So how do you create a solid content marketing strategy? Here are seven steps to a solid content marketing plan:
1. Work out your purpose - Without this, there’s really no point in doing anything. Unless you have a clearly defined purpose, which outlines in a concise sentence why someone would choose to work/buy with or from you, what hope have you got in cutting through the mountain of advertising messages everyone’s getting bombarded with daily? This means getting the right people in the room, and to agree; which is often tough, but absolutely vital.
2. Map your audience - There’s also no point in doing a thing before you know your audience. That means not only looking at current customers, but profiling potential ones, mapping out their behaviours & demographics, then exploring where they spend their time, their preferences, and what they need. This bit of the puzzle is no longer a ‘nice to have’.
You’ve got to base your content on this research & insight. Using ‘gut feeling’ is the magic
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sauce that sets apart good marketers from great ones, but you can’t rely on that alone any more.
3. What are you saying? - By doing stages one and two in parallel, you should be able to work out clearly what you’re offering people, and what they want. You then need to work out how you’re saying it, and what the creative hook or platform is. This is the umbrella that catches people’s attention and gets them excited. It has to be based on a combination of brand, category, human and product truths.
4. What are you focusing on? Consider an annual content calendar of seasonal moments, as well as brand news and sector events. What are you going to plan ahead for and focus on? Monocle’s Tyler Brule did an interview for January’s edition of Contagious, where he says that ‘Brands must learn to edit’ - this should be your content marketing mantra at all costs. Don’t try to do everything; focus on relevant highlights across the year and do them really well, rather than trying to do absolutely everything.
5. Who are you working with? Here’s a secret that will save you endless amounts of wasted budget and time; nobody really cares about what you have to say about your own brand. Well, you alone anyway. We all know that customer testimonials have always been the most powerful way to show off how great your brand is, but now the whole internet is one big testimonial, and we’ve moved beyond just collating nice quotes about the great things a business can do. Use the same concept to your advantage, but be smarter about it.
Consider content created for the community, by the community or with your community.
Essentially, stuff you create yourself, things you get people to write about you – or the golden egg, co-creation with influencers, where you get people to collaborate on projects, rather than just commissioning them to do stuff for you. This isn’t to be confused with YouTube’s hygiene, hub and hero model. For/by/with is about who you work with, hygiene/hub/hero is about types of content that do different things.
6. Remember divisible content, and distribute well - If you plan ahead properly, an ad shoot can provide an opportunity to create so much more than just a 30-second spot. If you loop in the right people (and multiple agencies, if appropriate) then you’ll get varied perspectives and more ideas not only on what to create, but where various iterations of that content can live. Make sure you’re making ‘hero’ content work as hard as possible, and that you’re distributing it in the places your potential customers spend their time. Consider paid
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support in this, as it’s vital to getting things seen. You can create the most beautiful video in the world; but if nobody sees it – you’ve failed.
7. Measure like a beast. And get granular - You need to track performance from an interaction and reach perspective, but also tie it back to end goals. Without that last bit, there’s not really much point in doing anything to start with.
Picking up on points 5 and 6. These tactics are, of course, where the differences start to arise. But in terms of creating content that sticks, there are lots of different theories; you'll see a million lists online – all picking up on various attributions. The core of it all though is creating something that makes someone feel something; typically that's a 'laugh, cry or get goosebumps' type of approach, but it also could be content that makes someone think – or be surprised that they've learned something. Largely, if you can tap into an emotion, you've got it nailed.
Presented by © Copyright PerformanceIN 2015 – All rights reserved. PerformanceIN grants you permission to store and print from this material for your own personal and commercial use. No part of this publication may be reproduced without prior permission from the publisher.