Most marketers see “more content” as the answer to every content marketing problem. But did you know that “more content” won’t solve your current marketing problems if you continue to follow the same misguided processes?
Why rely on patchwork to fill in the gaps when you can devise a plan to achieve your desired goals? Marketers who document their strategies and processes are four to six times more likely to report success than those who don't.
Given that documentation is a key ingredient to achieving your desired goals, it’s imperative that you regularly update your strategies and workflows. You can do a regular quarterly strategy and process refresh to see if anything in your business’ current priorities is misaligned, and then correct it before you create any content.
Here are 3 steps you can follow to make sure you’re creating great content:
Step 1: Reanalyze Your Goals and Map Your Funnel
Check if your content plan is still aligned with your latest business strategies and priorities.
This is important because your content strategy should match all areas of your business. This is where you also look at how content fits into your buyer’s journey in your business funnel.
Know each step users take in your funnel, how your content is interacting with them at various touchpoints, channels or mediums.
You need to identify which key contents help transform people from being a random viewer to audience visitors to being interested – and whatever else that follows.
It is also important to highlight the specific actions that are necessary for each stage of the funnel, and then map how each touchpoint, channel or medium will flow to the next step. For example, you’ll need to know how your vlog channels will support your raw content, and how those touchpoints will convert the audience to leads or even sign ups, if that is your end goal.
Use your content to attain your goals at every stage of the funnel. Your content is not just for traffic acquisition or building brand awareness. Look at your content as a tool that can attract an audience, convert followers into customers, or build and retain the loyalty of your customers.
Decide what your new content plan must accomplish and identify how it will funnel people through their journeys, then you’ll have the data you need to recalibrate the rest of your strategy. Now you’ll be able to know which audiences you need to target.
Step 2: Know How Your Content Can Appeal To Your Audience
Your target audience for specific content platforms or topics will represent the segments of your overall audience. For example, blog entries that are intended for a manager buyer persona at the top of the funnel must have a different tone, talking points and definitely a distinctive goal from your email sequences that nurtures executives getting ready to buy.
If building out a complete buyer profile or persona for your target customers is something that you’re not doing in the past, then you should do this now. You can do this by conducting research on your current audience, customers, and those that you are trying to specifically attract. Segment them and know their personality, traits and behavior.
Keep in mind that these personas could or could not have found your assets, and you might or might not have developed assets specific to attract to each of them at every phase. You should find and take notes of those gaps, and add them to your “to be developed” list, and move on with your planning.
Learn how your personas interact with your brand’s content, such as if they’ve read your emails or blog posts – or if they take any action after reading. Also, take time to talk to them directly, so you can have first hand insights of what they’re working on or struggling with, what they want from you, and what problems you can solve.
Focus on that persona that your content assets will be specifically targeting at every engagement. Marketers who use personas and map content to the buyer’s journey see 73 percent higher conversions than those who don’t.
Running some experiments with your brand messaging efforts is also a good idea. It will help you determine which communication creates a much bigger impact with the people exposed to it. These experiments can help you sharpen your understanding of your audience even further.
Step 3: Editorial Calendar
This stage basically entails setting up and how you’ll execute your plan through the editorial calendar.
Start by identifying your overall promotions, campaigns or themes and know how long you’ll run it, ideally a quarter of a year. Then break it down into individual pieces of content and topic buckets based on what you know about your target reader.
But to use your calendar to help you make a significant marketing impact, you’ll need to do more than simply flow in a stack of working article titles. For each piece of content, you need to pull together research from multiple areas and plan out.
With the above in place, you’ll have a clear schedule to follow when it comes time to finally starting the content creation process.
Plan First!
By looking at the overall picture before drilling down to specific contents or topics, you will allow each piece to be designed to create an impact from the start. You’ll avoid plugging up the gaps as you go and allow you to focus more on important aspects of your brand and business growth.
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