What's Your Plan for Content Marketing?

Two years ago, the buzz around social media was deafening. Marketers were pressed to deliver viral videos, professionals over 40 set up personal Facebook pages and companies recruited bloggers from their employees and hired community managers to monitor their presence in cyberspace.

Today, companies are making small but significant adjustments in how they create and publish marketing content, treating the messages themselves as more important than the channels they drive through. So instead of focusing on a mobile strategy or managing a single blog or forum, marketers are stepping back and looking holistically at what they want to communicate to the market, with individual communication channels becoming tactical rather than strategic.

What's driving this shift? The truth is that advertising and marketing content, often produced in a top-down way by a distributed marketing team, just doesn't measure up to the creative content that's available on social media sites. Would you choose to sit through an hour of TV commercials instead of last week's episode of House? Read a vendor-generated article instead of a magazine feature story? Dig into a company whitepaper instead of an analyst report that compares all the major players in that space?

Companies are grappling with the challenge of how to develop and distribute branded content that is compelling, accurate and timely -- and true to their brand. Often the right approach to Content Marketing can be found by speaking to your sales force and, when possible, directly with customers and prospects. What questions are they asking? What information do they want from your organization? Getting tacit permission to stay in contact is important, and then deliver with content that informs as well as influences, to engage and build the relationship with useful messages that also reinforce your brand.

What does it take to execute on a multichannel Content Marketing strategy? The requirements have gotten more stringent, and the tools to help marketers cope with the challenges of multichannel publishing are still emerging. See if your current system measures up.

1.    Can you publish daily? Content development cycles must be short, with no time wasted on the review and approval process. With more frequent messages going out through multiple channels, it’s critical that routine tasks don’t bog down the teams that support them.

2.    How large is your readership? Your first job is to establish a heartbeat, so visitors know they can expect fresh content on your site and in your tweets and blog posts. You’ll need to publish fresh information at regular intervals to make sure your online presence has a pulse. At a bare minimum, you’ll want to refresh blog posts monthly, Facebook weekly and Twitter at least once a day.

3.    What value can you add? Some companies analyze trends and news and then editorialize about what it means to their industry. You can spin up current events, market research data, and breaking news to offer a unique perspective that reinforces your position in the industry. Making this connection to the larger business environment helps you build credibility for branded content, and then refer readers to trusted third-party information, so you're reliably providing vendor-neutral sources. The overarching goal is to tailor your posts and messages to readers’ interests, to draw them in and keep them reading.

4.    Are your company-wide communications creating synergy -- or cocophony? In an ideal world, your executives, salespeople, and marketing are all speaking the same language, telling the same stories, and using the same statistics. In reality, there's often a wide disparity between the messages that are used to market individual products, to brand the organization and to enliven sales presentations and executive speeches. Marketers can use publishing tools to further develop the organization’s capacity to interpret trends and forecast where the market is heading, so messages at every level of the organization are consistent, unified and speak confidently to both customers’ anxieties and aspirations for future business growth.

Pulling It All Together

With a Marketing Asset Management (MAM) platform in place, your team can more easily meet the requirements of successful content marketing, including how best to orchestrate multichannel communications.

You can start anywhere: with a blog, Twitter feed, or long-form collateral like white papers and press releases. The important thing is to take a holistic approach to outbound communications and social media. Which customers are likely to visit your site on Facebook? Who wants up-to-the-minute Tweets about your industry? It’s helpful to map out each market segment with information about their preferences and demographics.

Then publish, measure and iterate. Recruit bloggers from within your organization to address specific information needs of your audience. Track the popularity and try to assess the quality of the readership. Sometimes it’s better to have fewer readers who are actively interested in a particular aspect of your products and services. Make it easy for them to drive others to your content by adding the Facebook "Like" button and enable Retweet-ing, right on your blog site. What you’re looking for, ultimately, is to cultivate relationships with customers and prospects who recommend your offerings within their organization and to others, and to act as an advocate for you based on a series of positive experiences.

Having multi-channel messages lets you fully explore how you want to express your brand online. There should always be easy. Online MAM tools can help you democratize participation in social media outlets across the company, while still ensuring consistency in the brand, such as company logo, colors, fonts and layouts. Readers should always recognize the communications coming from your organization.  However, you can experiment across media with your voice and tone. For instance, a YouTube video may be more youthful and cheeky than, say, a press release that represents your brand to the investor community. Have some leeway for your brand expression, based on who you’re speaking to. Then, evaluate your progress with each channel. Measure results in terms of active participation, as well as conversion to sale. And then tweak the mix until you get the right balance in each phase of the sales cycle: Awareness, Consideration, Intent, and Purchase.