There are six key elements to a profitable content strategy. While the focus and investment given to each will vary from company to company, all must be considered.
Here’s why each is important, and how we support all six.
It’s near-impossible to justify a content strategy which doesn’t build on primary customer research. If you’re executing a plan based on the insights your board put together over lunch, you’re heading for trouble.
For some businesses, a small qualitative survey is just the ticket. For others, a mix of interviews and surveys will provide the necessary data. It all depends on your relationship with your customers. We’ll help you define your approach, conduct the research and analyse and present the findings.
Benchmarking your current assets and performance is the first step to measuring and improving your content marketing ROI.
If you’re about to re-do your website or refresh your brand, auditing your digital content should be high on your to-do list. We offer two types of audit: a deep-dive Content Audit and The Content Marketing Healthcheck.
Content Audit
Our content audit starts with a crawl of your current indexable content, and ends with a list of all the pages that match your messaging and tone of voice guidelines, those that need work and those that should be deleted. Content audits like these work hand in glove with SEO audits and provide the foundation for successful, on-time and on-budget website projects.
The Content Marketing Healthcheck
The Content Marketing Healthcheck is designed to uncover how prepared your business is for profitable content marketing, and highlight hidden roadblocks that might block the path. We review everything from your company culture to your email contact lists, benchmarketing your performance against your top three competitors.
If a businesses is in the swing with content marketing, their marketing function should resemble a media company.
To make this possible, it’s essential to work from a clear brand strategy, communicate and collaborate across marketing disciplines and external agencies, and have full buy-in and engagement from your sales team.
This takes planning, training and lots of communication. Our content creation process is designed to integrate all the moving parts, and our team will make the shift easier through careful change management.
Good content governance flows from good strategy: one that’s easy to communicate and has buy-in from the whole team.
In practice, this looks like a well-documented plan, easy-to-follow brand and tone of voice guidelines, workflow processes and agreed roles and responsibilities. A core team is essential, and should include someone at board level to oversee the program. We’ll help you create your documentation and in-house team.
Digital means data. But not necessarily insight. A good content marketing strategy sets clear KPIs, prioritises them and doesn’t over-report. And it maintains a regular cadence, allowing it to adapt to changing conditions.
The hard bit is deciding what you will not measure, and setting aside time to analyse reports in a consistent way. Our team will help translate your goals into metrics and develop the right reports to enable fast, frequent decision-making.
Being a publisher is a new role for most marketing teams.
Learning how to judge content ideas, write briefs, interview subject matter experts, commision writers, edit copy and give feedback will put your team on the path to success. Getting to grips with email and social media marketing will make your content marketing ROI soar. In this way, our team know how to help turn your team into a publishing powerhouse.
Consistent execution is key for knowledge-based businesses to make the most of the opportunity that content marketing offers. An agile approach to content creation and distribution is a must to maintain activity levels, keep ideas fresh, engage teams and generate maximum ROI.
The media mix for content marketing is changing but blogs, or articles, remain the hub for businesses’ digital marketing activity.
Translating your content strategy into engaging editorial is best done with a mix of subject matter experts, marketing professionals and specialist editors. We manage the content marketing program for most of our clients, taking responsibility for the engine that powers lead generation in their business.
Email marketing continues to be the top distribution channel for B2B thought-leaders.
Newsletters are number one, thanks to their frequency and opportunities to generate data and personalisation. Our team is experienced in developing customer journeys through email automation and optimising email content, too.
Today, social media marketing is a mix of paid, owned and earned media – or ‘converged’ media.
For expert-led businesses, this means your editorial and social media strategies feed into one another, with your website content dovetailing your social media activity, and your social ad spend informing your editorial decisions.
We help our clients make sense of which platforms are best for them, and work with in-house teams to provide the best branded experience and maximum ROI possible.
Once a marketing team gets up to industry best practice with their inbound marketing, their attention should shift to optimisation.
For most teams working with marketing automation tools such as Hubspot and Agile, this means funnel analysis and A/B testing. We’ve developed an agile method for working with clients to help them quickly test new ideas and hone in on their marketing targets, via a manageable, iterative approach.
