“Content marketing is a marketing technique of creating and distributing relevant and valuable content to attract, acquire and engage a clearly defined and understood target audience – with the objective of driving profitable customer action.”⁵

1. Marketing objectives

What marketing objectives can you contribute to or influence with content? Some of the marketing objectives that content can impact on are:

• Brand health: the right kind of content used in the right context can affect positive sentiment, favourability and goodwill towards the brand.
• Brand recognition and recall: highly shareable, compelling content can spread far and wide and help raise awareness of a brand, product or service.
• Education: highly visual content in particular can really help educate an audience on a complex or emotive issue. The NHS in Leicester produced a very powerful social marketing campaign on teen pregnancy⁸ that showed a young girl giving birth in a playground from the point of view of a schoolmate, capturing the moment on a mobile phone. (Unfortunately, the video was subsequently banned by YouTube.)
• Purchase consideration and loyalty: content, particularly that which creates repeat interaction, can be used to keep the brand front of mind, which supports consideration and repeat purchase.

Maybe it's stating the obvious, but the starting point should be to think about how content can be used to contribute to the organization's marketing objectives.

2. Content objectives

What do you want the content to do? Thinking about the marketing objectives you want to affect, work out content-specific goals. It's worth thinking about the specific actions or reactions you want content to generate. For example:

The specific content objectives and associated KPIs will be bespoke to an organization's marketing plan and business goals.

3. Audience behaviour

What type of content does your audience read, watch, share and interact with?

It's important to work out early on in the process what content is going to appeal to your audience and, perhaps more importantly, what content will drive the action you desire. Usually, a range of content will appeal to your audience and drive several actions. Things to look at are:

• Subject matter: areas of interest that are relevant to the brand. Everyone has shared a cute animal photo at some point, but often this type of content is not highly relevant to the brand or product.
• Organization expertise: the expert content an organization can provide that will help or be useful to the target audience.
• Content format: does the audience watch large amounts of video content, or mainly photos and text?
• Online behaviour: what does the audience do online? Do they just watch content or do they create content and comment on others' content? It is worth looking at the channels they use and how they use them. Forrester's social technographic behaviour research⁹ is a good place to start.

In an ideal world, primary research, such as that gained from focus groups and quantitative surveys, would provide the best insight into an audience's content habits. However, in the real world, looking at how your target audience currently interacts with content on yours and your competitors' online properties can generate useful insights into what will work and what won't.

Thinking through the three points above provides a good foundation for developing a content production framework that will deliver against your organization's objectives.

Created content

This is content created and owned by the organization. A good starting point is to review all the content that has already been created. For example:

• Presentations used for sales, conferences and internal comms.
• Marketing collateral.
• Event photos and videos.
• Customer service communications.

The next step is to look at simple ways of creating the required content. There is usually lots of good stuff in the heads of senior management and other knowledgeable people in the organization that can be simply downloaded into video interviews, blog posts or articles.

Then, to ensure a steady stream of content, build content creation into as many of the organization's activities as possible. A good motto is “everything counts” as it's better to have too much content than too little. Record and snap exhibitions and events where the organization has a presence and ensure that things like visual PR stories are captured. Ideally, an organization should start creating activities that will produce the content required.

As noted earlier, Red Bull is probably the best at this, as the organization has content creation at the heart of all of its marketing. The drinks company has a media unit dedicated to producing content and all of its sponsorship activities are captured and shared across its owned media channels.

Curated content

Curating content from trusted third parties can add elements to a content programme that are not easily created by the organization. For example, sharing content from expert sources, such as specialist blogs, can add expertise that doesn't exist within the company. Sharing content from news organizations and other companies related to their sector can broaden the appeal of an organization's content marketing.

For curated content to have the most impact, it's important for the organization to add something to it. This isn't about changing the content, but adding some context as to why it is relevant to that organization's audience. Posting a link to an interesting article on Mashable with a comment saying “hey, check this out” doesn't really add any value – it's more appealing to an audience if the organization explains why it will be interesting and perhaps adds its own opinion or take on the topics discussed in the article.

Also, creating content is resource intensive, so having a strategy that involves curating others' content ensures there can always be sufficient volume of content.

Organizations should be diligent in making transparent what content is curated and what is created. It may be stating the obvious, but there should be no hint of claiming someone else's content as your own. All curated content should be credited and, where appropriate, permission to share from the content's owner obtained.

Commissioned content

Commissioned content is, perhaps, a misleading term as it is not necessarily just about organizations paying producers to make content on their behalf: it also includes traditional influencer relations, where an organization builds relationships with bloggers, journalists and other influencers and works with them to supply information that the influencer then turns into content, then shares that content on the influencer's owned media. Blogger relations, media relations and other forms of influencer relations, which do not involve any financial payment to the influencer, fall into this category.

In addition, organizations should source content producers to create bespoke content, e.g. commissioning a famous director to produce a short film on behalf of the organization. The Prada¹⁰ film directed by Roman Polanski and featuring Helena Bonham Carter is a good example. Here, the film has credibility due to the reputation of the director and people will want to watch the film in its own right. The film will be shown on broader channels than just those owned by the organization. The same principle applies to working with photographers, writers, videographers – any situation where the commissioned content relies upon the credibility of the producer.

This activity blurs the lines with created content. The main difference between created and commissioned content is that a great deal of the commissioned content's value comes from the producer. The audience knows that the producer has made the content for the organization and that is part of the content's appeal.

Getting the balance right

The 3Cs is a good starting point for developing a content framework. Getting the balance of created, curated and commissioned right will depend on the organization's marketing strategy and resources. As a general rule, the most successful content frameworks tend to have more created content than both commissioned and curated. However, success depends on the quality of content produced – the days of getting an intern to take some snaps on their iPhone are long gone.

Below are a few tips that often prove useful:

• Be interesting: try and produce content that is compelling to the specific audience that also contributes to the brand objectives.
• Don't hard sell: while the content strategy should contribute to a business objective, don't make it all about “buy it now!” People will switch off and go elsewhere.
• Add value: try and think about what the audience would find useful that they can't easily get elsewhere and how you can help the audience.
• Create trust: use your organization's knowledge to talk with expertise about your field. Ensure that you keep any promises you make.
• Talk with, not at: respond sensibly to interactions generated by your content. Don't just “Like” every comment on your Facebook Page. People respond better when they talk with another human being.

Content matrices

When planning how to execute a content strategy, it is often useful to draw up a content matrix that shows what content is going to be used where and when. It's good to ensure there is a balance of:

• Topics: you don't want to be talking about the same thing over and over.
• Formats: a mixture of text, photos videos, graphics, games, contests, quizzes, will keep the audience's interest.
• Organization v subject: balance content about the organization, brand and products with content on non-brand subjects that are still relevant but appeal to the audience.
• Interactions: ensure there is something for the audience to do, i.e. there are calls to action, things they will want to share, contests and quizzes to enter or just information that they will find useful. Naturally, common sense should be applied and not every Facebook status should be “Like this now …”.

Then it's a question of timing. It is good practice to define your content cycle, i.e. the time period for a particular batch of content to run before it is refreshed. By having a content cycle, you can create regular events or activities that people look forward to, e.g. Friday giveaways. Often two to four-week cycles are used – the example in the table below is a two-week cycle.

However, as we are working in a world of “real-time” and “always on” communications, it is essential to build flexibility into the content matrix to enable the organization to respond to topical events and news.

Content matrix example