Your company is doing great things for the community. Your company's products and services pioneer industry advancements. Your employees are knowledgable, resourceful and creative and you want to share that expertise with partners, vendors and customers. So, how do you share all these ideas and information?
Content marketing is a strategic approach to researching, developing and distribution valuable information for your target audience. It can boost search traffic, strengthen audience engagement, expand brand awareness, and convert sales. Haphazardly posting stories on your blog, website, social media or other channels will provide limited benefits. Successful content marketing programs lead with a plan.
Here are the necessary components to building your content marketing plan:
Content Pillars: Categories or themes that content is derived from. For example, if you’re a education company you may group your content into these buckets:
Student Stories
School News
Trends in Education
Topic: The focus of the story. There will be multiple stories within each content pillar and the topic is what differs one from another. If the content pillar is Trends in Education, perhaps you will produce a content piece on schools turning to four-day weeks.
Type: Framework for how the information is compiled and presented to the audience. There are hundreds of options, but here are a few to get you started:
Chart
Graph
Giveaways
Infographic
Interview
Listicle
Editorial Opinion article
Q&A session
Quiz
Report
Whitepaper
For the four-day week piece, maybe you would choose a well-designed chart to feature the pros and cons of schools interested in implementing this change.
Channel: Medium for delivering communications such as:
Social Media (Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube, etc.)
Television
Radio
Magazines
Blogs
Newspaper
Language: Be sure to note what translations you'll need for each piece.
Links: Always include a call to action which is often encouragement to visit a website. Don’t forget to establish a process for tracking and measuring the response to your call to action.
Assets: Resources you need to produce the content piece. It’s helpful to inventory these at the start of your project so you have a full account of what is available and how to access it when needed. Assets could be:
Photography
Video footage
Designed graphics
Copywriting
Music
Gif
Owner/Author: Who is assuming responsibility for producing the piece. Sometimes there are multiple individuals working on different aspects of the project such as a project manager, writer, video editor and composer. Make sure you note who is taking care of which part to ensure the content piece is delivered complete and on deadline.
Title: Headline for the content piece which entices people to click, engage share and act on your content. There are all sorts of articles that recommend how to structure a winning headline if you want to dig deep on this. One common point is to know what your audience is interested in and how they talk/write/think to be relevant to the audience.
Publish Date & Time: If there’s no deadline, does it ever get done? Know the best days and times to reach your target audience and plan to release content within that timeframe to increase opportunities for engagement.
Tags: Keywords that associate content to certain subjects, accounts or conversations. Many web users find content and new products, services and brands by searching for topics with hashtags (#). Take some time to research existing hashtags to evaluate what words are performing well, which online conversations you want to take part in and accounts you want to associate with. Additional tagging may include the handles of companies that may have a relationship to your company or the information in the content piece. For the education company’s chart on four-day weeks, maybe you want to tag the author (@McKinsey) of a report on the topic.
Plan and execute your content marketing strategy with measurement in mind. Nothing is worth doing unless it's helping you realize your goals. Stay tuned for more blog posts about content marketing measurement and promotion. Please share with us your tips for what content marketing hacks work well for your company.
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