Chapter 1

Establishing Your Content Marketing Strategy

In This Chapter

Formulating your business goals

Picking your key performance indicators (KPIs)

Catching customers with the Five Cs

Serving your customers using content

Building product habits

Companies have finally recognized what their customers have always known. If they can't find the content that makes your product easy to use and enjoy, they are off to seek out your competitor. You've missed the opportunity to impress them or, in some cases, even get on their radar screen. As marketing expert Seth Godin has said, "Content marketing is the only marketing left."

This chapter covers what goes into creating a content marketing strategy. Without it, you can't get the traction you need to beat the competition. You also discover each of the "Five Cs" that must be included to make your strategy complete.

Understanding the Components of a Content Marketing Strategy

To understand how the pieces of a content marketing strategy fit together, I have organized the components into a framework called the Five Cs. They are (1) company focus; (2) customer experience; (3); channel promotion (4) content creation, and (5) check-back analysis.

Working with the Five Cs framework helps you cover all the bases as you create your content marketing strategy and implement your content plan. You can choose to go sequentially through the chapters, or pick the ones that relate to your company's present status.

I also present a mind map created with iMindMap software (http://imindmap.com) at the end of every chapter to help you take notes and organize your thoughts. You can download these maps (and see them in color) at www.dummies.com/extrascontentmarketingstrategies.

The following sections walk you through each of the Five Cs in more detail.

Determining the company focus

The first C is company focus. To create a content marketing strategy, you need to begin by looking at your company's business goals. The question to ask yourself and your team is, "What do we want the company to achieve and how do we make it happen?"

You should direct your attention to your goals and business case for undertaking this effort. To that end, Part I of the book covers the following topics:

• Components that go into creating a content marketing strategy: You're in that topic's chapter now, and aspects of that strategy are covered in more detail in subsequent chapters.
• Getting your customers' attention: Content marketers are fiercely competing for your customers' attention. Find out why attention is important and how to capture it.
• Understanding your business model and your brand: Learn about a variety of business models and how to determine what "job" your product does. You look at brand components and access a downloadable brand worksheet to use.
• Getting buy-in from your teams: Getting buy-in from everyone on your team, not just the executives, is important. I tell you how to present your proposal to encourage participation and provide a downloadable worksheet that uses what I call the Five-Prong Approach (FPA).
• Putting your content marketing plan together: Find out how the organization of your company can affect the success of your content marketing efforts. You also see how the work you do on the Five-Prong Approach in Chapter 4 helps you put your plan together.

Uncovering the customer experience

The second of the Five Cs is customer experience. You need to learn what your prospects will think, feel, and do when interacting with your brand. The question for your marketing team to ask is, "Who are our prospects and how will we serve them as customers?"

You must define your audience and analyze the customer experience. You do this by

• Collecting and analyzing customer data: Before you define your audience, you need to evaluate the kind of data you will use. In Chapter 6, you look at the benefits and challenges you may face when dealing with big data to analyze your audience.
• Creating personas: Chapter 7 helps you define the characteristics of your perfect audience by investigating several different types of information. You find out what actions you need to take, and I point you to a worksheet for creating a persona template to use as a model to document your findings.
• Developing the customer journey: You want to understand the journey your prospect takes from being interested in your product to sold on it. Chapter 8 looks at the buyer's mindset and gives you a model to help you document your customer's touchpoints.
• Assisting with sales enablement: Your sales team is facing an empowered customer. Find out in Chapter 9 how your content can assist in making the job easier and more powerful. I also show you how to determine where your company falls on the content maturity scale.

Creating quality content

The third C is content creation. You need to focus on creating quality content (based on your story) that you know your customers want and need. The question to ask is, "How will we create quality content, who will do it, and what will that content be?"

You need to develop a strategy for content, define your messaging, and establish your systems and governance rules. The chapters in this part take you through:

• Creating a content strategy: You should have both a content plan and a content marketing strategy. In Chapter 10, you see how to take an audit of your content to determine what you have and how you can leverage it to develop a true corporate asset. This chapter is chock-full of maps and worksheets: a downloadable content audit worksheet; a downloadable content plan worksheet; and examples of maps that you can use to visualize your own content ecosystem and websites.
• Content types: You want to ensure that you take full advantage of all the types of content available to you. Chapter 11 covers various types including long- and short-form original content, curated content, and visual content.
• Writing and storytelling: You have a story to tell that will connect with your audience. How do you incorporate it into your content? See Chapter 12 to get a feel for the science behind why stories work and how to develop your own powerful corporate stories.
• Processes and systems: You know that without a documented workflow and procedures, your content marketing efforts fail. Chapter 13 spells out the roles and responsibilities of your content team and shows you the benefits of using an editorial calendar.

Developing channel promotions

The fourth C is channel promotion. To have your content make the greatest impact, you want to decide where and by whom your content will be distributed. The question to ask is, "How will our prospects and customers find our content so that they can choose us?"

You want to make your content easy to find and share. You need to know how to promote your content so that prospects can find it.

• Channel plans: Developing a content plan is not enough. After you have created your content, you need to get wide distribution. Chapter 14 explores how to understand your channel needs and shows you a model you can use to put together individual channel plans.
• Sharing content: Sharing is key to any content plan. Chapter 15 looks at why you should embrace share-ability as a strategy and borrow from journalism's Five Ws and one H (who, what, why, where, when, how) as applied to sharing.
• Paid, earned, shared, and owned media: Making the most of all types of media is the only way to ensure that your brand voice will be heard. Look to Chapter 16 to learn about the value of these types of media and why earned media is gaining in importance.
• Syndication and guest posting: Do you think syndication is "old school"? Maybe it's not. Chapter 17 shows you how to get the most from syndication and why you need to be guest posting.
• Influencers: Influencers wield a great deal of power with online audiences. Find out in Chapter 18 how to pick the right influencers for you. I also supply a downloadable worksheet to help you put together your plan for working with individual influencers.

Deploying check-back analysis

The fifth C is check-back analysis. The focus here is on the metrics you choose to determine successes or failure. The question to ask is, "Have we met our goals?"

You want to reevaluate your plans and make revisions as necessary. Chapters 19 and 20 work with you to

• Reassess your business model and brand value You know that it's important to frequently assess how things are working. Find out how you can determine whether business model changes are warranted and whether you need to revise brand plans.
• Reexamine your content marketing strategy: Obviously, a determination of how well your content...