content marketing campaign?

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content

marketing

campaign?

Thinking of doing a

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Remember the people

you addres

s are selﬁ

sh,

as we all ar

e. The best

ads ask no one to buy

.

That is useles

s. The best

ads are based entir

ely

on services. The

y oﬀ er

wanted inf

ormation…

Claude Hopkins,

_Scientif

ic Adver

tising (19

23)

“

”

Content mark

eting

without PR is lik

e

a shot without a

catapult.

Debby Penton,

EML Wildfire (2013)

“

”

(3)

Content marketing is the new SEO – everyone’s

claiming to be an expert in it now, but it’s something

we PR practitioners have been doing for years.

Not only do we know how to create great content,

but we focus on making it newsworthy too – a crucial

piece of the mix that is too often ignored. If you’re

going to the eﬀ ort of developing compelling content,

then why not use it to reach a wider audience, boost

your proﬁ le and generate more inbound traﬃ

c?

This guide details ﬁ ve clear steps to help you create

compelling content that reaches and resonates with

the widest audience possible, to ensure

maximum impact for your business.

plan

create

promote

convert

measure

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Planning is a vital ﬁ rst step for any content marketing

campaign. We are going to look at ﬁ ve stages you should go

through before even putting pen to paper:

1 Agreeing objectives

2 Understanding your audience

3 Identifying a theme

4 Writing a content brief

5 Creating a project plan

What are your objectives?

It’s vital to have clear objectives before starting any

marketing campaign. For content marketing, it is even more

important.

It will be impossible to measure success if you don’t know

what success will look like.

Here are some common objectives for content

marketing campaigns:

• Generate leads

• Position your company or key employees

as experts

• Demonstrate your expertise in a speciﬁ c area

• Grow your contact database

• Improve your SEO rankings

• Engage your community

• Arm your sales team with content to share

with prospects.

Pick out your key objectives and assign some key

performance indicators (KPIs) that you can use to

benchmark success.

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Thinking about your audience

Now you know what your objectives are, it’s time to think about the content that will help you achieve your aims.

Remember you need to put yourself in the shoes of your potential customer. The success of a content marketing campaign lies in identifying the content that will resonate with your audience.

Identify your audience - who is it you want to reach? Think about

existing customers and prospects.

Write some personas - help focus your mind by writing some audience

personas. When you come to write your content, being able to visualise who you want to write for will really help. You might even want to base them on existing customers if you have trouble making them up.

Where possible, use psychographic and demographic information, e.g. age, sex, job title, industry, company size, personality, values, buying

behaviour, and what inﬂ uences them in terms of traditional and social media, forums, colleagues, peer recommendations or word of mouth. But ultimately you want to understand their speciﬁ c challenges, what keeps them up at night and how you can help them overcome these concerns.

For example, in a business context your target customer might need to save money, understand a new trend, do their job better, improve sales or look good to their boss. And consumers might want to be a trendsetter, make their life easier, manage their health better, get the best product or service to suit their needs, or simply build trust and aﬃ nity with a brand.

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Identifying a theme

We’ve already extolled the virtue of having an audience-centric approach to content creation, but it is critical that any content you create allies closely to your business proposition, messages and culture, so don’t lose sight of that.

However, in generating a theme that will interest your audience, there are plenty of ways and free tools out there to help you to brainstorm topics that will resonate in a cost eﬀ ective way. For example:

•

Topsy - search content published on the social web by topic, theme or keyword.

•

Your own blog analytics - which blog posts are most popular? Are there common themes?

•

Google Trends - who is searching for what and when? This will tell you.

•

Social media - put a shout out on your social channels and see what topics are exciting your audience.

•

Industry publications and bloggers - see what issues are being written about on a regular basis.

•

Networking events - check out the events planned in your industry for the next few months. What are the common topics being discussed?

•

Ubersuggest - enter in a keyphrase and this clever search engine will use Google auto-complete data to give you other related suggestions.

•

Content idea generator - this impressive Google Doc will allow you

to enter a phrase and will then suggest a range of newsworthy topics based on what is being talked about on the web.

Once you have a long list of possible themes, discuss them with colleagues and customers, if possible. Get a sense for the ones that most frequently stand out.

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Writing a content brief

So now you are armed with this information, it’s time to write a content brief.

The key thing about writing a brief is to keep it short and concise (the clue is in the name). Your brief should answer the following questions for anyone reading it:

•

Why are we using content marketing?

•

What is our content marketing trying to achieve (objective)?

•

Who are we talking to (audience)?

•

What do we know about them (personas)?

•

What is the main idea we want to communicate (theme)?

•

What is the best way to get that idea across to

the audience?

•

What behaviour change or reaction do we want from our audience?

•

What does success look like?

Your brief should be one or two sides of A4, preferably presented in a bullet format. Whether you’re brieﬁ ng an agency or inhouse copywriter, this summary will help to ensure you get exactly what you want.

