5 days to Successful Content Marketing

Day 1 - Answer the key content marketing strategy questions

In this practical, 5 day series, I'll help define a 'quick-and-dirty' 5-day plan to help towards improving your content marketing strategy, without spending a fortune on paid media content distribution.

I've said this series is 'quick and dirty' since we believe that The perfect is often enemy of the good. When it comes to content strategy, it’s easy to spend a vast amount of time thinking about what you’re going to do and worrying about how to get it just right… without actually getting any content created or distributed.

But there comes a time when the Why needs to turn into the How. If you wait for all your strategic ducks to line up in a perfectly formed row, there’s a good chance the opportunity that content offers your business will drift off with the competition.

That doesn’t mean you should start producing content at random and hope for the best. A good content marketing plan is vital to turn your strategy into an agile, flexible operation – one that, thanks to the nature of digital, you can test and refine as you implement it.

So here is our quick-and-dirty plan for getting a strategic, well-planned, effective content marketing operation off the ground in just 5 days…

Day 1: Answer the big questions as best you can

Today you’re going to try and answer the big strategic questions as far as you can – in 1 day.

• You’re going to work with what you know, and make intelligent guesses about what you don’t.
• Take a look at the questions below and jot down the answers on 1 document, which you can then share with the team.
• You can return to and update this ‘strategy’ whenever you want to tweak it in the light of new insights or decisions, or when you’ve had more time (or more budget) for research.
• Sit yourself somewhere quiet on your own, or if you can gather your team run this as a group session.
• Don’t invite all of the interested stakeholders unless you can be sure of alignment and a speedy output. Remember this is a quick-and-dirty approach!

Finally, write down, as far as you can, the answers to these questions:

• Q1.  What are our business/marketing goals? eg generate more leads online, convert more browsers to buyers, differentiate our brand as best in class etc. If there are lots of goals, prioritise them 1 to 3 and forget the rest at this stage.
• Q2. Who are we trying to reach? Summarise personas, demographics and any other customer data you have easy access to. Again, focus on the top 3.
• Q3. How will we know if our content marketing is working? Make a quick list of easily achievable and available measurements – social shares and likes, email data capture, newsletter opens, search traffic, bounce rates etc.
• Q4. What’s our tone of voice? If you don’t have tonal guidelines, find a piece of previous content you all liked and use that as a shorthand reference. Pick out 5 things from it to act as guidelines for future content.

Output: A core strategy document outlining goals, audience, tone of voice guidelines and success indicators.

What’s coming next in our 5 part of our content marketing series?

Day 2: What’s your content brand? What kind of content will support your core strategy and how are you going to figure this out? A great example to learn from is included.

Day 3: How are you going to produce this content? Create your team structure, sources and workflows.

Day 4: Idea generation and editorial planning – quick ways to produce a detailed calendar in 1 day and some case studies to help you along.

Day 5: How are you going to build momentum and keep all of this going? Find out how to kick the whole thing off and create a blueprint for growth and learning in just 1 day.

Image/Copyright:@PA Images

Thanks to Dan Brotzel for sharing his thoughts and opinions in this blog post. Dan is the Content Director at stickycontent, part of the Press Association. He is also Econsultancy's trainer in Content Marketing and Editorial Planning. You can connect with Dan on LinkedIn or  follow stickycontent on Twitter