CHAPTER 8
Attract, Engage, and Inspire: Building Your Content Plan
What a journey we’re on. We’ve identified our goals and know who our customers are as well as what they care about in terms of search keywords and social topics. Now it’s time to translate that planning, research, and insight into an actionable content plan.
Content marketing is an approach to attract, engage, and inspire customers to a logical conclusion to buy and share through content that empathizes with the varied interests and behaviors during the buying cycle.
As a marketing discipline, content marketing has skyrocketed in popularity, with over 60 percent of content marketers planning to increase their spend over the next 12 months.1 It’s no wonder content has stepped into the spotlight, as consumers have become numb to the overabundance of traditional advertising and now spend more time educating themselves online about products and services before they buy. Content is the reason search engines exist, and it’s also a common vehicle for social sharing in the form of text, images, video, and audio. When marketers can effectively align their knowledge of search and social keyword demand with a relevant content plan, it helps connect buyers with products and services more efficiently, thus resulting in a better customer experience. There’s no doubt that content is the key to more effective online marketing. The question is, “How do we to plan, create, optimize, promote, and measure a content marketing plan that helps our brand become the most relevant choice for our target audience?”
KNOWING YOUR CUSTOMER IS ESSENTIAL FOR EFFECTIVE CONTENT MARKETING
Chief Manufacturing is a leading provider of professional AV solutions to dealers and distributors across several industries, including education, health care, and hospitality. In order to improve the effectiveness of their content marketing, Chief needed to identify key differences in the customer preferences for information and communication. The target audiences for Chief include dealers and installers, each with unique characteristics worth considering when developing content plans.
Focus groups revealed that dealers were starting to skew slightly younger than in the past. With the changing demographics, dealers were increasingly savvy about online sources of information, including reading blogs and other forms of digital communications. This trend did not hold true for dealers who skewed slightly older and still preferred to receive print communications.
The second target audience, installers, was similarly split as far as age range and type of content consumption, resulting in the tendency to look for a different type of information. Whereas dealers were more open to receiving sales-oriented content and product overviews, the installers were more interested in receiving how-to information about the product, including specifications and installation details. The marketing group at Chief understood that the installers have the ear of the dealers, so providing easy-to-use documentation for Chief’s solutions was a priority to ensure that the dealers continued to select Chief products.
As Chief developed its content marketing strategy, it was essential to identify the needs of each target audience, types of content they prefer to consume, and the feedback loop between the two audiences and how that might impact future purchases.
The result was a content plan that outlined unique concepts and delivery mechanisms for each audience that positioned Chief for success in communicating core messages about its offerings as the most relevant choice for each distinct customer segment.
The Chief Manufacturing story is a simple example that illustrates the importance of understanding different customer groups and then planning content accordingly to increase marketing effectiveness at inspiring sales as well as developing better customer relationships.
IS YOUR MARKETING MECHANICAL OR MEANINGFUL?
Most companies are more than happy to increase leads and sales with good content marketing. But what about fostering better customer relationships? What about better customer satisfaction, lowered costs for support, and an increase in both retention and referrals? Whatever the reason companies publish content online, that content can leverage keyword optimization for better visibility where prospects, employees, or customers are looking. Social discovery and sharing of content is another opportunity for companies to better connect their messages and value with communities that are interested. Business value from optimized and socialized content marketing comes in many forms, and to get a good picture of what that means, it’s important to understand the role of content across the customer life cycle. (See Figure 8.1.)
FIGURE 8.1 Customer and Content Life Cycle
Awareness. Content marketing contributes to the development of brand awareness by helping people find your product or service through search, social media, or wherever content can play a role as an information source.
Consideration. Once prospects know about your brand and solutions, content can educate them on your unique selling proposition. Content provided on your website, blog, social media networks, and other online platforms should make it easy for prospects and customers to understand your advantages and key benefits. A strong search and social media presence can boost credibility and shorten sales cycles.
Purchase. The prominent visibility of your content for long-tail search queries that represent a specific intent to purchase is essential with any website that is expected to attract new business. Once you’ve gained customers’ trust and respect and they have decided to purchase from you, it’s not the end of the line for content marketing and optimization. There’s more work you can do in terms of refining the effectiveness of your content’s ability to produce inquires and sales. Website statistics analysis and online sales paths that track the content viewed by your customer before purchase can assist with refining everything from the keyword focus of your search and social media optimization to optimizing for improved conversion performance.
