One of the biggest challenges I see today with content marketing is that it is largely a tactical solution to a tactical problem. Need some content. Create some content. Call it content marketing.
Many so-called approaches to content marketing are merely just content. Or worse, they are campaigns.
An e-book is not content marketing. A landing page with content on it is not content marketing. A YouTube video of your advertising campaign is not content marketing.
Marketing with content is not the same thing as content marketing!
Content marketing needs to become institutionalized and understood as a strategic approach to marketing across the enterprise landscape. Consider the facts that content marketing is the top priority for many CMOs and yet most have no idea what to do about it except hiring some director of content marketing who will leave in 16 months.
More content is not the answer. Technology is not the answer. Marketing leaders need to establish a culture that delivers customer-focused content continuously. Whew. That’s a mouthful!
But those words are all important (and why I wrote Mean People Suck): Create a company Culture that delivers customer-focused content, continuously. I could add that the content should be delivered across all the channels your audience uses, should ignite conversations and drive conversions. Maybe that’s too many Cs?
In order to make content a strategic solution to a serious challenge inside your business, you have to start with defining the problem and then building the business case to solve it.
Yes, You Have A Content Problem
The journey starts by understanding that the world has changed. Your buyers are deciding when, and how, and where they will engage with you. If your business isn’t creating engaging content across ALL stages of the buyer journey, then you are losing ground to your competition.
What is the cost of bad content? We know that as much as 70% of the content your marketing team creates goes completely unused. Did you get that? Your organization budgets, requests, and creates content. And 60-70% goes completely unused. I have yet to see a brand where that number is under 50%. So half or more of your budget that goes to creating content is completely wasted.
Why? Because some executive, sales person, product manager asked for it. So your company created it. Then the requestor moved on, the content wasn’t tied to any activation campaign, it didn’t have publishing home to begin with!
Add this to the fact that the non-content (media) budget spent your business goes towards banner ads that are ignored by 99.9x% of the audience, TV ads that are skipped by more than three-quarters of us, landing pages that have 99% bounce rates and emails that are opened by fewer than 10-20% of those who receive them.
The reason these outbound media budgets are so inefficient is because the content these programs contain the promotional messages we all avoid, ignore or worse, hate.
So yes, you have a strategic content problem that is responsible for the waste of a significant portion of your marketing budget.
Defining the Business Case
So we need to start the content strategy process with business goals. We need to ONLY create content that has a chance of delivering ROI. In my adventures inside large enterprises, I found a few ways to build a business case for strategic content marketing:
Costs: where do you spend marketing budget with little to show for it? What is the ROI on your advertising? Social media?- Reach: are the measures of your website’s organic traffic and search rankings up or down over time? Check out ours here.
- Engagement: have you mapped your content to the buyer journey? Almost every business I look at has a top of funnel gap.
- Execution: is your content only created with an activation strategy? This is where tactical execution comes in.
- Competition: have you looked at your search positions relative to your competitors. This is my favorite! Use great examples to get buy-in.
- ROI: Are you measuring your Content Marketing effectiveness?
Content marketing is no longer a question. It is an imperative for every single brand.
And as we look to the future, content marketing will become one of the key marketing disciplines along with brand storytelling, customer journeys, data, and technology.
Building the business case is all about finding the budget from under-performing marketing programs, and building a recurring, always-on, consistent program that delivers a compounding rate of return. Argue for your company to start investing in your website with great content today. Because:
Competition: if you don’t the competition probably already is.- Company: if you can’t show marketing ROI from your other programs, content marketing is highly measurable.
- Customers: Your customers want content that engages them not sells at them.
- Channels: any marketing channel you look at is filled with great stories and drowning in shitty ads.
So why are so few companies managing their content and marketing strategically?
Because it’s hard. Everyone produces content. Everyone owns content. And when everyone owns something, no one owns it. The CMO of tomorrow needs to be the Chief Content Officer or she will fail.
Large Enterprises may have heads of content marketing. But smaller companies need to built it into everything they do.
A Strategic Approach To Content Marketing
Ok so how do we get this done? Here are 9 questions to get you started down the road of strategic content marketing.
Defining Your Content Marketing “Why?”
Before you get started, define exactly why you are doing content marketing in the first place.
- What gap in your marketing performance is lacking?
- How much content do you produce along each stage of the buyer journey?
- How much of your content is used, downloaded, viewed – whatever metrics you can get. Are you ranking on the highest volume keywords used by your customers when it comes to your primary product or solution?
- And if you’re really good, what is your market “share of conversations” of your solution area?
Define “Content Strategy”
For me content strategy is the combination of an editorial approach and a business strategy: how do you publish content that meets your customer needs, incites them to act and drives additional business for your company.
There is some debate over the differences between content marketing and content strategy that are debated by some industry insiders who have spent their whole careers on one side of the discipline.
What matters most is that you are thinking strategically, with purpose, authority and intention to drive better business results with content.
What is the objective of your content marketing strategy?
What is your “Content Marketing Mission Statement” that defines your target market and what you want to help them achieve. For example, when I defined the SAP content marketing strategy nearly a decade ago, I defined our mission as: To become a destination of insights for business professionals looking to understand how technology and innovation can help them grow their business, out-perform their competition and advance their careers.
What is your design objective?
Are there visual or blog design standards you want to emulate? Who is already doing content well in your space? What does it look like? It makes a lot of sense to look at the examples of the content marketers who have come before you and look at the different elements of their site. Identify which ones you like and don’t and build those design specifications into your strategy.
Branding?
How prominent do you want to make your company brand? If this sounds like a crazy question, consider your objectives and how likely you are to achieve them if your readers are aware that ultimately you are trying to sell to them. If you are looking to establish trust with your readers before entering into a deeper relationship, you may want to consider toning down the size of your logo and the amount of promotion.
What Keywords Are Important?
Do keywords still matter? Hell yeah! 90% of all B2B purchases start with a search! The answer to the question needs to be driven through lots of analytical research. Take the Google Keyword tool out for a spin. Look at your own web analytics and check and see how you rank for the key terms. Once you identify the gaps, you can define a set of targeted keywords to build into your content production efforts.
What is your Editorial Approach?
Editorial strategy includes what topics, authors and content types can best help you deliver on your strategy? Will content curation and syndication play into the mix. There is a budgeting aspect to all this as well and if you are managing your content as an asset, you need to consider what will provide the most editorial bang for the buck. Can you create an editorial board across your key content constituents.
Do you have an editorial calendar mapped out as the forcing function of your effective content marketing approach. We strongly suggest an annual plan, with built-in, agile flexibility to plan strategically but also be able to adapt to the changing market conditions.
What Will Drive Conversion?
Think about the buyer or customer journey. What is an “appropriate next step” from the articles on your site. Your buyers are probably not going to go from early stage content to a product demo. So think about additional thought leadership offers. Think about subscriptions as the main focus of your efforts. There is value in building an audience vs. buying it. Find the way to optimize your lead conversion flow. Test different strategies.
How Will You Report On Results?
If you’ve defined your mission and objectives, then the next step is to make sure you track the metrics that relate to each objective. Create a report, update it monthly and share it widely.
How can you get this all done? It may sound impossible, but when the stars align, the results are almost unbelievable. Here are three things to think about as you get started:
1. Look for courage and support your leadership to create a culture of content
2. Create training and enablement to develop the skills to get the job done across the organization
3. Select the right technology to support your efforts
Follow these steps, answer these questions, commit to taking strategic action and I know you can be successful. Or call me. I would love to help!
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