How to Plan your Content Marketing Strategy ?

“Instead of one-way interruption, Web marketing is about delivering useful content at just the precise moment that the buyer needs it.”
David Meerman Scott author of New Rules of Marketing & PR.

We’ve been helping organizations increase their inbound traffic from SEO, increase their newsletter performance, boost engagement with their brand and stay top of mind on social media since 2010.

CONTENT MARKETING PLANNING METHODOLOGY

Before producing any content to distribute to an audience of prospects or customers, the first step is to define a sound strategy to understand who you’re targeting with your content, how content will help them in their customer journey and where you’ll be publishing and promoting that content.

There are four pillars to any content marketing strategy:

1. ASSESS YOUR AUDIENCE & MAP THE BUYER’S JOURNEY

We can help you define (or refine) the main personas (or customer profiles) your brand is looking to interact with and we’ll help you understand and map out every stage of their buying decision making process.

There are three common types of personas in B2B marketing (which tend to be similar for large purchases in B2C):

• The main decision maker
• The main influencer to the decision
• Secondary influencers

Here is an example of the main phases of a traditional customer journey:

For Lead Generation and Sales, the focus is usually on the phases that lead to a purchase. Here we have broken down the decision making steps for each phases:

The buyer’s journey is not Web or Mobile only centric (even though these are unavoidable touch points); we also consider other content related platforms such as conferences, trade shows, in person sales, etc.

2. DEFINE THE MECHANISMS TO CONVERT LEADS INTO CUSTOMERS

One of the main reasons why organizations implement Content Marketing initiatives is to bring visitors to their website or take them from social media into a process where they can assess the level of interest of a potential customer in their products, qualify that customer by inviting her to fill in a form, and finally identifying when that person is ready to be contacted by a sales person, or encouraged to make a purchase with a special deal.

In the “Marketing Automation” or “Inbound Marketing” lingo, a company is usually trying to help its sale team to get a qualified lead (or Marketing Qualified Lead) so that they can be more effective when following up with a sale call, or follow up email.

We can help you identify all the touchpoints throughout the customer journey where it would be appropriate to measure either visitor’s level of engagement with your content, or to trigger a form to get them to provide information about themselves that would help qualify if they’re the target customer you’re after.

Here is a classic example of such a conversion path on most website with a blog:

We also have experience with a few marketing automation systems, and when required, we can assist with defining Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL) assessment paths, email campaign setups and lead scoring logic.

3. DEFINE THE CONTENT STRATEGY TO ENGAGE YOUR AUDIENCE

Once target audiences are defined and there is a clear map of all the touchpoints where you wish to get them engaged with either content or forms that will help you qualify them, the next step is to define what content will need to be produced.

Content is defined through:

• Its target persona: the decision maker, the main influencer, secondary influencers, etc.
• Its purpose: thought leadership, lead nurturing, helping the buyer, entertaining, etc.
• Its format: blog post, white paper, case study, eBook, testimonial, Webinar, video Infographic, etc.
• Its theme: informative, utility / practical, assessment tool, buyer’s guide, news related, etc.
• Its topic: usually specific to the client’s industry, product, service, customer mindset / interests, etc.

Here is an example of content formats mapping according to a typical B2B customer journey:

Our content planning process is the following:

1. Identify content formats for each step of the buyer’s journey
2. Identify content themes for each one of these formats and according to buyer’s journey
3. Identify topics and titles for each piece of content that needs to be produced
4. Plan for content production resources and editorial calendar

We use content planning tools (usually spreadsheets) to define the different types of content and their topics and position them in the buyer’s journey.

We also use mind mapping tools to help define as many content topics as much possible, sometimes down to the article title, so that we cover a large range of subjects to produce an interesting diversity of written content. Here is an example:

4. DEFINING THE KEY PERFORMANCE METRICS TO MEASURE SUCCESS

A recurring complaint about Content Marketing or Social Media Marketing is related to understanding the Return on Investment (ROI) or the performance of the content produced. The issue is often more related to the lack of initial planning or goals to define and measure performance in the first place. Sometimes it’s also due to poor execution of the content plan (like not targeting the right audience, or publishing enough content) but for the most part, and for all our clients, Content Marketing delivers.

Key Performance Indicators (KPI) may vary from one client to another but the main KPIs are usually:

• Increase in Organic Traffic to the website (unique visitors, visits, and page views)
• Number of forms filled in (whether contact forms, or gated content forms)
• Number of leads and marketing qualified leads
• Number of subscribers to the website’s newsletter
• Increase in open rate and clickthrough rate in newsletters
• Number of fans on Social Media, and traffic from these fans to the website
• Google Search Engine Page Ranking compared to competitors

Another challenge with performance measurement is collecting the analytics data on all existing platforms (website, newsletter, social media, and 3rd party services) and interpreting the results in correlation with all the ongoing marketing initiative.

We can help benchmark current online performance, define or refine KPI, collect data in dashboards and produce monthly reports with insights about what the data means and what adjustments should be made to the Content Marketing plan to improve its results.

Here are the trends for what most B2B or B2C organizations define as their KPI measurements (from the Content Marketing Institute Research):