promotion, and measurement of content marketing efforts.
This is such a critical part of content marketing success, that it’s worth ensuring we
fully understand the differences between these four words.
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Strategy
Tactic
Objective
Goal
A strategy is carried out with tactics. Objectives are milestones on the way to a goal.
Another way to look at it is that typically, a strategy employs tactics and a goal is
comprised of objectives.
Content Marketing Primer
What Does a Content Marketing Strategy Include?
A content marketing strategy is comprised of various milestone elements that support
and align with specific business goals and objectives.
Here are a few typical objectives to consider including in a content marketing strategy:
• Lift brand awareness in specific markets, platforms, or among certain
demographics
• Engage and drive traffic from referring sites and platforms
• Aid in search engine optimization (SEO) efforts
But, to reach these kinds of objectives, a content marketing strategy needs to address
The following 10 critical milestones;
• Identify the target audience of your content – who is your buyer?
• Establish a content baseline – what engages your audience, what’s trending?
• Establish content publishing guidelines (kinds of content, frequency, tagging,
posting times, etc).
Content Marketing Primer
What Does a Content Marketing Strategy Include, continued
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Define ownership of content process and governance of assets and data.
Map content to the buyer journey and sales cycle and tie-back to specific KPIs.
Integrate content into the overall marketing strategy to support existing goals and
leverage new audiences.
Provide content in different mixes for varying formats, each with their unique callsto-action.
Optimize content for search engines
Promote content to different buyer profiles and target audiences.
Implement, measure, review, optimize, refine, re-implement, repeat.
Lots of marketers think that content marketing is designed to get likes, retweets and to
create other similar engagement. But we’re not seeking vanity metrics like that.
Content Marketing Primer
What Does a Content Marketing Strategy Include, continued
That’s because it’s critical for content marketing goals to support overall business
goals. So, instead of Facebook Likes or Twitter Retweets, it is now, conversions and
other post-click metrics that are the bar by which to be measured.
To be certain, page likes, retweets and shares do have a role in helping to create
engagement with content and to help increase brand awareness. Though, in content
marketing, the end-game – a converted buyer – is truly what we’re after. That takes
knowing who your buyers are.
For example, if your content marketing goal focuses on lead generation, then you
need to create content that is valuable enough to readers that they would trade their
contact info for whatever is behind your conversion call-to-action. Even better is to
offer an incentive that they simply cannot resist.
Content Marketing Primer
What Does a Content Marketing Strategy Include, continued
If we look at the customer journey in the presales stage, we can see (courtesy of
Google) that we basically have two types of interaction groups and therefore content
types;
• Assisting Interaction: channels and content that build awareness, consideration,
and intent earlier in the customer journey or “purchase funnel.”
• Last Interaction: channels and content that act as the last point of contact prior to
a purchase
Once we have cultivated interest in buyers, that’s when the content within customer
touchpoints really begins to work. But that takes knowing who your buyer really is.
Content Marketing Primer
What Does a Content Marketing Strategy Include, continued
This is why establishing a customer profile and properly segmenting your audience is
important. Especially in today’s market, where things like buyer affinities, geotargeting, location-based advertising, remarketing and the ability to personalize
content are all available.
Only once you’ve handled this properly can you create content that is not only
personalized, but that incorporates fundamental emotional and intellectual properties
that automatically speak to your customers.
Ultimately, you’ll be able to know which content works best in each channel.
Content Marketing Primer
What Does a Content Marketing Strategy Include, continued
Let’s look at this Homebuyer example.
We know from experience that the once the idea to purchase a home has been
decided, a consumer will typically consider many factors during the purchase process,
such as;
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Location
New vs Used
Price
Performance (personalization, energy-efficiency, builder process, warranty, etc)
Therefore, producing content to address these factors enables you to create
engagement with buyers (in assisting and in last interactions [Slide 8]) at various
points along the purchase pathway. And if your content is good, you’ll get them to
follow you and eventually to become your customer and maybe even your advocate!
Content Marketing Primer
Define a Content Implementation Schedule
A typical content implementation schedule includes a calendar of selected content,
creation, proofreading and publishing dates, a posting process and where content is to
be posted.
