Such has been the rapidity of its rise in popularity and importance, it’s easy to forget that content marketing has only recently become such a force in marketing. We adapt so quickly that our minds are almost unable to comprehend a time before Vine, Twitter or Facebook. It came as a shock to many when YouTube celebrated its 10th birthday recently. Ten years? But where did all the cat videos go before 2005?
Accompanying these technological leaps has been a seismic shift in the way consumers interpret and digest information, which in turn has impacted on the effectiveness of traditional marketing techniques. This means it’s more important than ever for businesses to have a strategic marketing approach. This should be focused on the creation and distribution of meaningful and consistent content that adds value, influences customer behaviour and, ultimately, leads to commercial success.
As Thomas Brown, director of strategy and marketing at CIM puts it: “Today’s consumer demands a high level of engagement from brands, and getting your content marketing plan right can mean the difference between the generation of brand loyalty and brand loathing.”
So, what’s the best way to start putting together a content marketing plan? What are the key areas marketers need to get right? And what are the common pitfalls to avoid?
Clear goals
With any plan, the starting point is inevitably setting out what you want to achieve and where you want to get to. Is the emphasis on engagement or are you trying to drive web traffic, leads and conversions? Are you targeting new customers or are you cross-selling to existing customers? As Marcus Stoll, head of EMEA marketing at NewsCred, states: “For a successful content strategy, you need to lay down the foundation of your brand strategy and target audience. You should begin by measuring your brand’s share of the conversation with that audience, then seek to grow that. Your audience plays a key role in your content creation and distribution process: the publications you licence content from, the topics you write about, and the channels you use.”
Part of working out targets also involves thinking about the length of time the strategy will operate for. Anna Wilson, head of digital at Tangerine, recommends a year: “Developing a 12-month game plan that highlights your areas of focus against your goals is key.”
Thomas Brown agrees, arguing that marketers should think about the shape of their content strategy month-to-month, but he also cautions against getting mired in detail: “Be careful not to over-plan: there is no one-size-fits-all approach and you should leave flexibility in your plan for your business to react to topical developments or other spontaneous changes in your industry.”
In practical terms, this may mean the way you plan needs to change. If your plans are physically too static, changing them can be as difficult and time-consuming as implementing the changes. As Jo-Ann Fortune, creative planner at iCrossing UK, explains: “We’ve ditched the spreadsheets in favour of project management tool Trello for many of our social media clients as this lets us be agile when plans change or we need to be receptive. We can also upload creative directly to calendar ‘cards’ so anyone on the account can pick it up.”
Know your audience
Once the goals are clear, the next stage is to gather real insight about the most effective way to achieve them. As Adam Clatworthy, account director at 3 Monkeys Communications, advises: “Gather insights about the business from all key audiences, such as customers and prospects, external and internal stakeholders, the wider market and
major competitors. But also think about the non-obvious audiences, such as the people who influence your target audience.”
Good content – and thus a good content marketing plan – has audience centricity at its heart. Scott McLean, COO at The Intelligent Marketing Institute, calls this identifying a point of mutuality: “To engage with your target audience you need to identify what you have in common as a company with your target audience. We call this the point of mutuality and it defines the theme for your content.”
Knowing your audience also means knowing how to get your timing right so you are delivering the best content at the right point in the customer journey. The B2B buying cycle is often extensive and there are many factors to consider which should be reflected in a content marketing plan. Sylvia Laws, MD of Technical Associates Group, explains this well: “During the initial tendering process, a company needs to stand out to get on the shortlist, so brand identity and value proposition must be superior in order to get noticed. As the process develops, multiple site requirements and a multiple approval process must be considered.”
Common content mistakes
• Being too rigid in planning: always leave space for trending stories.
• Trying to do everything: only use the content that will get results.
• Overtly selling: no one wants to be knowingly sold to.
• Not setting measurable KPIs: define exactly what success looks like.
• Leaving content to the end: be content-centric and get buy-in from across the business from the start.
The bottom line
Ultimately, a content marketing plan needs to have targets rooted in the bottom line. A common mistake in content marketing planning is trying to do everything: videos, whitepapers, social campaigns, blogs, downloadable e-books. They can all be brilliant pieces of content, but you don’t need to use all of them just for the sake of it.
As John Brown, head of engagement at Hotwire, bluntly puts it: “The first pit-fall many businesses make is confusing a content marketing strategy with a content strategy. The first is measured in leads and impact on sales pipeline, the second is measured on ‘likes’ and the size of the CEO’s ego.”
This comes back to setting clear goals. If a business’ commercial objectives can be achieved by targeting 100 people through one video a month on a niche website, then its content marketing strategy should be geared towards that end.
This focused approach to content marketing – what could be called a ‘content-centric’ approach – will lead to fewer red herrings, costly content creation that may look amazing but actually does nothing to increase revenue. It also makes content marketing a multidisciplinary task, incorporating input from all areas of the business to achieve goals everyone can buy into. David Burgess, UK CEO of the Reading Room, explains: “Content strategy should be at the heart of a project – precede, and then run alongside the design, technology and UX workstreams. Key activities such as research, IA, design and prototype should all be multidisciplinary tasks. Book a room for a few days. Bring experts from each discipline together. Draw all over the walls. Come up with the solution as a team.”
Producing a content marketing plan isn’t rocket science but it is all about getting the details right. As long as the foundations are strong, with clear goals, geared to a key audience with buy-in across the business, marketers will be producing a content marketing plan that will become an actionable document providing a clear overview of day-to-day, short and long-term, content requirements.
