How To Do A Proper Content Marketing Strategy (in just 7 simple steps)

You do content. You do marketing. You need strategy.

You do content marketing strategy with these steps:

STEP ONE: CONTENT AUDIT

The old saying that "in order to know where you are going, you need to know where you've been," is the essential premise for doing a content audit. The audit's purpose is to understand your past performance and your status quo so you can optimize and build a strategy that delivers results in the future.

Your content audit should contain three parts:

1. Data Analysis
2. Brand Listening
3. Internal Interviews

Data Analysis: Use Google Analytics and review digital footprint

Collate data about your brand's digital presence with Google Analytics. You need to gain insights on how your audience is engaging with your website. Read this article (by yours truly) explains how to answer the following questions about your current content performance using Google Analytics:

• How is my audience finding my content? (Channels report)
• Which content piece is performing the best in terms of traffic, engagement, and conversion? (Landing Page report)
• What should my content performance benchmarks be? (Landing Page report)
• How many pieces of content do I need to create a month? (Frequency & Recency report)
• What are the topics I should be talking about, but are not? (Site Search report)
• Is my content successful at driving business transactional goals? (Behavior Flow report)

Next do a website health audit: Use the guide from Everett Sizemore, the Screaming Frog crawler and URL Profiler to identify SEO & UX issues as well as duplicate content issues, broken links and improve your meta markup. This will tell you what need to be fixed and built in order to maximize the performance of your content.

If you need a template spreadsheet to help you collate this data, I recommend customizing Buffer's Content Audit Excel.

Next use a tool like Rival IQ to build a social media landscape and audit your brand's social media performance. This tool will give you insights into how your current social channels are performing against your competitors.

Brand Listening: speak to customers and public

Great, data explains a lot, but nothing is more powerful and insightful than actually talking to people.

• Choose three customers and interview them about your brand

And / or

• Create an incentivized email to your subscribers or eDM database asking them to complete a questionnaire about themselves and the brand.

Ask customers pertinent questions:

• Why did you purchase from the brand?
• Would type of content would you consume from the brand?
• Where do you get your information about the brand/industry?
• How was your experience with the brand, where could it be improved?

Compare the responses from your customers and in the survey to the data you are seeing Rival IQ and Google Analytics. What are the correlations and what are the gaps?

Likewise, engage with the public and measure their digital sentiment. Use a tool like Brandtology to deliver digital trends, conversations and audience insights around your industry vertical and target audiences.

Next. commission a public poll with companies like SSI or Pure Profile about your brand. This will give you an unbiased view of the public perception of your company. Likewise, you could commission a public focus group for the same purpose.

Now you have opinions from customers and sentiments from the public as well as insights about how people view your industry and brand online.

Internal Team Interviews: Speak to employees

You now have data on how the content performs as well as data on what customers and audiences think of your brand. Now ask the question - Is all this data actually aligned with how the brand sees itself?

Conduct internal interviews with multiple departments in the company to find out. For best results, speak to three core teams:

• Marketing / PR / Communications
• Sales / After Sales / Call centers
• Management

Ask such questions:

• How long is our buyer journey?
• Who do you think would be a good ambassador for our brand and why?
• In your opinion, what makes our brand unique?
• What are the key complaints customers have?

STEP TWO: BRAND STORY

Combine the three data sets to identify what is your brand truly stands for, why people care and where your "uniqueness" lies. This process is usually hotly debated within teams, so take your time with this process.

Compare the opinions of the brand with the opinions of the customers with the results in the data. Your goal is to find out what is true internally about the brand, attractive to the audience and supported by the data. Here is your sweet spot. Then work out how that sweet spot can become a unique message / tone of voice in the marketplace and ta da! You have your content marketing Brand Story:

STEP THREE: BUILD PERSONAS

We now know what we stand for and the core message that is to influence everything around your content efforts - the Brand Story. Next, we need to ensure it reaches the right audiences. A content marketing strategy requires you to separate your 'customer' personas from your 'content' personas because each one has a different reason to interact with your brand.