Things like what kinds of content (video, blog, social, etc) are required, which
platforms the content will be published in, the cadence and frequency of posts and
who is doing the posting are all defined within the content implementation schedule.
Content Marketing Primer
Define a Content Implementation Schedule, continued
From an acquisition perspective, customers you gain from syndicated content tactics
are less expensive to acquire. They also tend to be more targeted and convert more
easily. Consumers that are pulled to your brand have more of an affinity than
customers that you push your marketing and advertising tactics on.
Besides, content promotion and distribution enables you to diversify your reach and
connect with whole new groups of consumers by either syndicating your content
and/or creating links between people and businesses. These kinds of content
marketing tactics help to generate inbound leads.
From a consumers perspective, it’s about finding the right content, quickly. That's why
many sites publish and promote content – to help create deeper interest for users.
Ultimately, syndicating your content into the places where your target consumers are
will certainly help get you noticed and create interest. If your content is good, you'll
drive traffic, both on and off the web.
Content Marketing Primer
Create a Content Promotion Plan
The content promotion process helps you decide how, where, when and how much to
promote each piece of content. This includes the amount of funds to be allocated.
Getting content into the right places presents its own set of unique challenges and it
helps to understand how content is classified.
The content tripartite known as Owned, Earned and Paid media has been shaping
marketing and advertising for the last five or six years and is proving more important
than ever in today’s messaging marketplace. Owned Media and Paid Media both have
their place in the content mix, but Earned Media is often considered the holy grail of
marketing and customer loyalty.
Content Marketing Primer
Create a Promotion Plan, continued
Let’s revisit the Golden Content Triangle: Paid, Earned and Owned social media.
Content Marketing Primer
Create a Promotion Plan, continued
Here’s a quick refresher to make sure you’re on the right track:
• Owned media are things like your website, social channels, blog, & places you
have public-facing content which your company produces, controls and/or owns.
• Earned media are things like news stories, blog posts & articles published by thirdparties, customer testimonials and/or content voluntarily published by others.
• Paid media includes things like sponsorships, search engine keyword advertising,
banner ads, magazine ads & other media that you have to pay for.
Ultimately these types of content work together to lift brand awareness, connect with
consumers, build relationships and create sales.
The challenge for most businesses is to keep the Owned, Earned and Paid Content
machine running with engaging, informative and relevant content, in all three areas,
on a tight budget. The solution here is to develop a content optimization strategy that
can be leveraged across channels.
Content Marketing Primer
Create a Promotion Plan, continued
Then, all things being relevant, what do you get when you have good content, in the
right context? A conversion, of course.
Content Marketing Primer
Measure the Success of Your Content Marketing Efforts
To track the performance of your content marketing initiatives, you can use a metrics
program like Google Analytics. Why not use the metrics programs that are inherent
with each platform? Because, remember, in content marketing, we’re not measuring
vanity metrics. Instead, we’re concerned with post-click metrics like number of
visitors, selective page actions, conversions and other calls-to-action.
So, we’re really looking at identifying signals in the customer experience pathway that
help to cultivate e-rapport with visitors.
Content Marketing Primer
Measure the Success of Your Content Marketing Efforts, continued
Use the data you glean from your metrics to help accomplish the following;
• Understand how buyers from different channels expect different experiences
• Map customer touchpoints to calls-to-action along the buyer journey
• Analyze mulitchannel KPIs to spot patterns in buyer behavior
• Identify conversion sources using interaction steps to determine true channel
source of converting traffic
Armed with good data and an evolving content marketing strategy, you can better
optimize your landing pages and other customer touchpoints for maximum
engagement and conversion.
Content Marketing Primer
Summary
Today, everyone is a content publisher – even businesses. And like any good publisher,
it takes content to win. Not only that, it requires a timely flow of relevant and
engaging content to keep peoples’ interest – and to get them to take action.
Frankly, we’ve been doing content marketing for 20 years, only we’ve been calling it
“messaging.” Read any of our posts going back thru our company history and you’ll
see messaging as a contextual term in nearly every post.
The real difference is in how this messaging/content is being consumed today, vs any
other time in history.
Though, if you employ best-practices content marketing in your efforts to reach,
connect with and engage consumers, you will win them over – and that’s always good
for the bottom line.
Content Marketing Primer
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