Content Marketing - From Start to Finish (A Series)

This is post number one in a seven part series about successful content marketing.

No matter what companies do, where they operate, who they serve and how much money they make, one thing is for sure, almost everyone is trying to crack the content marketing code.

While some seem to totally nail it, many fail or aren’t considerably effective.

Content creation is not a problem, because businesses are creating more content than ever. (See image below)

Clarity and commitment are what separates brands that do content marketing well and those who do not see good results.

Success of brands like Red Bull, Amex, Nykaa, Wingify (makers of VWO) has shown us that content marketing works.

These brands understood the importance of content marketing and committed to it for the long haul. That commitment contributed to their success.

But commitment to do content marketing alone won’t make you successful. You need clarity about who your content is for, what your content will help your achieve, why you are creating content, and how you will help them through your content. You find this clarity by creating a content marketing strategy.

How To Get Started With Your Content Marketing Strategy

At the core of a content marketing strategy is a note of your business and customer needs, with a detailed plan for how you will use content to address these needs.

In other words, your content marketing strategy outlines how you will create content that drives value for your audience and also drives value for your business.

A good content marketing strategy has four key components:

• Your target audience,
• Your brand positioning,
• Your budget and,
• Your goals & objectives.

So the questions you should try to address through your content marketing strategy, could be something like:

• Who is your target audience?
• What is the budget you have to work with?
• When will you know you've reached your Goals / Objectives?
• Where does your brand/content sit in the market?
• Why is content marketing the right fit for this initiative?
• How do you plan to execute it? (including the tactical 4 C's - Consumer needs, Cost, Communication, Convenience

Objectives should guide metrics and not the other way round. Channel you choose should be based on the audience. What action you’ll take, what type of content you’ll create, what will be your frequency of publishing is all based on how users behave on a platform and what they expect to see there.

In this piece, I will share an overview of content marketing objectives, importance of your content mission, and how to identify your audience.

In future posts, I’ll dig deeper into each of these and also talk about identifying right metrics and KPIs based on your content marketing objectives; developing personas; and putting together your content marketing strategy.

1. Understanding Content Marketing Objectives

Your content marketing objective can be highly individualized but organizations typically use content marketing to build an audience and to achieve at least one of these profitable business goals: increased revenue, lower costs, or better customers.

Based on your business goals your can choose to leverage content marketing for,

• Developing brand awareness
• Establishing thought leadership
• Driving traffic to your website
• Generating leads
• Improving retention and driving upsells

Content marketing can also help you,

• Build new revenue streams
• Create a 'content' product
• Generate audience insights via subscribers to enhance customer services, marketing and sales

Whatever your objective be, it should align with your business goals and your content marketing maturity stage.

2. Understanding Target Audience

To create an effective content marketing strategy, you need to understand the audience you are trying to reach and address. This is important because your ultimate goal with content marketing is not only to attract people, but to attract the right people. These people that you intend to attract should not only include your prospective customers, but also subscribers, advocates, and influencers.

If you are selling enterprise software, then your audience is not teenagers. This is obvious. But we can't stop there. We need to zoom in to see who are right audience for enterprise software. Starting thought will be to target CIOs, CTOs, or a Director of IT. But this may not be the right approach because B2B decisions are not made by just the C-Suite. They are made by a committee, which includes people working at different levels from departments other than IT. With this understanding, it makes sense to target your content to the ITDMs (IT decision makers) and also to the BDMs (Business Decision Makers). Both ITDMs and BDMs can include people from practitioners to C-suite.

Our audience persona will eventually help us understand the kind of content we should create, the channels we should use to publish and promote it. I’ll share how to develop audience personas in one of my future posts.

3. Define Your Content Mission

Haven’t we already spoken about the objectives?

Well, yes! We have discussed what you want to achieve with your content marketing efforts. But are you going to tell your audience that all you want to do is to push them to the next stage in your sales funnel?

No.

Rather you want to tell them - how you add value to their lives.

That’s what a content mission is.

Here’s how a content marketing objective is different from a content mission:

A good content mission always includes the outcome for the audience (what they will get) and most of the times will also mention what it delivers.

Content Mission Statement Inspiration

Let’s understand more with these examples.

P&G everyday: At P&G everyday, we get that life can be messy, but sometimes that's what makes it fun. We're here to embrace real life right along with you while providing little ways to make it easier, like recipes, ideas and inspiration for your home, and deals on products you love.

• What P&G everyday delivers: recipes, ideas and inspiration for your home, and deals on products you love.
• Outcome: make your life little easier.

Digital Photography School: This ‘School’ is not a formal one by any means. There are no classes, no teachers, no exams – rather it’s a challenging and enjoyable learning environment where we share tips and techniques to help you improve all aspects of your photography.

• What Digital Photography School delivers: photography tips and techniques in an a challenging and enjoyable learning environment
• Outcome: improve all aspects of your photography.

Inc.com: Welcome to Inc.com, where you can find everything you need to know to start and grow your business now.

• Outcome: start and grow your business.

Another structure for creating your content marketing mission

Harvard Business Review recommends a basic structure — “verb, target, outcome” — that you can use to create a (content mission) statement that’s eight words or less.

The road to content marketing success is littered with wrecks of content marketing efforts that started without defining the right objective, focused on the wrong audience and lacked a clear content mission. Now you’ve read this post, I wish you will do it right :)

Thanks for reading.

This was the starting piece in a series of posts on content marketing that I’d be writing to help you understand content marketing better. I may choose to write couple of posts on different themes in between that will not be part of this series, but I promise to return to this series and not finish until we are done here!! Sounds like a plan?

Thanks to Daniel Hochuli for reading the draft of this post and sharing insights to improve.