“Insanity: Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”
Albert Einstein (Marketing Magazine, Jan 2015).
We’ve all seen THAT Content Marketing fact. You know the Content Marketing Institute one… 51% of UK Marketers have an undocumented content marketing strategy. Documenting your content strategy is the first step. But analysing and adapting your strategic activity could be the missing link to delivering content marketing results.
If you don’t want to go content marketing insane, you need to include agile marketing tactics in your content plans to create content that converts. How? By starting simple, then analysing, reporting and adapting your content processes according to your analytical findings.
Use these timesaving resources to help you throughout the whole content creation process. You’ll become more agile in your marketing activity and build a strategy that won’t send you down the rabbit hole…but will send you to success.
Timesaving Resources To Define Content Topic and Purpose
1) If you’re marketing within niche B2B industries, you’ll love the advanced search facilities of online tools such as Buzzsumo and Followerwonk to search for content trends that relate to your industry.
2) Love a good tweet? #Discover tab on Twitter is a little untapped resource of content trends tailored to your business and industry. Head to #Discover Tweets to find popular content that is trending and see what ideas it can inspire!
3) Don’t forget the content ideas available on your own website too. Using Lead Forensics can give you visibility on who is viewing the best performing content already on your website – are you seeing lots of agency traffic to your product/services pages? This could be an opportune blog or testimonial topic to cover!
Timesaving Resources for Creating (Or Curating) Content
4) From creation to curation, online resources like feedly.com and Stumbleupon are customisable RSS sources you can use freely. Categorise your feeds as you like and find the latest content to curate straight to your social channels. Remember to add value to any existing content by tailoring it to your audience, and always source the author.
5) Free design tools like Canva or Infogr.am give you opportunities for fast content upcycling – Create shareable images, graphs and visual content in a flash that can bulk up your content marketing plans and give your brand some exposure.
6) Take it back to basics with free editorial tools like the Hemingway editor. Keep those pesky adverbs at bay and your readability in check.
7) Can’t remember that word you’re after? “Words that sell” is a thesaurus of best-performing promotional words and phrases (a real book!) that will turn you into the Shakespeare of the content marketing world.
Timesaving Resource for Content Reporting and Analysis
8) According to the CMI, the top 4 business goals of content marketers are: Engagement, lead nurturing, lead generation and brand awareness. By measuring success against one (or all) of these core goals, you’ll be well on your way to content marketing success.
Before you start delving into those content analytics, download the Ultimate Content Planner 2.0 and you’ll be able to:
Plan effectively across the 4 core stages of content creation
If you want to start creating content that converts, you’re going to need to start planning simply and effectively as the basis for your agile content efforts.
Accurately report on your content’s performance according to 3 core business goals
Remember that earlier quote about insanity? By regularly measuring your content’s performance against your top business goals, you’ll be one step closer to developing a SMART content plan.
Become more agile with your content marketing using the Content Dashboard
It’s time to close that loop. By regularly reviewing your content dashboard metrics, you’ll be able to analyse performance based on core organisational goals, adapting and evolving as you go.
If you want to save time and become more agile in your B2B content marketing efforts, it’s going to take a little limbering up in your marketing department… but with some careful planning and effective, regular analysis you’ll be well on your way to becoming an agile B2B content ninja.
Our favorite productivity hacks
Richard Branson (Founder of Virgin Group) “Speak to people – I do get a lot of emails every day and try to answer as many as I can; but I also believe that you need to speak to people. It can save you and them a lot of time.”
Duncan Bannatyne (Chairman of the Bannatyne Group) “One major goal at a time is enough. If you try to do too many things at once, you’ll end up failing on several fronts. I try to focus on big decisions and eliminate trivialities.”
Ekaterina Walter (Gobal Social Innovation at Intel) “I set a timer for those activities to ensure I am on track with everything else and don’t spend too much time on a specific task.”
Brian Halligan (CEO at Hubspot) “I find that people work work work and don’t think think think, and that the percentage of time people work versus think is off. So I see people working a lot, and I say what’s your time spent thinking versus working?”
Bill Gates (Microsoft) “On my desk I have three screens, synchronized to form a single desktop. I can drag items from one screen to the next. Once you have that large display area, you’ll never go back, because it has a direct impact on productivity.”
Phil Libin (CEO at Evernote) “We strongly discourage lengthy email threads with everyone weighing in. It’s dangerous, because it’s way too easy to misread the tone of something. If you want to talk to somebody and you’re a couple floors apart, I kind of want you to get up and go talk to them.”
Wendy Lea (CEO of Get Satisfaction) “I send an email to my team each Monday morning with the top five things I will be focused on for the week. This really keeps me on track and gives me the focus I need.”
Dylan Tweney (Editor at VentureBeat) “I use Instapaper liberally to save articles that I run across during the day, but don’t have time to read during the busy hours. It sends stories to my Kindle automatically, so I always have something interesting to read on the train ride home or in the evening”
