Content Marketing Strategies For Dummies
Overview
Drive your content marketing campaign toward success
Blogs and social platforms are all the rage right now—especially for strategists looking to cultivate influence among target audience members through content marketing. Content Marketing Strategies For Dummies explains how you can use content marketing to gain an edge over your competition, even in the most crowded of marketplaces. This timely text introduces you to the Five C Cycle: Company Focus, Customer Experience, Content Creation, Channel Promotion, and Closed-Loop Analysis. The Five C Cycle drives the creation and documentation of a targeted content marketing strategy, and allows you to approach your content marketing campaign with confidence. By helping you determine your company's focus, uncover your customers' experience with data, develop channel promotions across social platforms, create actionable online content, and use closed-loop analysis to build on previous success, this will
become your go-to content marketing guide.
Content marketing entails creating and curating content online via blog posts, social media platforms, and more. The goal is to acquire and retain customers by creating content that brings value to their lives, and that encourages them to engage with your brand. This easy-to-understand guide will help you do just that.
- Analyze customer data to better understand your target audience's journey
- Leverage social platforms, such as Facebook and Twitter, to develop channel promotions
- Create and curate intelligent, engaging content that leads to action
- Build upon your previous success with closed-loop analysis
Whether you work for a large corporation, are part of a small business, are a solo thought leader, or are an educator, Content Marketing Strategies For Dummies tells you how to gain a critical, competitive advantage through targeted content marketing strategies.
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About The Author
Stephanie Diamond is a marketing professional with more than 20 years of experience building profits in over 75 different industries. A strategic thinker, she has worked with solopreneurs, small business owners, and multibillion-dollar corporations. Follow her blog at Contentmarketingtoolbox.com/blog.
Sample Chapters
content marketing strategies for dummies
CHEAT SHEET
Lots of moving parts make up a successful content marketing strategy. Make the effort to complete all the content worksheets, and you will be on your way. This cheat sheet provides some tips for making your content marketing efforts successful.Which Kind of Influencer Is Right for Your Customer?Are you making the most of potential partnerships with influencers?
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The content marketing tools singled out here have free versions that do a good job. These tools help you with six key functions: (1) analysis; (2) optimization; (3) writing; (4) creating visuals; (5) scheduling; and (6) collecting and storing content.
If you want a cohesive content marketing platform, you need to buy one that is constructed to have all its parts working together to accomplish everything you need.
As every content marketer knows, even if you try to do everything right, you always face problems. Following are 10 problems that content marketers may face, spread across those categories. Consider the "Five Cs" framework to examine some of the problems you may encounter.
Company focus
Customer experience
Content creation
Content promotion
Check-back analysis
Company focus
The question to answer in this category is, "what do you want to achieve and how will you make it happen?
Marketing
Digital asset management (DAM) companies provide a tool to help you manage your brand assets online. DAMs provide a central repository for company assets such as documents, photos, and videos. If you have a small shop, you may not need a system like this. But if you have multiple assets and multiple locations, using a tool like this can be a productive way to help your employees manage their work.
Marketing
One business model worth noting is the freemium model, which is used for online software products. Companies who use this model provide a free version of their software with the expectation that some customers will want to pay for a premium version.
Some business owners are leery of this model because it involves a risk that doesn't apply to a standard retail model.
Marketing
In content marketing, it's important to understand how keywords fit in when you're constructing your buyer's journey. The keywords that people use tell you their intent, that is, what they are trying to accomplish. When you create your keyword list, you should consider buyers' commercial intent. That means that you want to focus on keywords people use when they intend to buy things.
Marketing
If you fail to document your buyer's journey, you will never be sure that you are supplying the right content at the right time. Follow these guidelines as you document your buyer's journey:
Put customers at the center of your thinking. Today's empowered customers expects to be given all the content they need to make informed decisions about your products.
Marketing
Keeping your eye on trends is an important part of a content marketer's job. You want to know what your customers are seeing, hearing, and thinking about in the wider culture. Sometimes trends come in with a huge flourish. Other times, they sneak up on you. Keeping yourself in touch with popular culture helps you know what your customers might want next or what they will reject.
