The average buyer consumes over 17 pieces of content before they make a purchase.
Seventeen.
That means that content marketing isn’t going anywhere. As more industries get more and more competitive (hello, global economy), content marketing can be the one factor that earns you new customers — or what causes you to lose a sale to a competitor.
Content marketing backed by a strategy — including goals and key performance indicators — is one of the best ways to stay relevant and in the great game of business.
And social media? It’s just one part of what can be an incredibly powerful marketing strategy.
Here's a start-to-finish explanation of content marketing, how you can use it strategically, and some downloadable tools to get you started.Make 2018 the year you finally invest in one of the most valuable marketing approaches available.
Content Marketing: Defined
According to the Content Marketing Institute, content marketing is a strategic marketing approach focused on creating and distributing content that is:
Valuable
Relevant
Consistent
The content is designed to attract and retain a clearly-defined audience — and, ultimately, to drive profitable customer action.It's marketing with the consumer in mind. This short video explains it.
It's not a megaphone or an opportunity to broadcast your message. It's meant to help, entertain or otherwise add value to your potential customer.
The way I explain social media marketing is that it’s a tool, meant to be used with other tools and materials to build your vision. Think of content marketing as the other tools. For example, say you’re trying to build a house. You go to Home Depot or Lowes and you walk in and grab a hammer. That hammer is social media marketing. You can do a bunch of stuff with a hammer:
Drive in a nail that will secure two pieces of wood together
Hang curtains
Kill that spider
But alone, the hammer has its limitations and it will never allow you to build your full vision of a house.
Then you carefully browse the next 16 aisles, looking for the materials that could help you build this dream house. You put drywall, tiles, power tools, paint, doors, windows, shingles and maybe a fancy light fixture into your cart. These are your blog, infographics, videos, slideshows, gifs and ebooks.
The goal of building this house is to make it into the vision in your head; a cohesive, stable structure that reflects your brilliance and hard work.
The same is true with your content marketing: if you put in the time to plan your marketing and decide which channels and tactics to use, and then put in the elbow grease to execute your plan, you’ll end up with something you’re proud to show off.
Traditional Marketing versus Content Marketing
After decades of a stable marketing world, content marketing is incredibly disruptive. It's confusing as to how it works. Some people might even see it as snake oil, allegedly producing lots of results, but no one's really sure why or how. The confusion, from a business owner’s perspective, is understandable. In the old days, waaaay back, you knew what you were buying from marketing agencies:
Billboard? Sure, that targets people who drive on that highway.
TV commercial? Yeah, so the people watching that TV program see your product, sale or service.
Print advertisement? Obviously, everyone who reads the local newspaper will at least skim that.
Now we have blogs, social media, slideshows, videos and infographics — all of which are considered content marketing. Who the hell is seeing that?
The consumer.
As in, the people who consume goods and services, and yes, the people who you want to buy said goods and services from you. As you know, the business world is now driven by the consumer, and only the businesses willing to adapt quickly and pivot, pivot, pivot will come out as champions.
That, dear business owner, is where content marketing comes in. Your target audience, the consumer, wants a:
Laugh
Cry
Giggle
Deal
Story
Idea
Not a:
Promotion
Sale
Three reasons why your direct competitor sucks
How to Use Content Marketing in your Business
Let’s forget about the specific medium for a second. Whether you’re blogging, tweeting or making videos, your content should be used to:
Build trust
Distribute knowledge
Offer value to the consumer
Strengthen your brand
Support a goal in your business, such as generating sales leads
If this sounds like a lot to do, that’s because it is.
One of the best actions you can take to use content marketing to effectively generate awareness and leads for your business is to understand that it’s a long game. Sometimes a long, long game. It could take months and it could take a year.
This video explains it in more depth.
To use the same analogy as earlier in this article, you’re building your vision; you’re making it a reality.
Do you want the cheap McMansion in Sarasota that starts falling apart after 10 years, or do you want the old stone building that stands for centuries?
If you want the latter, it will take time to build it. Once you do, you’ll reap the benefits for years to come and build a brand with a legacy.
How to Take Control of Your Content Marketing in 3 Steps
Your content marketing should include three key documents: your content marketing strategy, your content calendar and your tactical plan.
1. Create a strategy.
This should include:
Channels you’re using and why
Business objectives the content marketing supports
Baseline website analytics, email subscribers and open/click through rates, and social media engagement and followers
Industry/competitive research
Measurable goals
Core paid campaigns
The value of a content marketing strategy cannot be understated:
Entrepreneur Magazine just called it “the secret to successful content marketing in 2018.”
