Before getting into content marketing, you should do a content marketing audit. Even if you haven’t created any content yet and are just getting started, planning out and systematizing your content marketing will improve your effectiveness.
Below are some questions that you should ask yourself when planning out a content strategy.
1. What is the purpose of your content? Why are you doing content marketing?
One of the most important things you need to do is decide what your goals are with content marketing. Here are a few common objectives:
-Get more leads – Getting more leads that they can convert into sales is often a top priority for companies when they decide to do content marketing. To get qualified leads through content, it is important to understand your customers’ buying cycle.
Customers will often face a series of problems or challenges that compels them to look for solutions. As a content marketer, creating content that focuses on these solutions can draw new visitors to your site.
Without a content strategy, you may end up writing about topics that don’t draw in qualified prospects, which can result in wasted time and money.
-Branding – Content marketing can be used to increase website traffic and brand awareness. People often need multiple exposures to your brand before they make a purchase, so content creation can help with that.
-Establish authority in your niche – Some companies want to be an authority or thought leader in their niche. Being an authority can multiply the effectiveness of your content.
Other bloggers and thought leaders will follow you and promote your content without you asking if you are a thought leader. This can allow you to reach a lot more people and give you more power when collaborating with other influencers.
Some people might say that they have all of the above goals with content marketing, but it’s important to decide what goal is the most important as it can result in very different content strategies.
For example, if the goal is to get immediate leads that can quickly be converted into sales, then a company might choose to create a lot of shorter content daily to generate search engine traffic rather than spending time creating longer authoritative content.
2. How Will You Promote?
Another important aspect of your content strategy is your content promotion plan. How you promote your content will affect what type of content you create.
Influencers – Let’s say you want influencers to promote your content. Part of your content strategy may be to interview influencers, link to them in blog posts or allow them to guest post on your blog.
SEO – If SEO is your core promotion strategy, then you will probably want to base your content creation off of keyword research and develop a good understanding of what types of topics your target audience will search for. You may also need a link building strategy and a strategy to generate natural links through increased publicity and community awareness of your content.
PPC – Let’s say you will use Adwords or other PPC advertising to promote your content. Then you will need to take PPC guidelines and quality scores into account when creating your content.
3. How Will You Convert Traffic into Leads?
A lot of people think that they can just create content, get SEO and social media traffic, and then some of those people will become paying customers.
While that approach could work, you’ll be more effective if you have a strategy to convert traffic into leads and customers.
A simple way to do this is to funnel your visiting traffic into a webinar page. The webinar can provide content that addresses your prospect’s pain point and then shows how your product or services might be a solution.
4. How Will You Generate Ongoing Content Ideas?
Generating ongoing content is one thing, but generating top quality authoritative content is a much greater challenge. I’ve seen some blogs create blog posts that went viral, but struggled when it came to creating quality content consistently.
If you really want people to follow you and influencers to share your content, then you need to stand out from other content creators. Here are a few ways you can do that and possibly even give yourself an unfair advantage over your competitors.
What resources or information do you have access to that other people don’t?
-Your customer base – Your own customers can be a great source of content ideas. Here are a few ways you can leverage your own customer base to create unique content.
1. Ask them what they’re struggling with – Ask your customers about what types of problems and issues they are struggling with. Your customers can give you great ideas on what to write about.
You can also ask for feedback as your produce content. Often, people will have follow up questions that you can use to create new content from.
Encourage your readers to email you or comment on your blog posts if they have any questions.
2. Case studies & Interviews – Some of your customers may have achieved great successes and might be willing to share what they’ve learned. Getting your customers to provide case studies could be a great way to provide authoritative content that your competitors can’t produce.
Asides from simply producing case studies and interviews, you can back up some of your own content with their successes. For example, if you are writing a blog post about Twitter marketing and you have a customer that successfully used Twitter to promote their business, then you can include a paragraph about that customer to make your content more authoritative.
3. Surveys – Surveying people can produce interesting data. You can survey your own customers and subscribers or use something like Google Consumer Surveys to get data from third party sources.
Survey data can even be converted into infographics or other visual formats. If your survey results are interesting enough, you might even be able to pitch your content to journalists.
4. Customer data – Some companies have access to customer data which can be used to produce useful and interesting content.
Buffer for example is one of the most well known and commonly used social media scheduling tools. With the data that they have, they’ve been able to create data driven content about social media, like the best times to share updates on different social channels.
5. Access to influencers or important people – Perhaps you or other people in your organization are connected to other people that can help in your content creation efforts. If you have access to other experts or influencers, then it may be easier for you to schedule interviews with them, appear on a webinar, or have them write an awesome guest post on your site.
Reach out to your team and make a list of who you know that might be able to assist in your content creation efforts.
6. Tools – Do you have access to any tools or resources that other people don’t have? Perhaps you have a tool that you created in house to aid in your business.
Making useful tools and resources available to your readers can be a powerful way to generate more traffic or leads. Tools can also be viewed as more useful than blog posts because they often require more resources to create and automate tasks that normally take time to perform.
7. Funds to run experiments with or invest in other promotional resources – Do you have a budget to spend on content marketing and are there areas that you are willing to spend money on that your competitors aren’t?