Service. Content and social applications encourage customers to have a great experience on your site, even when they aren’t making a purchase. As we discussed in previous chapters, content like FAQs and other information about your brand offers customers a baseline postpurchase support service they can turn to at any time of day to find answers without having to contact one of your customer service resources. Making it easy for customers to find answers to their questions can save on your support costs and lead to better customer satisfaction.
Loyalty. People love your products; they visit your website; they engage with you on social networks. Each of their interactions with your content offers even more insights into the motivations and interests of your customers. Newsletters, webinars, helpful how-to articles, and similar content offerings that help customers get more out of their purchases and the brand relationship can foster loyalty above and beyond the competition.
The value of content marketing goes beyond attracting leads and sales—to fostering goodwill, brand value, and empowerment of fans to refer products and services they like to others. As you develop and implement your content plan, consider the holistic impact of content on reaching and engaging with your customers throughout the relationship.
With an understanding of our business and marketing goals, target consumer personas, and how those insights translate into keywords and topics, we are ready to create an optimized and socialized content plan.
Consumers tend to engage with information that is most interesting, timely, and relevant to them. Content marketing isn’t as simple as publishing and distributing what you think potential customers want to see. There has to be some sort of order and strategy in place to achieve mutually beneficial results. An editorial calendar is vital to any content marketing effort for bringing together your understanding of customer goals and the key benefits of your products into a schedule of useful content and media creation.
Traditional media outlets such as television news, newspapers, and magazines use editorial calendars to plan the types of stories they will cover. The goal of these calendars is to secure a steady stream of fresh content consistently into the future. They also ensure the content is relevant and suits the needs of content producers, readers, and advertisers.
Editorial calendars for content marketing purposes are very similar. To create one, it takes an understanding of the communities and individuals you’re trying to reach. Our discussion of personas in Chapter 6 covered most of that homework, but it’s essentially about researching customer preferences in terms of content discovery, consumption, and engagement. It’s also about answering some important questions: What are your target customer’s needs and goals? What do they search for, and what do they talk about on the social web relevant to your solution? The insights from those answers are condensed into topics and keyword ideas. Relevant search keywords that are descriptive of the brand, products, or services along with the relevant topics of interest to customers on the social web are analyzed for popularity and competitiveness. This insight is then synthesized and organized into an editorial calendar.
INVENTORY EXISTING CONTENT AND MAP THE GAPS
Our objective is to not only create new content, but also to leverage all of our online content to build business value for prospects and customers. Taking an inventory of current content assets, including website, social presence, microsites, and other media, helps us understand where gaps exist between those topics we’ve already covered and are known for in search, social, and within the target community and those we have not covered, or perhaps covered inadequately. This research will help identify content topics of priority where there is a high degree of interest and relevance for our customers and insufficient content in place to meet that demand. The editorial and content plan addresses those gaps to ensure we are publishing relevant, useful, and shareable content that supports overall brand messaging and business goals, as well as inspiring readers to take the actions we desire. (See Figure 8.2.)
FIGURE 8.2 Blog Editorial Plan
BASIC PROCESS FOR CREATING AN EDITORIAL CALENDAR
Determine topics of interest. Topical relevance is essential for meeting customers’ needs, answering questions, and motivating return visits, whether topics are directly about your brand or related information that customers can benefit from. Research into customer segments, persona development, and keyword research will reveal a gold mine of such topics. Typically, we work with primary topics and supporting, or secondary, topics.
For example, Widgets might be a primary topic, but color variations, sizes, applications, end benefits, specifications, and other value attributes, as defined by customer research, would represent secondary topics.
Create content categories. Your topics of interest will be divided into certain categories chosen by you to provide some continuity and organization to your published content. Typical categories for an editorial calendar can include breaking headlines, industry news, ongoing series, feature stories, in-depth product or service reports, polls, special promotions, events, tips, lists, and more depending on platforms available for publishing and editorial direction for customer segments.
Assign content types. Editorial plans are typically developed for a primary publishing platform like a website, special resources section, blog, or microsite. Some content will live on the company website or blog and other content will publish elsewhere, such as on social media platforms like YouTube, Facebook or Pinterest. Content types within the publishing platform that represent topics of interest can vary according to customer preferences. Articles, videos, images, long-form content, short-form content, and many more formats are possible. I’ve listed 30 different content types later in this chapter to give you some ideas. The important thing is to be relevant: to your customers, your brand, and to search engines and social communities with the content types, formats, and topics you choose.
