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On Thanksgiving - your mouth full of stuffing, the smell of pie wafting through the room - did your smile conceal a nagging anxiety? Despite your best efforts to push all work-related thoughts from your brain, was the question, “What the hell is our content team going to make next year?” running through your mind?
Don’t let it ruin the rest of the holidays.
Plenty of organizations are embracing content marketing. Too few are wrapping their arms around content marketing strategy. The result is ad hoc assets, piles of redundant content, and a sense of impending doom.
It doesn’t have to be this way. With a few key moves, you can get the jump on your first quarter content marketing and be well on your way to a complete content strategy for all of 2014.
One of the best decisions you can make is not doing the exact same thing over again. Sounds easy, but most organizations create tons of duplicate, one-time-use content.
The secret to avoiding this mistake is to know what you already have. Most businesses have content living everywhere (the website, the blog, YouTube, SlideShare, etc.). Conduct a content audit spotlighting where each asset lives, the subject matter or topic it covers, how it was used for sales or marketing, and the region that used it.
Putting this all in one place will help steer your content efforts moving forward.
Examine which assets were top performers once your audit is complete. But don’t measure strictly by one set of metrics. You need to know which pieces drove action at each stage of the sales cycle - the top, middle, and bottom of your funnel.
One eBook might lure in a ton of new names, while a couple of webinars led to serious engagement around your service. A particular presentation might have killed it with sales opportunities. Get a sense of your best three content efforts for each stage.
Once you know what’s worked before, you’ll know the best choices to make when faced with urgent goals.
Now that you’ve identified your top performing content, consider franchising or recycling that content. Here’s what I mean by both:
Franchising content means taking a successful concept or topic, then creating a series of spin-offs. If a topic is really resonating with your audience, then going deeper into the subject matter will not only move leads closer to a sale, it’s also going to save on the time and resources it would take to come up with concepts from scratch.
Recycling is an even faster approach. If you produced some big hits, package them together for an outbound email campaign. Put some online ad money behind their promotion. List your best hits on your blog or feature them on your homepage.
Franchising and recycling top performing content provides a quick jumpstart to the first quarter.
I argued that sales needs access to the marketing editorial calendar in a previous post. The issue is way too many organizations don’t have an editorial calendar or have too many.
If you’re not using a regularly updated editorial calendar, you’re flying blind. If your organization has multiple editorial calendars spread out across regions, you’re not even heading in the same direction.
Use the time just before Q1, or the first couple weeks of the quarter, to fix your editorial calendar. Get it updated and centrally located so all stakeholders can access it. Set a cadence for updating it. (Ideally, you’d use a content marketing software so your calendar automatically updates in real time.)
Surprise! I’m not going to push you to set a content strategy right this second. Instead, set it as a goal for Q2.
A thought-out, documented content marketing strategy is missing in many organizations. (Only 39% of B2C companies and 44% of B2B companies report having one in place.) Without a strategy, chaos tends to rule the day...and quarter.
But don’t bite off more than you can chew. Start with steps one through four, which will help you get organized and gather the information you need to make smart decisions for 2014. Commit now to building out a strategy in Q2 by acting on these smaller steps in Q1. You’ll be well on your way to a multi-quarter strategy if you do.
Jesse Noyes is Senior Director of Content Marketing at Kapost. He got his start in the newsroom and today his goal is to ensure Kapost's content meets the best editorial standards, that Kapost tells the best stories and spreads the word through social media channels.
Learn more about content marketing in this free ebook at the button below.