Sometimes companies are slow to invest in new technologies or channels, but investing in those channels yourself could provide interesting results that can later be converted into content.
5. Who will be creating content?
Another important decision to make is who will be creating your content and how large your content team will be.
-Dedicated content specialist?
When you are starting out, you may want to consider using a dedicated content specialist. An in house content creator will be focused on creating content for your company and can gain a good understanding of your organization.
The downside of having just one content specialist is that they might have limited perspective versus having multiple contributors.
-Company employees
Some organizations have several of their employees create content. People in different roles can often share different perspectives and lessons with the audience.
With this approach, it is still a good idea to educate all contributors about content strategy.
One advantage of having your current staff contribute is that you don’t incur additional expense from hiring a new content marketer. They can write when they have some down time or if they have something interesting to share.
On the other hand, employees with other responsibilities may be too busy to contribute regularly. Your content operation should have at least one regular contributor for the best results.
-Agency
Sometimes outsourcing to an agency might make sense. Agencies specialize in marketing and if your company doesn’t have the resources in house or the time to develop such talent, then hiring an agency is an option.
An outside agency may also have connections and relationships that you don’t have. This can allow the agency to promote your content more effectively than an in house employee could.
They might also have access to other resources.
When you take into account the real cost of hiring an employee including training, taxes, turnover, management, etc, an agency could also end up being less expensive than hiring someone in house.
Sometimes agency resources aren’t as familiar with your company and its operations, so there are times when hiring and training your own content marketers might make sense.
Some companies might choose to get the best of both worlds by having an in house content team that works with an outside agency.
-Will allowing guest posting be part of your strategy?
Allowing other people to guest post on your site could be another strategy that you may want to consider. Other influencers can create authoritative content that your followers will find useful as well as promote it to their own followers.
However, if you allow guest posting on your site, you will need an editor to manage submissions. Even though the content is “free”, it will still take time for your editor to manage submissions and format the content.
Note that guest posts still need to integrate with your overall content strategy. Even if an influential writer offers to guest post, your editor will still need to make sure their post fits into the organization’s content strategy and editorial guidelines.
6. What types of content will you be focusing on?
When most people think of content marketing, blogging is the first thing that comes to mind. However, content marketing can include a much wider variety of content types.
-Blog posts – Blogging is one of the most popular forms of content marketing. A well run blog can result in significantly more search engine traffic and can even position the company as a thought leader in the industry.
Blogging is a long term strategy, but as you create more and more quality content, your traffic should also gradually increase over time.
-Infographics – A good infographic can also drive a lot of traffic to your website. With the rise of visual marketing channels like Pinterest, visual content can get your content shared even further.
-Ebooks – Ebooks aren’t as popular for content marketing due to the time it takes to produce them, but they can allow you to reach customers through channels like Amazon or affiliate marketing.
-White papers – White papers are a popular lead generator for B2B marketing. They are usually fairly short and include useful information that prospects might be interested in.
Your white papers can be promoted through paid advertisements or paid placement in other people’s email newsletters.
-Podcasts – Podcasting allows you to reach people through ITunes, Sound Cloud and other audio channels. Some people prefer to consume audio content, for example, while they are jogging or commuting to work.
-Video – Video is another way to stand out from other content marketers. If your video marketing is successful, you may even get more traffic from YouTube and other video sites.
Example:
This Thai Life Insurance video went viral and got millions of views. Note that you don’t need to have a lot of expensive special effects. A good message or story can be very effective –
-Webinars – One of the most popular content formats for B2B businesses is webinars. With a webinar, you can target your ideal customer by showing them how they can solve their problem. You can then convince them that your product or service is a good solution to their problem.
7. How frequently will you be creating content?
Content can be costly to produce, so you should think carefully about how much content you are going to create. High quality blog posts for example can take longer to create and can cost a lot of money.
Is getting long tail SEO traffic your strategy for generating traffic? Then you might want to focus on creating shorter blog posts more often.
Are you more concerned about being an authority in your niche? Then you may want to focus on writing less often, but creating top quality content with each post.
8. What is your budget for content marketing?
Deciding on a budget for content marketing is important as well. Money can be used on design for infographics, paid advertising and research.
You should also consider investing in some tools to assist in your content creation and promotion efforts.
Having a big budget will allow you to create better content and promote it more, but risk and ROI also needs to be considered.
9. Will you be leveraging paid ads for content marketing?
If so, which of the following best describes your stance?
- We have a certain budget that we are willing to spend each month to accelerate awareness of our content and increase subscribers
- We are willing to spend, but only if we are able to realize an immediate or fast ROI
Companies with big marketing budgets can accelerate their content awareness greatly with paid ads.
However, more ROI focused companies might prefer to create stricter limits on ad spending and focus on converting traffic into sales first. Once the sales funnel has proven effective, ad spending can be increased.
10. Do you have an influencer outreach strategy?
Building relationships with influencers can accelerate your results, but you will need to have a strategy to connect with and build relationships with them. While it is possible to have an effective content marketing operation without having an official influencer strategy, incorporating a relationship building plan can be effective.
SEM Rush does a great job of reaching out to other bloggers and allowing them to guest post on the SEM Rush blog. Offering them free access to their premium product has also gotten them some free reviews from popular bloggers.
Content Marketing Guide
About Brian Liang