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Writing your project plan

The ﬁ nal part of your planning phase is to produce a project plan. Your project plan should include the following:

•

Key objectives

•

Timeline

•

Breakdown of the steps required in creating and promoting your content and who is responsible for each

•

Third party input required

•

Budget breakdown.

It’s worth bearing in mind that your project plan could well change, but it is always good to have a clear overview of what the project will look like at the beginning.

If you are working with a number of colleagues and/or third parties, then using a shared worksheet could be useful. Consider a Google spreadsheet or even tools like Huddle, Smartsheet, Trello or Asana.

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Create your hero piece

At the heart of any content marketing campaign will be a hero piece of content. This is the piece of content that all your PR and supporting materials will point to and the piece that you feel your audience will deﬁ nitely feel educated, enlightened or entertained as a result of reading or watching it.

It should embody the core themes that you put together in the planning stage.

Deciding the format of the hero piece should be the result of a

brainstorming phase using the creative brief that has been put together. Typically, this will be a whitepaper, guide, report or ebook depending on your business or audience.

But the content development should not stop there. There are many ways you can “atomise”, or break up the core content into bite size chunks for your audience and use across many diﬀ erent marketing channels to extend the reach and life of your campaign, as the diagram below shows:

“Just because somebody hears something you say, or reads something that

you write, doesn’t mean you’ve reached them.” -

Frank Zappa

create

5 steps

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content marketing

REPORT

WHITEPAPER

EBOOK

GUIDE

VIDEO OR VOX POPS WEBINAR BLOGS ARTICLES TWEETS INFOGRAPHIC PODCAST GIFTS & IMAGES GAMES & QUIZZES ROUNDTABLE DEMOS NEWSLETTERS SLIDESHARE

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Make it awesome

With so much content now out there on the web, making yours stand out is absolutely crucial. It doesn’t just have to be good. It has to be awesome.

Stuck with a blank page or struggling for inspiration? Here are a few tips to get those creative juices ﬂ owing:

•

Do some research – this can be the best way to quickly create content that is really interesting, newsworthy and that says something

diﬀ erent. You can interview consumers, businesses, scour the internet or even benchmark industry performance in some way.

•

Interview some experts – they might exist within your company, they

might be customers or they might be industry inﬂ uencers. Tap into their knowledge and expertise.

•

Put a shout out on social media channels – why not ask your social communities for help? Or check out what people are talking about on forums. What would they like to see in your content? You could even pull out quotes or tweets within the content itself.

Looks matter

Related to the last section, the way you present your content is now more important than ever. Looks matter when it comes to content. So don’t scrimp on design.

Think about the best ways to present the content you have created. Does it need some design or development work? Can you do this yourself or do you need to employ the services of a third party?

Having done all the hard work, it is amazing how many companies drop the ball at this crucial last stage.

Finally, in the era of multi-devices, think about user experience. Where will your audience be when they are trying to access your content? Do you need content that is mobile friendly?

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You’ve done it! Your content is ready, it has been created and it’s all ready to be consumed. But how do you get the message out? There is a lot of discussion about inbound and outbound content marketing strategies, and there are many very eﬀ ective tactics you can use via your own channels or earned media to get the content into the hands of your audience:

• SEO – make sure your content is optimised for the keywords you planned for earlier. If your content starts ranking for key terms then you can expect to see a signiﬁ cant amount of traﬃ c.

• Launch it via a press release, and comprehensive media sell-in – if you have newsworthy content, make sure you share with the media, and share it with them ﬁ rst as once it’s in the public domain, it’s no longer news.

• Add it to your website homepage and ﬂ ag it on every page.

• Write articles/guest blog posts about it – tap into the community and demonstrate your expertise by writing for other websites.

• Create social objects or variations – you have your hero piece but, like all good success stories, you need a spin oﬀ . Create smaller variations of your hero piece that can be easily shared or embedded on social channels.

• Blog about it – sounds obvious, but many companies forget to talk about their content on their own blog. Why not write a series of posts covering

• Social media – distribute via your social channels. Think about posts that are relevant for the medium - can you send tips out on Twitter, for example? How about incentivising people to download your content in exchange for a tweet?

• Bookmarking sites – make sure you add your content to bookmarking sites like Reddit and Delicious.

• Tell communities about it – are there groups on LinkedIn or forums that might be interested?

• Events – can you launch your content via an event? Either oﬄ ine or online via a webinar or Google Hangout. Or could you use it as the basis of a speaking session at an industry event?

• Share with inﬂ uencers – do you have a list of inﬂ uencers that would be interested in your content?

• Email newsletters or eshots – make sure you inform your existing customers or prospects.

Once you’ve exhausted the many possible inbound traﬃ c generation tactics you may choose to augment your content marketing approach with some outbound, or paid activity. This can often be an eﬀ ective way to reach new audiences, for example through Linkedin adverts, promoted

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For the majority of companies, the main aim of a content marketing campaign will be to reach some point of conversion.

