How to Plan and Build an Extraordinarily Successful Content Marketing Campaign PREVIEW

HOW TO PLAN AND BUILD AN

Extraordinarily Successful Content Marketing Campaign

How to Plan and Build an Extraordinarily Successful Content Marketing Campaign Contents 1. What is content marketing and why do I need it?

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2. Planning your content marketing strategy

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3. Audience

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4. What type of content?

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5. Choosing the best channels for your content marketing

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6. The process

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7. How to measure success

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8. Summary

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If you want your business to succeed in the digital age, you can’t just produce a great product. You have to produce high-quality content too. But let’s be honest: when it comes to content marketing, there’s an awful lot of competition out there.

So how do you get yourself heard above the digital din?

This eBook is packed with help, information and tips. You may be at the beginning of your content marketing campaign, and you may need some fresh ideas to give your current strategy a bit of a makeover.

Here’s what you’ll learn: • What is content marketing? (and what have tractors got to do with it?)

• Planning – How to plan your content marketing strategy and get buy-in • How to define your audience • Your brand story – The best content types for B2C and B2B marketing • Choosing the best channels for your content marketing • The process – How often you should publish, and how to curate content like an expert • How to measure success

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CHAPTER

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What is content marketing and why do I need it?

Believe it or not, content marketing isn’t a new idea. It began in the late 1800s when a farmer called John Deere discovered he could sell more tractors by publishing a free magazine for farmers.

Okay, you may not sell tractors. But when Farmer Deere realised he could profit by giving away useful stuff for free, the concept of content marketing was born. Here’s a modern day definition from Joe Pulizzi, founder of the Content Marketing Institute:

“Content marketing is the strategic marketing approach 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.”

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In short, content marketing is absolutely not about selling. It’s about giving away valuable, useful and shareable information. If you can get the attention of someone looking for a solution to a problem, and then solve that problem through content, you’ll drive more conversions. If you create content so valuable that people would pay for it, but give it away for free, you build a relationship with your audience that leads to trust, loyalty and more sales.

So now that we’ve established what content marketing actually is, how do you begin?

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CHAPTER

Planning your content marketing strategy In this chapter we’ll be walking you through the simplest ways to plan your content marketing strategy. We’re going to be looking at: 3 Creating a content marketing mission statement (and documenting it) 3 Getting buy-in from stakeholders & content creators

The content marketing mission statement Here’s a question for you: why are you creating content in the first place? The “why” is important here, and it should always come before the “what”. Remember, good content marketing isn’t about what you sell. It’s about the information needs of your customer. It’s very easy to become so bogged down with the details that the person at the receiving end of your content gets forgotten.

Why? What?

When?

Okay, are you ready? Here’s our single most important tip: write down your content marketing strategy. Come up with a mission statement. The simpler the better. In fact, there are only 4 elements to it: • Your core audience: Who are you trying to reach with your content? Where do they hang out online? What are they talking about and which questions are they asking?

• Which content will they find useful and shareable? Advice, knowledge, resources, inspiration, entertainment.

• How will your customer benefit? What will be the outcome of your content for your audience? What’s in it for them? Growing their business, improving their home life, saving or making more money, saving time, distracting them from a hard day?

• How will you benefit? What do you want to achieve from your content marketing 6-12 months from now?

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What you should end up with is an answer to this straightforward question: why do we exist?

Once you’ve crafted your mission statement, any decision about what kind of content to create can simply be run past it. If it doesn’t fit, don’t publish it.

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Getting buy-in Getting buy-in is important. Even the most finely crafted content marketing plan will hit the buffers if there’s no real buyin or engagement across all levels in an organisation. Why? For a start, you’ll lack the resources and budget to put it into action. And secondly, on the internet we are all publishers. When you have multiple content creators it’s easy for an ill-advised piece of content to slip through the net. As we all know, it only takes a single misguided tweet for your content to get shared for all the wrong reasons.

Getting buy-in from stakeholders If you work for a medium or large business, you’re probably going to have to explain your content marketing strategy to the boss. This isn’t always easy. After all, you can’t just waltz in, announce “content is king” and waltz out again with a content marketing budget.

Here are a few handy facts for persuading your stakeholders: Higher quality leads: When Hubspot sampled more than 150 businesses, they found that inbound marketing (content marketing) leads are eight times more likely to convert than outbound leads. Let’s just say that again. Eight times more likely to convert.

Lower cost per lead: Content marketing consistently delivers dramatically lower cost per lead than outbound marketing. Unless you’re employing in-house or freelance content writers, there are few recurring costs in content marketing. Compare this to display, print and TV advertising, PPC, PPI or even social media advertising and you’re onto a winner when it comes to the bottom line.

Customer engagement: Your customers are more savvy to marketing than ever before. They don’t like being sold to, they can spot it a mile off and will run for the hills.

Straight to your competitor. They like being communicated with and engaged. Content marketing does this.

Getting buy-in from colleagues It can be tricky getting colleagues on board when it comes to content creation. It’s even more difficult to persuade them to become key content contributors who really want to produce high-quality material. So how do you do this?

Don’t force them. When someone doesn’t want to produce content or finds it difficult, they’re more likely to leave it to the last minute, rush it and come up with something potentially disastrous.

Identify a team: Talk to potential contributors on their own or in groups. Explain the importance of content marketing, the type of content to share and what you’re hoping to achieve. Then ask who wants to help.

Pin up the mission statement: Ask your contributors to hang the content marketing mission statement next to their desk. If in doubt about whether to publish, they’ll have a litmus test to work from.

Set realistic regular deadlines: We’re all creatures of habit. Your colleagues are busy doing other jobs, but if they know they’ve got to do something at the same time every week or month, they’re more likely to do it.

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