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How To Create A Content Marketing Strategy
If you haven't heard the
term "content marketing" - you soon will. The idea of content marketing
is becoming more popular among marketing teams as a result of the
growing influence of social media, but it has been around much longer
than that. White papers, contributed articles, even infomercials are
all forms of content marketing. Essentially, when you create content
around a particular subject and then use it to deliver a message that
may drive someone toward purchasing or recommending your product or
service, you're doing it. The question is, are you doing it in a
strategic way?
Today at 3pm there is a free teleseminar I'll be participating in along with Brian Clark from CopyBlogger and Joe Pulizzi and Newt Barrett (founders of Junta42 and authors of Get Content. Get Customers.) all about using content to impact your bottom line. To give you a taste of what we'll talk about, here is my quick checklist of the questions you should ask yourself as you start to build your own content marketing strategy:
- What is the problem you will try to solve? Great content marketing focuses on answering a key challenge or question that relates to your business.
- How can you make it about more than you? This is not a sales pitch. It needs to be useful and offer more context beyond just how great your product/service is.
- Who's going to care to read and share it? It needs to be interesting, but the sharing is particularly important, as great content marketing should be something people can't help sharing.
- What's the best platform and format to use? Think about video versus blogging versus downloadable PDFs and what will be easiest for your audience.
- How will you promote it? Plan to spend quite a bit of time thinking about how people will find your content, as it is completely useless if no one can locate it.
- How will you know if it's working? Your metric for success may be directly tied to sales, or awareness, or consideration. Whatever it is, know before you start how you'll tell if it was successful.
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