Content marketing strategy

Content Marketing StrategyWritten by Mark Cameron CEO Working Three

Working Three Pty. Ltd. T/A W3, 2014. All rights reserved. 41 Cubitt Street, Cremorne VIC 3121, Australia workingthree.com

Summary

Great content marketers have a documented strategy and follow it closely. This document sets out Working Three methodology and guidance for the development of a content marketing strategy so that you can answer key questions about your company and your audience:

Who do you want to reach?

What value can you provide?

How are you going to deliver that information?

Who is going to manage the process?

How will you measure success and refine your efforts?

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http://workingthree.com


Overview on content marketingThe world of marketing has changed. Smart marketers have recognised traditional marketing approaches are less effective on channels where consumers have greater control than ever before. Content marketing is becoming widely adopted as the approach to address this challenge and is proving effective across a wide range of digital channels.

Content marketing is a marketing technique of creating and distributing valuable, relevant and consistent content to attract and acquire a clearly defined audience – with the objective of driving profitable customer action. Key outcomes include:

The creation of a narrative that aligns brands to customer values

Increased awareness and engagement

Driver of brand equity

cost effectively reach more customers in an ever increasingly complex landscape.

Content marketing provides an opportunity to deliver real value. Think carefully, understand your audience and create an engaging story. Your customers will love you for it.

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Create a Vision

Sometimes the pressure to “get things moving” can become overwhelming, but wait! Spending time defining the direction and vision for your content marketing is critical. Identifying what success means for your strategy at the outset is critical to guide execution.

W3 recommends a vision document is prepared which includes:

Clearly identifying who you will target

The brand attributes that will be expressed

The tone of your content.

A clear statement about how and why your content is going to deliver value to your audience.

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Understanding Your Audience

To be effective, content marketing needs to be focused. General messages for a undefined audience (i.e. all our customers) end up as white noise. Identifying a specific audience is critical so the value proposition can be made far more relevant. You may choose to communicate with multiple segments, but you need be clear which segment your content is for.

W3 recommends:

Starting with what you have access. Review your digital analytics to identify new insights into what your customers are engaging with, and who they are.

Use existing customer segmentation as basis, or start developing a customer segmentation model. identify the differences between segments and what will appeal to

Talk to real customers! Nothing beats real interaction with your customers. Test hypothesis about who they are and what interests them.

Develop out a key persona for each key segment. Fictionalised person’s that are representative of your audience segments will act as a guiding light for your content strategy.

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Map the Customer’s Path to Purchase

The chances of your customers organically arriving at your website or social media channel are slim. The best content in the world is only worth producing if your customers get to see it.

Mapping your customer’s (or each persona’s) conversation pathway provides a clear picture as to where they spend time, the sites they visit, and what they are trying to achieve. This will allow you to ensure you will be present at the locations that matter to them. Working Three recommends:

Focus on a key customer segment (persona) and get that right first.

Map primary touch-points that this persona interacts with.

Use quotes and images from your customer insights and try and be as specific and realistic as you can.

Testing?

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Align your Brand to the Customers’ NeedsOnce you understand the customer and their behaviour the real work begins. You now need to plan the content itself. It’s likely you will need a range of tactics to keep your audience engaged. What are you going to write? How should it sound? What images will you use? Will you need video? How often will you publish? What channels will the content be published to?

Working Three recommends:

Be clear about what your brand stands for. Are you about excitement? Are you about safety? Are you about family values? If so which ones? Be clear and succinct about your brand and it’s tone.

Develop content pillars. These high-level themes that will best express your brand values and speak to your audience

Go into depth and create long story arcs that will keep your audience engaged.

Map the content you are going to create, plot it on a calendar and get ready to start publishing.

Identify your channels, and how content will cascade through those channels and the type of story arc’s appropriate.

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Design MetricsBefore any content is published, knowing what you are measuring and reporting on is critical. This will help you run experiments and test efficacy, and continue to make iterative improvements to drive conversions, whether your goal is brand equity, leads or sales.


Identify the analytics that let you measure the engagement and conversion rates of your content in line with your core objectives.

This may include simple metics such as

reach and unique visits

clicks and social shares (if that is the action you are asking for)

sentiment and,

cost per interaction (if you are paying to amplify the content through methods such as Google Adwords or using tools such as Outbrain)

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Establish the team

Empower a dedicated team (or a key person for small companies) that’s responsible and accountable for the success of your content marketing program. The team will creating, refining and managing your content marketing efforts.


Appoint a head of content marketing

Ensure someone is responsible for conversion rate optimisation [CRO]

A great story teller and can skilfully think through your brand story and design the content for maximum effectiveness.

Consider whether you need to a community manager - The person who will physically public the content on each platform and respond to customers when they start to interact

Free the team up to be agile and responsive. Good content marketing is all about being fast and relevant,

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Working Three Pty. Ltd. T/A W3. All rights reserved. 41 Cubitt Street, Cremorne VIC 3121, Australia workingthree.com

Content Strategy Framework

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Assets

Business Objectives Brand Objectives Customer Experience Objectives

Awareness Target Audience

Content Activities Platforms

Engagement

What digital assets exist currently?What assets need to be created?How will the assets be managed?

What tactics will be used to drive content awareness?How will content be amplified? Who is the target

audience? What are their patterns of behaviour?Describe audience personas?

What are the content themes and topics? Publishing timeline? Publishing platforms?

What is the community engagement strategy?

What is the business expecting to achieve from content marketing?

What expectations will the be created in the customers mind by the brand?

The way the customer will experience the brand?


Content marketing strategy

Marketing

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