The second part of the Bridgeline Digital white paper outlines the ten steps you can follow to increase the success of you content marketing strategy.
1. Make a commitment
Look around – examples are everywhere of companies that have already committed to making content a cornerstone of their marketing strategy. There’s the successful outdoor gear and apparel retailer with over 350 articles and videos on its website and the industrial manufacturer that maintains Wiki pages to help the marketplace stay informed, to name just a couple. The longer you wait, the more opportunities you are missing to connect with existing and prospective customers.
Treating content like a critical business asset means allocating budget for content, holding planning meetings to discuss content strategy and making a commitment to regularly publishing fresh content. This is how to ensure content supports business goals, drives results and meets consumers‟ needs.
2. Know Your Audience
While basic demographic data about website users is easy enough to come by, it can be more difficult uncovering visitors‟ intent on a site. This information, however, is important to have as a company starts to consider the different kinds of content its customers are interested in.
The first step is to establish the one or two overarching goals for the website or a particular effort around which you want to develop content. Is the goal to get people to buy something? Or, is it to encourage people to sign up for a Webinar? From here, pinpoint the primary audience attached to these goals. For example, if your goal is to sell shoes, then the audience is people who want to buy shoes. This may sound simplistic, but defining success metrics and then figuring out the audience needed to attract those metrics isn’t always so straightforward. It is an important step, however, in developing a successful content marketing strategy.
Customer behavior reports generated by a Web analytics solution can also help reveal user intent. With iAPPS Analytics, for example, it’s possible to track what customers are doing on a site and generate real-time reports on the top referring sites, click-through paths and other site behaviors, as well as to create custom audience profiles.
3. Understand the content needs of an audience
Once you know a few things about your customers, it’s time to start thinking about the kinds of content they might be interested in. Don’t just assume all customers want to read articles on a website. Consumers‟ media consumption habits are undergoing dramatic changes right now and doing a little legwork can go a long way toward improving the results of any content effort. One company’s customers might be interested in short items that can be read quickly while another’s might prefer how-to videos. It’s also important to think about where an audience prefers to consume content. Are your customers just on your website or are they also on Facebook, their smart phone or somewhere else? One way to get this information is to conduct a few interviews with customers, asking them questions about what they are reading and which content sites they go back to again and again. Checking out what the competition is doing can also help.
4. Create an Editorial Calendar
“If you are trying to market content in anyway online, you need to have an editorial calendar,” says Dilworth. Few companies, however, currently have one, mainly because they don‟t see themselves as publishers, she notes.
Very simply, an editorial calendar maps out when content will be published over the course of a 12 month period and, in broad strokes, what that content will be. This forces companies to think strategically about what type of content they should be releasing throughout the year. For example, a company that offers portable storage solutions might want to consider publishing an article on its website after Christmas about storage ideas for holiday decorations. This way, someone who is looking for what to do with Christmas decorations, but not necessarily thinking about portable storage solutions, can be introduced to the brand while searching online for ideas. With an editorial calendar, the company can plan for the article, make sure it is published in a timely manner and support it via e-mail or other appropriate marketing vehicles.
“If you know that consumers are looking for certain content and you make it available, it can be a pretty powerful way to capture an audience you’ve never captured before,” reports Dilworth.
5. Have a strong and consistent voice
Grabbing the customer’s attention can be a challenge. Every day, people are exposed to content from numerous sources — TV, radio, the mailbox, in-store displays and kiosks, digital billboards and more. Which is why it’s so important that anything you publish not only stands out because it‟s unique in some way but, also that it be immediately identifiable as coming from you. This should be true even if all the brand markers were removed.
Giving content a “voice” may sound slightly pretentious but, it’s an important step. Try taking a look “inside” the company to search for what’s special or different about it. You may also want to consider if the company has a particular point of view on the issues or hot topics in its market sector. Finally, give some thought to how you want to express yourself. Are you looking to establish a lighthearted, conversational tone or an authoritative, scholarly one?
“The language you use and tone of your voice provide an untapped, powerful way to forge a distinctive identity,” says Handley. She suggests using the language of your customers to communicate brand missions, values and philosophy in simple terms and eliminating the use of corporate speak and buzzwords. Whatever voice you do establish, apply it consistently across all communications in order to avoid any confusion.
