Documenting your content marketing strategy is one of the most important – yet often overlooked – steps in executing a content marketing campaign.
If you haven’t yet defined your content marketing strategy, creating a strategy doc will help you answer important questions and gain clarity about the road ahead.
Even if you have put in considerable thought already, a written plan allows companies to proceed with more efficiency, consistency, and confidence, and to track progress toward objectives. This document also helps justify a higher proportion of marketing budget being spent on content marketing.
Make a Plan
Your content marketing plan will link high level corporate objectives and capabilities (top-down view) with customer behavior (bottom-up view) to establish a taut content marketing strategy that links the two.
Working in such a manner will obviate answers to questions such as which content to prioritize, how much to create, how to disseminate it, personnel requirements for such a schedule, and budgetary requirements.
The document will include the following information:
- Mission statement and key objectives of the content marketing campaign.
- Content marketing campaigns designed for specific products, media channels, consumer personas
- An efficient plan for repurposing content for multiple products, channels, and audiences.
- A schedule for the creation and dissemination of specific content. Content prioritization will be based on marketing objectives, market research, and resources (personnel, budget, etc.) available for creation/dissemination, and customer behavior.
- Personnel, tools, and budget required to fulfill content marketing endeavors.
- Lists of resources that can be used for researching content and the market.
- Consideration for scalability of content marketing endeavors.
- Methods for tracking KPI and other metrics of content marketing impact.
- Specific plans for social media (listening, posting, chat planning); editorial calendar; brand storytelling; KPI tracking; content marketing effectiveness; influencer marketing; and more if necessary.
- An outline of visual branding such as designating a style guide of text, theme colors, illustration styles, etc.
Lean, Mean Marketing Machine
Large companies with bottomless marketing budgets can often get away with creating massive amounts of impressive content that isn’t optimized for audience and media channel, yet still see returns.
Small and medium sized enterprises have to work smarter to bootstrap themselves to the next level despite the competition. A documented content marketing strategy increases impact while minimizing cost.
Contact me today to discuss how you can make the most of your content.
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