According to the 2014 B2B CMI content marketing study, 93% of B2B marketers say they utilize content marketing. The same study asked the participants what their biggest marketing challenges are, and the top 3 reasons were; "lack of time", "producing enough content," and "producing the type of content that engages". All of these issues would suggest a lack of resources being dedicated to content marketing, but can that really be true? From two person teams to marketers with $10 million budgets, everyone feels as if they need more resources, but maybe we should focus more energy on figuring out what we can do to make the most of the resources we have. In order to optimize your resources, everyone should complete these 3 steps first: Write down your strategy, define your target personas, and create a promotion strategy..
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WRITE DOWN A STRATEGY
Though having a strategy may sound pretty elementary, according to the same 2014 B2B CMI study, only 44% of marketers say they have a defined marketing strategy. To make things worse, only 44% of those marketers have a documented strategy. This lack of direction is the core reason why so many marketers feel as if they do not have enough resources.
Much like everything else in life, without direction, marketers waste a lot of their time performing redundant research because all of their actions and channels exist in different silos. A critical step here is to understand that channels are a means of promoting your brand, not an end in themselves. If you keep working each channel in silos, you waste time doing research for each individual space. You are fighting a war on multiple fronts instead of leveraging each channel to promote the next.
Take, for example, this scenario: You are benchmarking your twitter strategy by counting your followers, likes, and retweets. If this is the case, you may be wasting your time pursuing vanity metrics. But if you understand that twitter may be a good channel to get your content in front of industry influencers who may be interested in sharing your blog content, you could focus on reaching a very targeted community that will not only grow your twitter following, but also your backlink count and your SEO authority.
2) DEFINE YOUR TARGET PERSONAS
Though I know it can seem daunting, defining your target personas is probably the best thing any marketer can do to optimize the resources that they have. More importantly, you will never be able to create an accurate marking plan if you do not know or understand your marketing personas.
First lets define what is marketing persona. It does not matter if you are B2B or B2C, each of your offerings, as well as each feature of your offering , has a different persona, and they all behave differently. For example, while tracking terms for female runners and male runners in Audienti, I found that the top 3 social channels for content about men's running gear are; Twitter, Youtube, and Pinterest.
So, if I decide to create content to promote my running gear for men, I know what channels to optimize for and I can create a promotion strategy that takes advantage of the existing conversations to amplify my visibility. So if I did not have this information and decided to spend time promoting my content on Facebook, I would have to do a significantly higher amount of work to see the same results as Twitter.
On the other hand, if I am writing content for female runners, the top 3 channels by volume are Twitter, Blogs, and Pinterest.
Though there are some commonalities between the channels, it is pretty evident that I should definitely focus heavily on blogger outreach and pinterest, but maybe save my video budget for men's running shoes. The channels are just a tip of the iceberg. If you have clearly defined personas and you take the time to learn their habits and preferences, you can free up your team from doing research because they will already understand what kind of content your personas prefer: which channels, best times of the week, and who the influencers are in each channel that can help them grow a self sustaining community.
3) CREATE A CONTENT PROMOTION STRATEGY
Last, but not least, everyone should define a promotion strategy. Before you say that you have one, let me say this: posting your content on your social media profiles does not count as promotion. That is called content broadcasting.
Content promotion is a strategy by which you reach new audience who are not yet aware of your brand. Using the right hashtags is one part of the strategy, but engaging in a conversation with a person who has 10k followers, or 15k monthly readers on their blog, targeting ads at influential people or sites, is what gets you those new eyes that we are all after.
As a content marketer, you should know how many hours your team has at its disposal. Make sure that you allocate at least 40% of those hours to targeted promotion. I know it is popular to believe that if you just write enough content, people will come, or Google will recognize how much good content you are creating and will improve your search engine rankings, but sadly, that is not how it works.
Your audience and Google still rely on the same criteria to decide if you are trustworthy, and that is third party validation. For a buyer it may be that they found you through a trusted forum, blog, twitter account, or search result, and Google still needs to see backlinks to your content to understand that people find it useful. While I understand that trying to build relationships with people online is hard work, we are still marketers. It's time we stop hiding behind the content we create or the analytics that we produce, our primary role will always be to connect the right people to the right message.
Though it may all sound daunting, it really is high time for digital marketers to become more confident and effective. Popularity of channels and strategies will always change, as will your customer's behavior, but that does not mean that you get to bury your head in the sand. It may take some time and it will definitely push your team out of their comfort zones, but it's time to start thinking about the customer, and not your favorite channel.
Sit down, figure out what resources are available to you, and find the best way to use them. Define your target audience and learn as much as you can about their behavior, like preferred channels, topics, types of content, influencers, and best times to engage. After identifying the best way to reach them and the kind of content to produce, create a promotion pattern that is easily executed and fits within the time/resources available to you.
Once those steps are completed, you have your marketing plan and your team is ready to optimize its time and resources. They know what kind of content you will create for each persona (content calendar), you know which channels you will utilize to promote it, and you know exactly how each content piece will reach your target audience. You may be amazed by how much time your team will get back when every action they take does not require additional research. You'll see that they stop wasting their time working the wrong channels for the wrong reasons. Most importantly, once you start optimizing for your audience instead of the channel, you will realize that people are not as hard to reach as you may have thought.