Product personas - are your leads and past purchasers. They care about your product. The goal with this audience is to get them to purchase product or up sell. You need to solve their problems with content. Advertorial content and branded content work with this persona. They are potential influencers of your brand.

Content Personas - These are your 'Subscribers'. They care about your content, not your product. The goal with this audience is to research them on how you can improve business processes, provide better customer experiences, diversify or disrupt your brand or create new products. Check out this article on the value of Subscribers (again by yours truly). You need to entertain, educate, inspire these audiences. Try to minimize talking about your products and yourself with this audience. They are also potential influencers of your brand.

Here are how the two audiences engage differently on a journey. Consider the funnel when you start ideation:

When it comes to build personas, I often use the 'Jobs To Be Done' framework by Clayton M. Christensen. This framework is used to help brands innovate around their customers by approaching personas as "people who buy products to get jobs done", rather than coming up with demographic data points such as age, sex and income.

For example, which below is more effective to answering why a customer buys something?

Below is a template persona around the "Jobs To Be Done" framework, that you can customize when building personas:

STEP FOUR - CREATE PILLARS

Personas in mind, we move to the Pillars. The Pillars are the core messages that you want to develop for your content. They are the ways to tell your Brand Story, as well as address the Jobs that your personas need to do with your products.

When it comes to developing ideas, grab a team together and for each pillar think about how the brand can address the personas using the brand story through the four mediums of Education, Controversy, Data and Emotion.

So here is an example ideation spreadsheet that I've created for you. It shows how this process can look like. It is fun to do, so gather a team for a brainstorming session and make it your own!

Finally, jump on Buzzsumo and review the most shared content in your vertical and topics, as well as consult forums such as Reddit and Quora about the subjects. This will identify what content and formats are popular with audiences as well as help you source some potential social media influencers.

STEP FIVE - DETERMINE ASSETS

The last step you need to complete your content strategy is a decision on what type of content to create and where it will sit.

When working out what content type to create. A good starting point is to use this sweet chart created by Simon Penson from ZazzleMedia:

Deciding where to put the content should ideally always be on an OWNED asset, such as your website, magazine or podcast. This is an asset that you should have full editorial and publishing control - and which, if successful, you can monetize in the future. It also doesn't hurt if your owned asset is as close as possible to your product asset. You want to ensure the path from content to conversion is as quick and as easy as possible for the audience.

Keep in mind the Three-Legged model: Be on Digital; Be in Print; Be in Events. How is your brand performing across these.

Also, consider RENTED assets such as your social media channels, partnerships and native platforms, such as Outbrain, and they role play in reaching your audience. The goal for your content should be to use these as your loudspeakers and drivers of traffic to your owned assets.

Aim to answer the questions: What content needs to sit on my OWNED assets and how do I plan to leverage RENTED assets to promote it?

Nearly.

STEP SIX - STRATEGY STACK

You are now ready to roll the whole strategy together into a strategy stack to help you make a simple content marketing business case. The strategy stack should clearly define the core principals of the strategy, the target audiences, the goals, pillars and assets involved. Here is an example of what a content strategy stack can look like:

Boom!

CONGRATULATIONS!

You've just completed a content marketing strategy that is grounded in research, places emphasis on uniqueness and properly defined target audiences.

Now that you have the strategy theory worked out. Your next step is to figure out how to make your content strategy a reality. This final process revolves around implementation. If you are building a business case for content marketing, your implementation plan needs to include the following items:

• Tools needed to implement the strategy
• People / talent needed to implement the strategy
• Time frames needed to implement the strategy
• Budget needed to implement the strategy

Remember that your strategy is not final. It should by nature be dynamic and constantly evolving. Something will work, some things won't. Failure is a part of the strategy. Ensure you revisit your content strategy every three months to understand what is happening and how you can improve its results.