Establish a timeline. It makes sense to prepare a regular publishing schedule according to your resources and the expectations of your targeted customers. At the same time, business often fluctuates or possesses varied timelines due to seasonality, sales cycles, and changes in the industry or company. Allow in your timeline for wildcard content and for adaptations to your schedule. Things may simply come up that you’ll want to define within days or weeks (versus three or six months in advance). Regarding seasonality, ask yourself: Is there a product or service you offer that is particularly popular at a certain time of the year? Is a holiday approaching that might influence your target customer? Consider the overarching theme of your content structure as it pertains to the calendar and cyclicality of your business as well as a consistent and regular publishing schedule.
Chart a publishing schedule. Take all of the information from the previous steps and organize it into a plan for creating your content. Whatever your publishing method, whether you want to create videos, blogs, articles, or other media, design a schedule that allows you to keep up a certain regularity and that allows you to cross-promote your content between media and publishing channels. For example, a blog post, press release, and video on a very similar topic could all cross-link or make reference to an authoritative report or e-book. If you have dedicated copywriting resources, assign topics or beats for them to cover so they can build up some consistency and expertise in those areas of focus.
Incorporate other marketing plans. As with any marketing effort, content marketing practices should integrate with other marketing, advertising, and PR efforts. That could include online and offline communication tools and media. It’s not just about marketing, either. The content published by customer service, human resources, public relations, and other departments may offer opportunities to cross-promote as well. Depending on the size and structure of your company, it may make sense to create an informal content council to meet at least quarterly to talk about how you can work together across different departments in the organization to leverage resources and cross-promote.
Continue the process. After you’ve designed your content marketing plan and have started creating, optimizing, and promoting great content, it is time to head back to the beginning. Evaluate your content effectiveness to determine the topics that most interest customers and inspire intended outcomes like shares, referrals, engagement, network growth, leads, and sales. Expand on categories that are popular, pull back on those that fail to perform, and fill in the gaps where your content might be incomplete. Create a cycle of creation, publishing, interaction, analysis, and refinement.
A well-planned, thoughtful, and adaptable content plan can be instrumental for online marketing performance, making an editorial calendar essential. You might not consider your company to be a publisher, but that’s exactly what it becomes when you embark on an organized content marketing effort.
With a content plan in hand, it is time to take a closer look at social content promotion. Search engine optimization passively attracts relevant traffic to your content. Social media promotion and networking actively solicits and invites them to it. The added benefit of social media promotion integrated with search engine optimization is that social sites can send traffic to your content, and they can also provide signals to search engines that will positively affect your natural search engine positioning. Social Media and SEO are working together more closely than ever for companies that are marketing through content online.
A social content promotion plan outlines and provides guidance towards how content will be shared on online networks that have the most potential to attract traffic for your content.
Understanding which social networks your customers are spending time on is important for social promotion, but there’s another target audience they may be even more important. The irony is that this group is most often overlooked by companies evaluating whether they should participate in the social web. What group am I talking about? Influencers.
Well-connected bloggers or participants on specific social channels relevant to your topics of focus can deliver significant and qualified traffic to the content you’re promoting. Some companies might say, “Our customers are not on Twitter or Facebook. They don’t read blogs.” What’s important is whether those individuals who influence your customers are themselves influenced by content they consume on the social web. Of course it’s ideal when both customers and influencers can be found in rich dialog on a certain social channel, but customers are not always active participants. Influence is a very valuable currency on the social web, and creating relationships with individuals involved in relevant networks who can in turn influence those in your category can be very productive for content promotion. We cover more about social network development in Chapter 11, but know that content promotion through social channels is an essential part of your content marketing plan.
Social media in general can be a powerful force for influencing today’s technology-savvy consumers. As with any marketing plan, creating a strategy for social media promotion can make a huge difference in the distribution and reach of your content.
Content doesn’t have to be limited to text and images. Different types of content can appeal to diverse types of people and serve varying purposes. Any content that can be optimized for better visibility on search engines can also be shareable with social. As I like to say, “Optimize for search, optimize for share.”
One of the biggest challenges for companies is the creation of content. Yet content creation is one of the most effective SEO tactics.2 To help generate ideas for the types of content you might consider with your content marketing plan, here is a list of 30 different content marketing tactics.
Articles. Using articles similar to those that would be found in a newspaper or magazine, article marketing includes the creation of content with the intention of distributing and syndicating it via various means, including article aggregator websites.
Blogs. Publishing original content using blog software, which organizes pages sequentially and/or categorically.
Case studies. Case studies are a written description that tells how a problem was successfully solved with a product or service.
Digital newsletters. These online newsletters are often published according to a schedule and regularly provide a source of useful information, promotion, and links to web pages that further engage readers.
E-books. Longer than a blog post or online article, an e-book provides a more in-depth analysis of a particular topic of expertise.