6. Be a valuable source of information
If you recognize that more consumers are going online all the time looking for answers to their questions, then it‟s easy to see why customers find value in content that solves their problems. Problem-solving content is also a good way to show customers and prospects that a company is interested in helping people accomplish their goals or meet their objectives and isn‟t simply trying to sell them something, says Handley. Such content builds trust, makes the publisher an authority in their field and encourages people to come back to a site repeatedly.
Since case studies and client narratives explain in real-life terms how a product or service brings value to someone’s life or business, they can be a good way to inform while keeping the
sales pitch to a minimum. “Good content is not about storytelling; it’s about telling a true story well,” says Handley.
7. Be relevant
Now that your content meets customers‟ needs and reflects your brand’s point of view, what should you do with it? You could upload it to a website, add navigational tools and hope someone will find it. Or, you could proactively serve relevant content to users, insuring that every step of a visit to your website is a meaningful and interactive experience.
With an integrated content management system like iAPPS, marketers can do just this by automatically delivering relevant content to users based on their website behavior. iAPPS can also insure that visitors who click through to the site from a search ad will land on a page populated with content relevant to their search.
The way it works is that iAPPS Analytics assigns users to predefined customer segments — such as new customer or Webinar lead — based on what they click on a website. IAPPS Content Manager can then take any content that has index tags assigned to it and show users only the content that is associated with the segment they fall into. For example, a company could create three different versions of a flash movie – one for existing customers, one for new customers and one for purchasing influencers – and serve up the indicated version when someone lands on the homepage.
“All of this can be done without the involvement of an IT department, giving the marketer the ability to control the content and the messaging,” says Brett Zucker, Chief Technical Officer at Bridgeline Digital.
iAPPS is the only Web content management platform currently available that integrates four essential marketing functions: Analytics, eMarketing, eCommerce as well as content management. Because all four main marketing functions work from the same database, iAPPS is able to help marketers more efficiently create customer segments and automatically deliver relevant content to users.
8. Have a clear objective in mind
Because good content is created with intent, it’s always a good idea to ask, “why are you creating what you are creating?” says Handley. Then, consider if there are any calls to action, triggers or other ways to further the momentum of users along the path toward your desired objective.
Using a robust content management system is one way to help build momentum. With iAPPS, companies are able to not only serve up relevant content but they can also map out the order in which content appears. By using iAPPS Analytics to track how content performs, companies can test and come up with the best sequence for driving their desired outcome. Bridgeline Digital calls this “persuasive content.”
9. Spread the wealth
As we’ve already discussed, it’s a multi-channel world these days. Which is why it’s a good idea to always think about ways to repurpose content. Can that Webinar be reworked as a whitepaper? Can whitepaper be broken down into a series of blog posts? (Like the one you are reading certainly will be.) Thinking like this can help insure a brand is presented consistently across channels and that you are reaching consumers who may not be on the website.
With the right content management system, repurposing content can be easy. Because iAPPS is integrated, it’s simple to access all of the content and imagery for the website to create e-mails, landing pages and social media content. This consistency helps mitigate bounce rates, which is when customers click through to a website after receiving an e-mail and then quickly leave. iAPPS can also publish website content out to a mobile device without the need to develop an entirely new mobile site.
10. Track results
Once you have an editorial calendar and can repurpose content across multiple platforms, your content should start behaving like any other marketing vehicle, driving engagement, conversion and revenue. At this stage, it‟s imperative to be able to track the results of your content efforts, just like you would with any other campaign. Using iAPPS Analytics, it’s easy to measure how many people viewed certain content, how many clicked through to another page and how many converted. From here, it should be clear what is and isn’t working, enabling you to tweak your efforts going forward and continue to improve your content’s ability to drive results.
Whatever technology you use, make sure the vendor “totally gets the fundamentals of a killer content marketing strategy,” says Handley. “What’s cool about the iAPPS Product Suite is the way it helps organizations publish, manage, and measure engaging content across so many platforms like websites, blogs, online stores, and email.”
To learn more about the Top 10 Steps to a Successful Content Marketing Strategy watch the Denver Seminar we held with Ann Handley of MarketingProfs and Becki Dilworth on Content Marketing – http://www.youtube.com/user/bridgelinedigital#p/u/0/jYRsZt-9xBY For more information you can also check out the Top 10 Steps to a Successful Content Marketing Strategy webinar follow-up with Q&A: http://blog.bridgelinedigital.com/content_management/webinar-top-10-content-marketing-strategy/