The simplest way to achieve this is to create a landing page or microsite where visitors have to complete some information in order to download or access the content you have created.

Any download form should ask for details that are critical for you. If you’re providing informative or entertaining content then people won’t mind exchanging their contact details in return, but don’t ask too much otherwise this will likely impact the number of downloads you receive. You could instead ask for social media shares in return for a download using a service such as Cloud Flood. This would be especially

appropriate if your ultimate aim is brand awareness rather than lead generation.

Lead nurturing

If your aim is lead generation, then making sure you have thought about lead nurturing is important too. Getting the download information is just the ﬁ rst step. What will you do with it afterwards? When will this content work most eﬀ ectively in the buying cycle and what else can you send interested parties at future dates?

There are many good marketing automation platforms available that can run this process seamlessly for you, such as Marketo, Eloqua and hubspot, or you could even talk to your existing email marketing provider, such as dotMailer, who are increasingly building marketing automation functionality into their email platforms.

CONVERT

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Remember chapter one and those KPIs we discussed? This is where we look at them again.

Each KPI should have a speciﬁ c measurement metric attached to it so that you can measure success on an ongoing basis.

Agile measurement

Try and record metrics on a real-time basis. This way, if something doesn’t seem to be working properly, you can take steps to correct it immediately rather than waiting for the end of the campaign.

Looking at the objectives we outlined in part one, here are some possible measurement metrics you could use:

Once the campaign is complete, make sure you do a thorough post mortem so that you can learn from what worked and what didn’t work and make improvements to future content marketing activities.

measure

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content marketing

Objective

Metric / KPI

Leads Number of downloads_{Number of qualifi ed leads} Position your company or key

employees as experts

Growth in spokesperson visibility Interactions with key infl uencers Demonstrate your expertise in a

specifi c area

Thought leadership pieces in key media/websites

Support other marketing, PR or social media activity

Social media activity

Conversions driven by social media Grow your contact database Data acquired

Improve your SEO rankings Growth in SEO rankings Arm your sales team with content

to share with prospects

Content created for sales team Conversions through sales team

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Hopefully this guide has been helpful to you, but if you still need

inspiration then check out a couple of the content-led PR campaigns

we’ve done for clients, or just give us a call on

020 8408 8000

or email

newbusiness@emlwildﬁ re.com.

word

final

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Generating sales

Case study:

The challenge:

Position EPiServer as an expert in enabling successful online communities and advanced digital techniques such as personalisation to drive traﬃ c to the website and deliver potential sales leads.

Approach:

Launch a provocative study, using market research, into how UK businesses are using online communication strategies, in order to highlight the importance of eﬀ ective community management.

Campaign highlights:

•

Fully integrated campaign including media targeting to marketing, business, customer service, ecommerce and new media sectors.

•

Creation of social objects to encourage online buzz, viral sharing and stickiness.

•

Blogging and article placement to promote expertise residing within EPiServer, including regular blog spot on econsultancy.

•

Research report available as redemption item on EPiServer website, with data capture for lead generation.

Results

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122

Qualiﬁ ed leads generated with target marketers and web developers

5

Major deals closed

200%

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coverage

Developing y

our

e-commerce stra

tegy:

How to deliv er what consumers r eally want

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Client experience

Case study:

The Challenge:

Create media impact and sales leads around the launch of dotCommerce - an ecommerce platform aimed at a niche B2B audience of SMB retailers - with a very modest digital PR budget.

Approach:

Launch an industry benchmark report to attract widespread industry attention, provoke controversy and debate, and educate the target market about the full capability of the dotCommerce platform.

•

In-depth study to assess the ecommerce eﬀ ectiveness of the UK’s top 20 retail web sites.

•

Make learnings available in 42-page report to drive home the key sales message, with 130

best practice guidelines drawing on examples from the study.

•

Fully integrated campaign launch, including media targeting in retail, ecommerce and marketing sectors, blogger outreach and promotion across social media channels.

•

Web traﬃ c encouraged by making in-depth report available as a redemption item on the dotCommerce website.

•

Inﬂ uential bloggers and journalists given exclusive advanced access to the full report.

Results

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53

pieces of coverage in traditional and new media channels,

including publications such as Internet Retailing, Econsultancy, NMA and SMEWeb

£1m

value of sales pipeline comprising 117 prospective

(18)

testimonial

client

Successfully launching a ne

w brand in a very competitive and established B2B sector is

always going to be a challeng

e. EML Wildﬁ re developed a campaign that not only g

enerated a sustained buzz around the br

and, but also helped drive extremely targ

eted traﬃ c to the new website and ga

ve us a detailed whitepaper that can be used f

or marketing activities and data captur

e in the future. This was an incredibly eﬀ

ective campaign that achieved fantastic results f

or the business and really put dotCommerce on the map. F

or these reasons it more than achie

ved our objectives and gave us a fantastic return

on our investment.