E-mail. From timed sequences of articles to special promotions, messages via e-mail continue to provide the highest conversion rates of any online marketing tactic.
Images. Content need not be overly verbose. Like the old saying, a picture is worth a thousand words—and sometimes a few thousand clicks.
Infographics. Just as the name implies, the field of infographics translates information, data, or knowledge into graphic visual representations. For example, why talk about percentages in the usual boring manner when a pie chart and textual facts can get the point across in a more interesting way?
Microsites. These types of websites are dedicated to specific campaigns or promotions. They may also be created to serve as a social hub for content that doesn’t fit on the corporate website or blog.
Mobile content. Content and applications specifically created and formatted for mobile consumption are increasingly valuable in some markets.
News releases. Press release format, application, and distribution has changed so that press releases reach beyond journalists—they can be effective for directly appealing to consumers, too.
PDFs. Many of the types of content mentioned here, such as articles, case studies, white papers, and more, could be converted into PDFs and easily distributed.
Podcasts. Though not practical for all industries, audio files provide an effective promotion opportunity for some markets. Such audio files are often formatted as interviews, news reports, or infomercials. Like newsletters, podcasts are often distributed according to a schedule.
Research. Surveys, studies, research, and statistical data that provide insights can be very engaging and shareable. The information provided by them can work in tandem with many of the content types listed here.
Slide shows. Digital slide shows are often used to make presentations and pitches in person to make B2B sales, but they can just as easily be uploaded to the Internet to appeal to a wider audience.
Social. Content created exclusively for social networks like Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn have significant impact on awareness and engagement.
Traditional media. Content marketing can also be carried out through traditional digital media, including newspapers, magazines, television, and radio.
Videos. Not everyone is engaged through reading or static imagery. Some of the most engaging and rich content is in video format.
Webinars. One of the more advanced content marketing techniques to be sure, webinars are audio combined with presentation slides, often done in real time with a question-and-answer session and the opportunity to chat. Once a webinar is finished and has been recorded, it can be stored in an online archive for future audiences to view.
White papers. White papers are used to educate readers and help people make decisions. These authoritative reports or guides dive deep into a specific topic and can be very persuasive.
The mix of content types that you employ with your content plan is really dependent on target customer preferences for content consumption, your own resources for creation, and prioritization of content types for their effectiveness. Consider not only the individual content object, but also how content can work in a series such as a sequence of infographics or articles, as well as in collaboration with other types of content and media that are included in your overall marketing plan.
With a diversity of content types and promotion channels, a hub and spoke model for publishing can be very effective. The focal point provides a destination of organized content and media that can be referenced by customers, the media, or any other audience a brand is after. Blogs are commonly used in a hub and spoke scenario since they bridge the gap between corporate and conversational content so well. (See Figure 8.3.)
FIGURE 8.3 Hub and Spoke Publishing
For example, TopRank Online Marketing uses a blog (toprankblog.com) as a hub with spokes that serve as channels of distribution. When we publish a blog post, some of these channels are activated, and the blog post is promoted through them. In some cases, such as RSS and Twitter, it’s automatic. In other cases, it depends on the media included in the blog post, such as videos which are promoted though YouTube as well as other video hosting services. Some of the promotion and content channels we use with blog marketing include:
- Facebook fan page
- Google+ page
- YouTube channel
- Flickr
- RSS
- RSS to e-mail (FeedBlitz)
- E-mail newsletters
- Guest blog posts
- Contributed articles to industry websites
- SlideShare
Our blog posts follow an editorial calendar with title, keywords, categories, tags, and methods of social promotion already defined. As we build out a keyword portfolio of visibility within search engines and the topics we’re known for on the social web, TopRank’s blog functions as the hub with spokes on various social media promotion channels that help to create an online footprint of an agency 10 times our size. If you’re a small business, you can achieve the same kind of impact. What we recommend to many small businesses is to start with a hub like a blog and two or three spokes relevant to customer interests and the online communities where they spend time. As the company grows relationships, credibility, and savvy about content creation and social promotion, additional social spokes can be added.
A hub of content that promotes through social media channels and networks is the basis of many social media SEO tactics. This happens in a few different ways. First, when your social content (tweets, public Facebook updates, blog posts, YouTube videos, etc.) becomes keyword-optimized and attracts links from other websites, it will also attract natural search engine traffic.
In the case of Google it also helps that your Google+ brand page has been added to as many other Google+ circles as possible. As a result, when a search is performed on Google, the chances of your website content appearing in search results is much greater for those who have added your personal or brand Google+ account to their circles. How do you get others to add you or your brand to their circles? By creating and sharing useful content, commenting, plussing others’ content and comments, and engaging with others on Google+.