Smart content marketers know that listening to their customers is crucial. That's why good listening tools are available online. A listening tool is a tool that helps you find out what your customers are saying online about you and your brand. For example, if someone mentions your brand in a tweet, you want to know about it.
Content creators often struggle with consistently creating solid content. Are you one of them? Here are some tips that will help you keep the content rolling:
Keep a list of content ideas that occur to you when you're reading and researching. Don't try to rely on your memory. You'll be able to hit the ground running when you have a list ready to review.
You know that if your content is not widely distributed, you have no chance of capturing new customers. Keep these five tips in mind when you are developing content to be shared:
Publish on a consistent schedule. You want people to get into the habit of reading and sharing your content on a consistent basis. This means that you have to establish a routine of regularly publishing content.
Marketing
Most content marketers agree that creating content requires a well-thought-out content plan. Here are some items to remember when you begin creating content:
Look at the competition's content strategy. Your customers will see the content your competitors create. Shouldn't you be as familiar with it as they are?
Marketing
One of the main reasons that personas are hard for content marketers to create is that you just can't sit quietly in your office and look at data. You need to take action to gather everything you want to know.
Here are some actions you need to take:
Meet actual customers on a regular basis. Customer feedback is crucial.
Marketing
Although some may treat attention as an unknowable commodity, there are actually codified ways to capture it. In his book Captivology: The Science of Capturing People's Attention (HarperOne, 2015), Ben Parr, former Mashable editor, details seven triggers that you can employ to get attention.
These triggers have been drawn from the fields of psychology and neuroscience and help you understand how and why people pay attention (sometimes without a conscious thought.
Marketing
Creating personas for your content marketing strategy is not easy. There are several mistakes that you and your team can make along the way. Here are six common ones:
Mistaking themselves for the customer. This may have happened to you. You begin telling your manager or colleague about a solution to your customer's problem.
Marketing
Lots of moving parts make up a successful content marketing strategy. Make the effort to complete all the content worksheets, and you will be on your way. This cheat sheet provides some tips for making your content marketing efforts successful.Which Kind of Influencer Is Right for Your Customer?Are you making the most of potential partnerships with influencers?
Marketing
You can hold your reader's attention by using good design. So what are some things you can do to help your readers focus their attention? Consider using the following:Headings and subheadingsYou want to make it easy to read your headline. But after your readers’ eyes move from the headline, they are going to be skimming your headings and subheadings.
Marketing
It's important to develop your content marketing strategy before you start writing your actual content pieces. You need to understand what your overall company goals are so that you create content that will help you reach those goals. It's not unusual for companies without a solid strategy to produce content that they think will be engaging, only to find that it misses the mark.
Marketing
Throughout your content marketing project, you want to focus on keeping upper management engaged. You can make your plan easier to shepherd by understanding how the best leaders approach change.
According to the Project Management Institute's "In-depth Report on Enabling Organizational Change through Strategic Initiatives," highly effective leaders do the following:
Focus on well-defined milestones and metrics
Ensure that their senior managers are committed to the change
Take ownership and expect accountability
Use standardized project management practices
Expect that the executives who sponsor the project are actively engaged
With these criteria in mind, read on to discover the kinds of questions you need to answer as your quest for management buy-in continues.
Marketing
The shift in control from marketers to prospects has created a strong need for content marketers to figure out what a prospect needs at every stage of the buyer's journey. One of the things that is central to your investigation of buyer personas is how your customers feel when they buy and use your products. It's imperative to use emotional language in your content — that is, language that evokes feelings.
Marketing
Every generation puts its definitive stamp on society. Here, you look at two groups that have a major impact on your content marketing efforts — millennials and Generation C.
Understanding millennials and content marketing
According to a Pew Research Center study, shown here, 2015 was the year that millennials became the largest generational group in the United States, surpassing baby boomers.
The first question you may have as a content marketer is whether your content benefits from using buyer personas. When you create a persona, you are mixing your own customer data with your understanding of the marketplace to represent your ideal buyer. This is key because if you make assumptions without having real data to back them up, you risk derailing your content marketing efforts.
