Modify these tips as necessary for your company, culture and industry, but they generally represent a solid foundation of best practices for ensuring your content marketing efforts drive more value in terms of inbound traffic, new followers and qualified leads.
Key Strategies
- Focus on customer needs & issues: Minimize references to your product specifically and even your product category in general, in lieu of topics at the core of what early adopter target customers are facing. Great content focuses on people and their problems, not products.
- Build for repurposing: Create content that can be leveraged multiple ways, in multiple formats, to increase ROI from a core/smaller set of new content
- Crowdsource as much as possible: Build a contribution team from inside and outside the company to develop both content ideas as well as final products, to minimize content creation costs
- Create & Curate: Leverage original content as well as content created by others shared through your social channels to drive interest, engagement and conversion from target prospects
- Perfect is the enemy of good: Have a bias for action and publishing quality content quickly without worrying about extraneous polish
Key Tactics
- Editorial calendar planning: Develop a detailed, week-to-week calendar of new and curated content across a set of common themes and target channels
- Resource identification: Secure roster of contributors inside and outside the organization to create content, including commitment of at least one contribution per month
- Multi-media, multi-channel formats: Diversify content across written, video, podcast, Slideshare and other formats to increase discoverability and engagement
- Contributed & curated content: Establish daily programs to curate content into the blog and other social channels to increase network effect and followers
- Repurpose strategy & schedule: Build repurposing of content into the editorial calendar (i.e. blog posts into white paper, webinar into blog series, etc.)
- Blog & landing page conversion optimization: Continually refine all content hosting sites and channels to increase lead capture rate on registration-required offers
- Tracking & reporting structure: Build dashboard of key metrics to track growth of key Measures of Success (traffic, subscribers, lead conversions)