The second way has to do with the fact that most social content is focused on specific topics. That’s the nature of social media. It’s about like-minded people connecting and sharing. When that content is keyword-optimized and easy to find in search by people who are actively looking, you can grow your social network simply by being easy to find and useful. Of course, when you promote the content through social spokes, the exposure to others might inspire some of them to link back to the source (your hub). Those links can send traffic and may also help Google and Bing decide your content is a great answer for what people are searching for. In other words, promoting useful and topically relevant content can attract links that help grow your social networks and improve your ranking on search engines.
The hub and spoke method of content organization and promotion can be applied and expanded in multiple ways for growing awareness of your brand, products, and services on search engines and within social networks. Better visibility on search engines and social networks isn’t limited to marketing benefits, though. When journalists, analysts, and bloggers see your brand appear prominently on Google.com, Facebook, Yahoo! News, Bing, Twitter, as well as mentioned on prominent blogs, it will be clear that your business is an authority on the topic they’re doing a story on. That’s the kind of credibility that leads to media coverage. Authority, credibility, and influence are pretty important assets for businesses of all sizes, and when companies have great stories to tell, a hub and spoke publishing model can be instrumental in attracting and engaging communities of interest.
A hub and spoke model of content publishing and promotion can only go so far based on internal company knowledge. When a company gains a certain amount of savvy with content, SEO, and social networking, it’s important to develop a cyclical approach to improvement and growth. The cycle of social media and SEO is a method content marketers can use to develop and refine the effectiveness of their content with the customer segments it’s meant for. The cycle is a feedback approach that can improve the relevancy and impact of your search optimization and social media promotion efforts. (See Figure 8.4.) The key is that the cycle should start with content. Here are the steps to developing your own cycle of social media and SEO insight.
FIGURE 8.4 Cycle of Social Media and SEO
1. Creation. With insight into customer personas, your keyword and social topic research guide a content marketing plan with a component that’s managed as a hub and spoke. Content is planned, optimized, and socially promoted to the communities of interest in your spokes around topics customers care about.
2. Awareness. As community members discover your optimized and socialized content, many will engage with it. They’ll vote, share, comment, and discuss it. Some of those community members will be potential customers, some won’t care at all, and some will be social influencers.
3. Attraction. With an optimized and socialized content plan that’s committed to creating useful content relevant to customer needs, the community responds. The increased exposure of your content attracts more subscribers, fans, friends, followers, links, and visitors. You’ll start to develop your own community.
4. Growth. With a growing reputation as a useful source of information, other websites and blogs respond. Increased links and social exposure increase your content’s search rankings and referral traffic. There’s a momentum growing that attracts visitors, fans, shares, and links with less promotion on your part.
5. Analysis and insight. With growing popularity, analysis of the traffic you’ve generated and the communities you’ve nurtured will assist in the refinement of future content and social engagement by focusing on topics and content formats that best resonate and inspire the community to engage. Engagement may be social shares; it could also be inquiries and sales.
6. Repeat. Armed with new insight into better-performing search keywords and social topics that inspire influential connections and community growth, you can implement an updated content plan of optimized and socialized content.
In this hyperconnected world, with fewer and fewer degrees of separation every day, it is important to recognize that your brand’s network of influence does not stand alone. It is connected to a network of others who are tied to more still. Social influencers within relevant communities can cause ripples through the Internet, drawing attention to your content and elevating your brand’s ranking in the search engines as more people visit and share.
Now that we have a great content plan with plenty of ideas about our audience and the role of content in reaching business goals, the next step in our journey involves striking a balance between content creation and curation.
1. Take inventory of your current content assets, on and off of the company website.
2. Based on your research into customer segments, persona development, and keyword research, identify the types and formats of content that should be a part of your content plan.
3. Identify your hub (website, blog, microsite) and at least four potential distribution channels as spokes.
4. Develop a list of content types and messaging for your social networking and media sharing efforts.
5. Consider what other departments in your organization you could collaborate with in terms of content creation, optimization, and social promotion.
Notes
1. Joe Pulizzi, “2012 B2B Content Marketing Benchmarks, Budgets and Trends [Research Report],” December 5, 2011, Content Marketing Institute, http://www.contentmarketinginstitute.com/2011/12/2012-b2b-content-marketing-research/.
2. MECLABS, “MarketingSherpa’s 2012 Search Marketing Benchmark Report SEO Edition,” MECLABS, accessed December 2011, http://www.meclabs.com/training/publications/benchmark-report/2012-search-marketing-seo-edition?8907.