Content Marketing: the art of producing content such as blog posts, whitepapers, infographics, videos, tutorials, and more, then putting that content in front of an audience. It might sound simple, yet many content marketers fail to produce a return on their initial attempts. This failure can be attributed to any number of causes such as a lack of quality content or a lack of planning. Hopefully, by explaining the process of content marketing, we can shed some light on this emerging advertising medium and help others ensure success in their endeavors.
Step 1: HAVE A PLANNING DOCUMENT
I cannot stress the importance of this enough: you need a planning document. You need something that people can refer to at every step of the process, so anyone involved in the content marketing campaign is on the same page. Nothing can kill your campaign faster than to have everybody working at cross purposes, or worse, not knowing what to do once you reach a particular step. Creating a planning document will keep everybody focused.
For each step of your content marketing process, you should have a place where you can write down what was decided, progress made, and results. In fact, as you answer the questions posed in this article you should be taking notes on that document. Don’t worry if you get it wrong now, you can revise it later. Make sure you have fields to describe your company, your audience, your channel plan, your plan on each channel, and how you plan to market to each audience if you have more than one.
Step 2: Know Thyself
The next part of content marketing is understanding who you are as a business. This does not mean knowing the product you sell, but your company culture and personality. Are you serious, focused, driven professionals? Perhaps your company is a laid back group of people who are as much friends as coworkers? See your business not merely as a means to an end, but a living, breathing organism with its own wants and needs, its own dreams, ideas, goals, and fears.
When designing this company persona, try to resist the urge to model it after the personalities of the owner only, or the CEO, or the board of directors. This company persona must reflect the personalities of every employee, from your directors all the way down to the janitors washing the floors. For smaller companies, this tends to be easier: you all know one another, you all laugh and cry together and share your successes and embarrassing stories. Embarrassing stories that you can easily share with the world through the company blog if they do not bow down and acknowledge the majesty of its author.
This is an important part of content marketing because you want your content to be engaging, and people don’t like engaging with something that is “just a brand”. They want a story, they want something that looks, acts, and feels human. Your customers aren’t numbers, after all, they are thinking, feeling, breathing people seeking other thinking, feeling, breathing people. This is one of the primary reasons why the internet has revolutionized the marketing landscape: it is allowing companies to interact with their customers like never before on a level they could never have imagined even twenty years ago.
Step 3: Know Your Audience
Some will say I got this backward, that your personality should be decided after you learn your audience. This order was selected because the company personality works best when it evolves naturally. If you know your audience before you know yourself, it becomes easy to give in to the temptation to carve a company persona focus tested into oblivion that so perfectly matches the wants and needs of your audience that you lose out on that element that makes content marketing work: the human element.
So, after you know yourself, figure out whom you want your audience to be. Imagine your company as a person walking down the street and about to engage somebody in conversation, and wonder which group they would most likely fit in well with. Is it the group of businessmen in tailored suits discussing the Q3 projections for growth in their industry? The parents chatting away on a park bench while their kids enjoy the playground? The guys playing football in the field? Perhaps the circle of hippies singing in another field?
It is perfectly acceptable to emphasize different parts of your business ‘personality’ to fit in with different customer bases, trying to find perfect fits is simply going to shrink your potential pool of clients. The goal here is to try to avoid wasting money marketing towards a consumer base that is probably going to be entirely unreceptive to your company personality.
An essential part of knowing your audience is knowing where to FIND your audience. Are they on Facebook or Twitter? Where do they go to find interesting articles? Where do they get their news? How tech savvy are they? Are they likely to appear at a local convention? This should all be a part of your plan.
Finally, know what your audience is interested in. Knowing yourself and knowing who your friends will be is worthless if you can’t get people interested enough to call you friend in the first place. This will also make it easier to come up with topics to discuss when you move onto creating the content itself.
Step 4: Figure Out What Effect You Want Each Piece of Content to Have
Every piece of content you produce has an objective behind it. Yes, you want to be entertaining and informative, but you also want to achieve a specific business goal. Perhaps you’re trying to make yourself look smart to ensure confidence, or driving traffic to the contact form, you might even be using a multi-tiered approach where you drive people from one piece of content to another to another until they reach the desired destination. Regardless of your goals, remember that everything you produce must have a purpose.
Content created without purpose is content that is costing you money. Knowing the purpose will guide your audience and the content creation itself towards your business objectives: whatever those might be. This section will have to be kept short because there is no template for deciding what effect you desire: you know your business needs better than I do.
Step 5: Assemble Your Team
You likely already have a team at your disposal, but if you don’t have one, now is the time to find one. What should your team consist of? The following are essential:
- Graphic Designer: even if you are only going to be doing written content, having a graphic designer to spruce up your articles or blog posts with unique images helps add to the value of that content.
- Writer: do not depend on freelance writers to create content for you. It is a hit-or-miss endeavor where, for every reincarnation of Hemmingway you discover, you’ll find a dozen barely literate individuals you suspect are lying about their high-school diploma (let alone the BA on their profile). For a dedicated content marketing campaign, it pays to have a full-time writer. Depending on your budget, you may also hire an editor. While a good writer can edit his own content, having an extra set of eyes on the material makes it easier to catch things even the best writers miss.
- Social Media Manager: content marketing is joined at the hip with social media marketing. In this day and age, there is no doubt that social media has great potential for amplifying your content. Having somebody who specializes in managing your company’s social media profiles will help ensure maximum returns.
- Videographer: If you plan on making videos, it pays to have a professional videographer on hand. Making professional quality movies is not as easy as just setting up a camera and dancing in front. There is much editing that goes into the process to make things perfect for the audience.
While the above list is by no means exhaustive, it is a very good start. You may need to add or subtract from this list based on your individual content marketing objectives. In addition to having talent, you want to aim for team members with a proven ability to self-manage and who understand that they have deadlines to meet. In short: they need to be trustworthy, but this is true for any position.
Step 6: Content Creation
This is what it is all about: actually creating the content you intend to produce. You must brainstorm, create, and then edit your content until it is a perfect representation of your company’s professionalism and commitment to quality. This is not a fast endeavor, and you should not be surprised to find the content creation takes longer than every other step combined.
Remember, the content you create will be placed before the eyes of thousands, perhaps millions, of people. There is no real guide here other than to let your artists be artists. You recruited these people because they demonstrated an ability that others lack, and the best way to harness that talent is to not worry about the methods they use to accomplish. Deadlines are important, and it is important to impress this upon your team members before hire they will be held to these deadlines, but beyond that trust your team to do their jobs – that is why you hired them after all.
Step 7: Publishing
Your content was planned, it was created, and now it is time to publish. The methods of publishing largely depend on your channel: social media and blogs are a simple matter of making a post. Some channels demand that you reach out to others and convince them to publish your content. Regardless of the channel, you want to ensure that your content will end up in front of readers. This means if you are not using your social media channels or blog, be sure that they have the traffic to make your content worth publishing. Alternatively, if your purpose is more geared towards SEO, make sure the website in question will produce a valuable link.
Step 8: Repeat
The thing about content marketing is that it never ends. Once you’ve created and published a fantastic piece of content, it is time to go back and brainstorm a new idea with your team and get that content created, all according to your plan. Note that content marketing is also a long process, so do not make adjustments to your plan until you’ve given it three to six months to bear fruit. After this time has elapsed look at your results compared to where you were before you began, and decide where you can find room for improvement. Content Marketing is a dynamic, constantly changing game, and it is not something everybody can manage. If you can’t afford to hire somebody to do the job for you, this guide will make for a solid starting point, there is also a great tutorial on quicksprout.com to help get you going in the right direction.
