Good Content Marketing Strategy
In July we wrote about “Marketing Automation Challenges – Avoiding Status Quo” and “New Marketing Technology” as two obstacles facing adoption of marketing automation. The third obstacle, which we’ll discuss today, is being “content challenged”. Whether you’re using marketing and sales automation technology to help your business or not, a good content marketing strategy never hurts.
Personally, I’ve worked for several companies with a bad content marketing strategy. All companies had three things in common. First, they knew they had to create content. They did so in a reactive way, they were not proactive about content creation. Second, they had no schedule. They created content on a whim at infrequent periods. Third, their content was misguided. The marketing teams thought like the sellers, not the buyers.
Now that we’ve defined what a bad content marketing strategy is, let’s discuss a good content marketing strategy:
The truth is – we live in a digital content era and the internet completely shifted business to business sales. Buyers conduct the majority of their research online instead of calling the vendor. A good content marketing strategy requires a company to become a “content creation machine” – stretching their marketing footprint far and wide across a multitude of internet outlets; including social media, blogs, corporate websites and partner websites. Content should be re-purposed into emails, whitepapers, webinars and more. See our article on 101 business to business lead generation ideas and tips to light a spark.
Framework for a Good Content Marketing Strategy:
1. Blog at least two times a week
2. Put on monthly webinars
3. Produce quarterly whitepapers and/or eBooks
4. Tweet at least two times per day to promote new content and share relevant material
5. Comment on other blogs and/or forums at least two time a week
6. Produce a useful and/or educational tool for your buyers at least two times per year (ROI analysis, calculators, templates, guides, etc.)
Most importantly, stay committed for the long run. Do not start, stop then start again. It does you no good. Part of a search engine’s ranking formula is content-freshness; i.e. how often content is updated or added. If necessary, hire a marketing assistant to help create and distribute content. Follow these guidelines and you’ll be well on your way to a good content marketing strategy, one hell of an inbound marketing program (see Inbound Marketing vs Outbound Marketing) and more leads for sales!
We’d love to hear from you, how do you create a good marketing content strategy? What would you add to our framework?
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