Marketing
If your company has a content marketing strategy, you wonder if you need a content strategy as well. If you're skeptical as to why you should create a content plan, take a look at some ways it will benefit you. When you have a cohesive content plan, you can
Increase brand awareness and brand loyalty by being in the right place with quality content
More effectively evaluate content performance and revise as necessary
Save time and money and avoid duplicating efforts
Meet customer needs during every part of the buyer's journey
Ensure that you deliver quality content that has been through an effective editorial process
Deliver a consistent message on all your distribution channels
According to the infographic by Demand Metric, shown here, "80 percent of people appreciate learning about a company through custom content and 60 percent are inspired to seek out a product after reading content about it.
Marketing
Your content marketing efforts will be only as good as the strategy that underpins them. Here are five things to consider that will help you avoid making strategy mistakes:
Make sure you understand your business model. If you don't truly know how your business makes money, you are jeopardizing its growth. Take the time to understand your business model and develop the content that supports your goals.
Marketing
When you hear the term mission statement, you probably are thinking "boring." At some point while you were in school, you were taught about mission statements and you found it boring. But the good news is that now, when you look at communicating the reason your company exists, a mission statement becomes important and personal.
Marketing
Does your company have a culture of content (CoC)? Content creation and marketing is front and center in today's businesses, so it's no surprise that it could become part of an organization's DNA.
The term CoC was popularized by the Altimeter Group's authors Rebecca Lieb and Jessica Groopman in their 2014 study.
Although curating content as part of your content marketing strategy is a newer concept, curation is not a new concept. For example, curators have been employed by museums to look at their holdings and pick out the most representative pieces to tell a larger story. You do the same with web content. You use other people's content as the foundation of a new story you want to tell.
Are you just getting started creating your content or is your company an old hand at it? Knowing where you stand is helpful when you begin creating your content plan. To determine your status, you can use a content maturity model.
Todd Cameron has written an article about Kapost's "The Content Operation Maturity Model," shown here.
After you’ve established your content marketing mission statement, you can focus on your company goals. Here is a brief look at how to formulate goals.
Uncovering your content marketing goals
When looking at formulating your own goals, it can be useful to see what other marketers set as their top goals for B2B content marketing.
Marketing
A good starting point for making your content alluring to readers is to understand how people read. Eye-tracking studies have determined that people use two eye patterns when viewing content, as follows:The Z patternPicture a Z. Using this pattern, readers’ eyes move from left to right and then down, and then left to right again.
Marketing
If you understand your business model, you should be able to generate more revenue each year. However, you should also consider adding more than one model if your growth is stagnant. Here are some ways to add more business models:
Actively look for new niches. People's interests continue to change, and your knowledge of the marketplace is only as good as your last research project or customer survey.
Get ready to hear something you won't like: You need to make customer service a part of your content marketing strategy. It's not as sexy as creating great blog posts that get you buzz, plus it requires extra effort.
If your organization takes this advice to heart, though, you will see several important benefits including:
An increase in customer loyalty and retention
Happier, more educated customers
A better understanding of your customer's problems
An opportunity to provide real solutions
All these benefits go straight to the bottom line.
Marketing
One effective way to collect information to get buy-in from your managers is to use the Five-Prong Approach (FPA). The FPA includes five types of content that will help persuade your audience.
This presentation isn't the plan itself. The plan is a significant document that needs to be carefully studied. This is the high-level presentation that you create to get buy-in to move forward and then flesh out the plan further with stakeholders.
Marketing
You company's content is everywhere. If you could create your content marketing plan from scratch, you would be able to do everything effectively and efficiently. Unfortunately, creating from scratch is rarely the case. You have to deal with legacy items and the way things were done before.
In some cases, building from legacies can be a good thing.
As a content marketer, you want to know how using big data will improve your content marketing efforts. You should be happy to know that it enhances your effort in several ways. It helps you:
Be more effective against your competition. By analyzing a variety of data, you can understand your competitors in ways that you couldn't before.
