How to Create a Documented Content Marketing Strategy

How to Create a Documented Content Marketing Strategy. How to define what conversations to own, how to structure those ideas, and how to create a team that will execute them. Define Your Content Marketing Objectives Why are you doing content marketing? It’s imperative to define success and why content marketing is the best method to achieve your goals. Identify Key Insights that Will Inform Your Strategy Next question: How do you know content marketing will help your customers? For example, to define your audience, take keyword, demographic, and customer data into consideration as you determine insights that will help you create content that drives action. and Who is actually going to create the content? So what will the content you create look like? Not having stakeholder buy-in with the process or agreement around the timeframe and process for delivery/approval/amends. When you are creating ideas to tie to topics and formats, think of the guidelines to which you want your creators to adhere.

A Visual History of Content Marketing [Infographic]
Trump content marketing mistakes with these election lessons
How To Report On Content Marketing [Part 4 of 5]

If you’re new to content marketing, get ready to hear the phrase: “Marketers with a documented strategy are 5x more likely to succeed.”
And if you’re a content marketing veteran, you might be saying: “I’ve heard this a million times, but what does this actually mean? I know what I want to accomplish, but how will writing this down help me?”
The short answer: Having a documented content strategy will help you work smarter, more efficiently, and more effectively.
Consider these statistics from Content Marketing Institute’s 2016 B2B Content Marketing Trend Report: Only 30% of B2B marketers said they were effective with content marketing.
However, effectiveness levels increase with:

  • Experience (64% of sophisticated/mature marketers say they are
    effective)
  • A documented content marketing strategy (48%)
  • A documented editorial mission statement (49%)
  • Organizational clarity on what content marketing success looks
    like (55%)
  • Daily or weekly content marketing meetings (41%)

A good strategy addresses your current business challenges and defines how you’ll leverage content to solve those problems. If you create a comprehensive strategic document, you can ensure all your efforts tackle these elements.
As Neil Patel puts it: “Smart marketers don’t reinvent the wheel every day. Instead, they replicate what already delivered results for them. They know what works because they documented their strategy and measured each detail as it happened. Documented strategies can be measured and evaluated, which leads to better and smarter decisions.”
As a NewsCred brand strategist, I’ve helped enterprise brands like Verizon, Twitter, United Airlines, GSK, First Republic Bank, and Blue Cross Blue Shield create, implement, and optimize their content marketing programs. My goal is to help them become incredible content marketers.
In this post, I will share my knowledge to make it easy for you to gather the right information for your documented content marketing strategy. There are hundreds (if not thousands) of factors to consider when creating or refining a content marketing program, so this guide will take you through some of the most basic elements to create a comprehensive strategic document. You’ll learn how to organize your ideas on what your content marketing program should be, and how to package those items into a neat and precise document around which you can rally and align your team.
In this guide, I will cover:
  • How to define your content marketing purpose and reach a
    consensus for common definitions.
  • How to digest the various pieces of data available to you and
    turn them into valuable insights around which you can build your
    strategy.
  • How to define what conversations to own, how to structure those
    ideas, and how to create a team that will execute them.
  • What key elements to include in your editorial calendar.
  • Templates for distributing content across paid, owned, and
    earned channels.
  • Considerations for measuring content at a regular cadence, and
    optimizing your program.

Before you start documenting your content strategy, you may be wondering: What format works best?
That is completely up to you. How do you and your team work best?
Here are some pros and cons for various formats, based on my experience preparing strategy documents for clients. It’s important to remember that this is a living document that you’ll need to update and iterate upon, based on your learnings. This document will evolve with your content marketing strategy.

Format

Pros

Cons

Google Doc

Many teams can access

Fluid document that’s easy to update

Not highly visual

Information can get lost in very wordy prose

Not all companies allow Google Apps

Not secure

Google Sheet

Many teams can access

Fluid document that’s easy to update

Concise cell organization

Very detailed

Not highly visual

Not all companies allow Google Apps

Not secure

Hard to present to stakeholders

PowerPoint

Highly visual

Easy to present to stakeholders

Forces concise language

Lacks details for project planning

Tedious to update

PDF

Highly visual

Easy to present to stakeholders

Most secure for sharing outside your organization

Static document

Excel Project Plan

Very detailed

Concise cell organization

Often too detailed to present to key stakeholders

Tedious to update

With many versions, changes could get lost/left out of the
master document

Use this framework to develop and define the key elements of
your content marketing strategy. In doing so, you’ll create a
document that’s robust enough to guide your actions and help you
respond to challenges.

Define Your Content Marketing Objectives

Why are you doing content marketing? What are you hoping to
achieve?

People will be asking these questions before they even open your
document – so it’s key to have your first few pages dedicated to
answering those questions.

In this section, determine exactly on what you need your team to
be aligned. This could include everything from specific definitions
(for ambiguous terms like “content” or “thought leadership”), as
well as common understandings on what problems you’re looking to
solve through content marketing, and why now is the right time.
It’s imperative to define success and why content marketing is the
best method to achieve your goals. Rally anyone involved with this
strategy to agree on common definitions and points of view. You
need to align on the relative strengths and weaknesses of your
business before you can embark on fixing them.

Some key questions you answer in your document might be:

  • What is the purpose of doing content marketing for your brand?
    (If you want some inspiration, check out this video by
    Simon Sinek.)
  • How effective are you currently at driving value through
    content?
  • How will you determine content marketing success?
  • What are the metrics and KPIs you’ll measure?

It’s important to begin your documented strategy with a
level-set on what you are trying to achieve; this should be
meaningful to anyone reading your strategy.

Identify Key Insights that Will Inform Your
Strategy

Next question: How do you know content marketing will
help your customers? What information do you have to back up that
this is going to work?

In this section of your strategy, compile everything you know –
but in a way that will resonate with your content and leadership
teams. Unlike the definitions section, this isn’t about giving
clear answers to ambiguous questions, but rather gathering all the
hard facts you have…

COMMENTS

WORDPRESS: 0
DISQUS: 0