The Content Marketing Institute (CMI), the leader in all things content marketing, found that 60 percent of B2C marketers who rate themselves as most effective at content marketing have a documented strategy.
CMI says that, “One of the biggest differences between a content marketer who is effective and one who fails is a documented content marketing strategy.”
Search Engine Watch listed a lack of a content strategy as one of the top hindrances to effective content marketing.
If you’re investing time, energy and resources into your content, develop a strategy.
2. Plan a Content Marketing Calendar
After you’ve done your due diligence and put together a content marketing strategy, get ready to put your plan into action. A content marketing calendar is an easy way to organize your topics and themes so you know what content needs to be created/designed/written/edited and when.
You can format these in a variety of ways. There are lots of free templates out there. For the sake of simplicity,here is a 2018 content calendar in Excel with all the major U.S. holiday already included.
Here’s a sneak peak:
Content calendar template example
Download it. Print it out. Write out what you think your year will look like for your business. A few questions to get your planning juices flowing include:
When is your peak sales season? Write that in.
When is the biggest conference or trade show for your industry? Write it in, even if you're not going.
When is your slow season? Write it in so you can plan for long-term lead generation.
When was your company founded? Write that in because you can do a quick and simple highlight on social media.
Do you start hiring seasonal help prior to your peak season? Hey, write that in, too.
Have you budgeted to run advertisements for specific dates/weeks/months? Write those in, including both print and digital. They'll come in handy when you're creating content.
This calendar serves as your go-to guide when you're writing blogs, creating social media content, designing graphics or developing reports.
After you’ve written in all your major events and campaigns, slept on it, thought about it on a run and remembered that one thing on your drive to work, type it into the digital copy of the document.
Keep ONE version and share it through a cloud-based document host like Google Drive or DropBox. That way you can update it through the year as plans change.
If you’re in a leadership position — as the CEO, vice president or director of some sort — this calendar can also help you figure out how to allocate two of your most valuable resources: time (yours and your staff) and money (budgets).
Bonus: If you're working with multiple employees, agencies or vendors to implement your content marketing strategy, you can give everyone this calendar to work from.
3. Develop a Tactical Plan
Tactics are, by definition, the means by which a strategy is carried out.In marketing, tactics include things like blogs, podcasts, videos, infographics, social media posts, emails, fliers, print advertisements and digital advertisements. Plus much, much more.
Your tactical plan outlines all the marketing pieces required to help you reach your business objective.
Going back to the building-a-house analogy, your tactical plan is a document that outlines what you’ll do, and when, so you achieve your desired outcome and don’t end up with a toilet in your living room or a mystery light switch that doesn’t seem to turn on any lights. Think about what you want to do to make your 2018 calendar come alive.
Will all the content topics get a written blog post/graphic/video/social post?
Will some content get a paid boost on social media so more people see it? If so, will you boost on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Pinterest, or just a few of the channels?
Will some content be used for lead generation? I.e. in exchange for access to a white paper or video, website visitors need to give their email addresses to you first
Tactical plan template example
The devil is in the details, as the saying goes. In marketing, the devil is in the tactics.Take the time now to map out how all your tactics — your Facebook posts, your Tweets, your Instagram stories, your blogs, your emails, your PPC ads — work together.
Download this tactical plan template as a basis for managing your content marketing. This is also an Excel document and you can edit it based on the tactics you're using and your internal process for creating, editing and publishing content. A screen shot is below for reference.
Not Sure Where to Start?
If this is your first content marketing rodeo, never fear. You can take this one step at a time.
Try organizing your content marketing tactics just for January 2018.
You can use Trello or a simple spreadsheet like the one featured in this download.
Include all the steps of your process. Work through January and refine your process as you see fit. Maybe you don't need an editor. Although, I always recommend using an editor. Editors are your gut check and fresh eyes — which could save you from an embarrassing Tweet or controversial advertisement.
Maybe your writer uploads their content directly into WordPress. Maybe your social media manager does one final proof of the blog, publishes and then schedules the Facebook, Twitter and Instagram posts highlighting the new content.
Maybe, just maybe, you focus on creating one really, really good piece of content — a long-form blog or a video — for the month, then promote it on your social media networks and work with influencers to share it with their audience.Whatever your content marketing approach is in 2018, it. is. manageable. It's doable. It's flexible.
And if you focus on creating and delivering content your audience truly wants — which you know because your strategy is well-researched and has measurable objectives — then it will be effective in generating awareness for your brand and leads for sales.