Marketing
Interactive content is a relatively new content type that can really grab your prospects' attention. This content type is becoming popular because it's easy to create with some new tools. It's popular with customers because you don't have to require an email address.
Some examples of this type of content are
Interactive infographics
Quizzes and assessments
Interactive white papers
Advanced calculators
Polls
Interactive videos
Interactive shopping catalogs
You gain several benefits from using this type of content:
Higher potential to develop a long-term customer: When prospects make an investment in your content by answering questions or providing their own content, this content becomes their asset.
Personalizing content is a tricky business. Customers want to have a personalized experience but also want to feel that their privacy is being respected. This is a fine line to walk. But walk it you will, because consumers no longer tolerate content that isn't matched to their needs.
Forbes Magazine named personalization one of the top trends for 2015 and said that "Personalization is not a trend.
Obviously, the desire by marketers to provide customers with exciting real-time content is strong. It's a way to capture attention. The key to using this content effectively is to keep your customers at the center of all your efforts.
Focus on the idea of creating content that speaks to specific personas on their customer journey.
Marketing
To get the most out of your content marketing strategy, you need to understand two important concepts: business model and brand. After looking at the meaning of each of these concepts, you'll find it easier to effectively address each one.
Your business model: Your business model describes how you make money. This concept is inward facing, meaning that you look inside your company to see what drives your revenue.
One battle cry that can be heard throughout marketing departments today is the notion that sharing content should be everyone's job. It used to be that only customer-facing employees were encouraged to share. Now everyone across all departments is expected to help the company gain a wider audience.
Understanding sharing patterns
There are two immediate ways for you to make content sharing a company-wide endeavor:
Focus some attention on your "employee channel.
Most great content marketers know that storytelling is their secret weapon. Now that the web helps everyone share stories, you need to create brand stories that others can tell for you. A great story can capture your customer's attention as no other feature or benefits package can.
People are hard-wired to love stories, but why is this so?
So why should the attention span and distractibility of the average customer matter to you as a content marketer? Obviously, it matters because you want to get your prospect's attention, and doing so becomes more difficult with each passing day. In addition, what marketers have come to believe about engagement metrics (that they consist of measures like page views or clicks) may not be true.
Marketing
To understand how the pieces of a content marketing strategy fit together, organize the components into a framework called the Five Cs. They are (1) company focus; (2) customer experience; (3); channel promotion (4) content creation, and (5) check-back analysis.
Working with the Five Cs framework helps you cover all the bases as you create your content marketing strategy and implement your content plan.
Marketing
Your company's reputation contributes to the acceptance of your content and vice versa. When readers see your branded content, they need to make an immediate decision. They have to decide whether you're trustworthy enough to continue reading. If they decide that you're not, they click away. If they see a review of your business, they can be swayed by negative comments.
Marketing
When you think about your content marketing strategy, you probably focus on what topic to write about and where you will distribute it. Those are important questions. The way you answer those content marketing questions, and many others, is by analyzing your data. When content marketing was in its infancy, many companies flew by the seat of their pants.
Here are some go-to blogs for information about content marketing. This list is by no means an exhaustive one. Following — in alphabetical order — are the blogs you should consider reading.
Buffer
It's software; it's a blog. Buffer is a relative newcomer to the list. Joel Gascoigne, cofounder, launched the Buffer software tool in 2010.
Marketing
What types of data should you mine to gather information for your buying personas? The list goes well beyond the usual prescription to conduct one-on-one interviews. If you take the time to collect different types of data (see the table), you gain the added insight you need to serve your customers.
Data for
Marketing
Design and color play a tremendously important role in the branding of a company. Every year, companies spend millions of dollars to update and refresh their brand. Here are the design elements that distinguish a brand:
Tagline: A tagline can help your potential customer understand the essence of your brand. Think American Express's tagline "Don't leave home without it.
Marketing
Two issues to be aware of when you are constructing your content marketing plan are the user experience (UX) and your customer's habits. Both are related to content in a very specific way:
The UX: The UX is not about the buyer's journey that the user takes on the road to making a purchase. The UX is the experience the user has while navigating your sites and reading your content.
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