The goal of this blog post is to emphasize the importance of having a content marketing strategy for any company that sells products or services and to explain how a content marketing strategy can help a company tell its story, attract and retain customers, and become an essential component of the company's overall marketing plan. This post provides a comprehensive overview of the key elements of a content marketing strategy, including the importance of a collaborative team, a publishing calendar, and a consistent message across different mediums. It also provides an example of how a content marketing strategy can be executed across different buying cycle stages. Ultimately, the post aims to educate readers that content marketing is essential to any successful marketing plan and that they should consider implementing a content marketing strategy for their company. “Content marketing is the marketing and business process for creating and distributing relevant and valuable content to attract, acquire, and engage a clearly defined and understood target audience–with the objective of driving profitable customer action.” —Content Marketing Institute Developing a Collaborative Team for Content Marketing
A content marketing strategy contains all the parts of your company’s story, how to execute, when to publish, and who will tell your story. Your story needs to be on point, from site content to downloadable fact sheets to video messages and infographics. You need a collaborative team to make sure all the moving parts are in synch, and that the message doesn’t stray from one department to another, and you’ll need an evangelical whose voice is heard across the entire company. If your company comes complete with many departments—marketing, sales, business development, engineering, and customer service—chances are you will need a content marketing strategist who can coordinate the strategy, production, publication, and execution of your campaign. Executing Your Content Marketing Strategy: Fine-Tuning to the Buying Cycle Content marketing strategies are executed across several mediums continuously and are fine-tuned to the buying cycle. This is where a publishing calendar comes in extremely handy. Your calendar will show which part of the story you are currently telling, when you are telling it, and where you are telling it. In this manner, you can use your calendar to put your video producers and writers on the same page with customer service, sales, and engineers. Types of Content for Your Content Marketing Strategy By telling the same story through different mediums, and then altering it to fit the different phases of the buying cycle, you will create a positive customer experience. An example of a content marketing strategy might go like this:
Conclusion To develop a consistent message, it’s important to tell a story, a story rich in themes. Each theme should tell a different part of the story—the product’s features, the integrity of the company, the customer’s pain points, and so on. Your message should be told in text, video, animations, and webinars and spread across several mediums so that your customers are continuously exposed to a consistent message that informs them about you and why they want to buy your products or services. That's just the beginning of content marketing! Please get in touch if you think this plan will work for you. Introducing a new product or service to the market can be exciting and daunting. As a business, it's crucial to have a well-thought-out strategy that guides potential customers through the buying cycle. The buying cycle consists of four phases: Discovery, Consideration, Conversion, and Retention. Each stage has its own challenges and opportunities for businesses to create compelling content that resonates with their target audience. In this blog post, I'll dive into each phase of the buying cycle and explore the best type of content to create for each stage. Let's get started! Phase 1—Discovery The beginning of the story starts with potential customers finding you. At this stage, your potential customers need to become aware of your company’s products and why they should choose your products or services. A successful beginning starts with introducing the company to the potential customer. The goal is to show the customer that your company is aware of their needs and can fulfill them. You will have reached your Phase 1—Discovery goal when the customer becomes aware of your brand. The best content at this beginning stage should be educational. Viral content is also important in helping spread awareness. Types of content that work well during the discovery phase include:
Phase 2—Consideration After the customer becomes aware of your company, you will want to start the education process on how your company’s products will help the customer succeed, describe how your company excels where the competitors might fail, and answer all of the customer’s questions so that they can make an educated decision on choosing your company’s product. The goal at this point is to get the customer to consider a purchase. The best content at the consideration stage of the buying cycle is to supply potential customers with content that helps them evaluate you and your products, such as:
Phase 3—Conversion The story’s climax is when the potential customer becomes a paying customer. For this to happen, the customer’s pain points must be resolved, any lingering doubts about the competition must be removed, and the customer must feel confident they made the right decision. All of this is accomplished through a consistent message, adhering to set themes that address the customer’s concerns, and relaying confidence that the company’s product is the best product or service on the market. The best type of content for converting the customer includes:
This content will be the heart of your direct sales materials and should showcase all your best features — this is the point of the story where you want to drive home the message that your products or services are the best available. The story won’t end there of course; there should always be an epilogue. The theme of the epilogue is to keep the paying customer happy so they remain a paying customer, and would recommend your products and services. That’s where Phase 4—Retention, comes into play. Phase 4—Retention At this point in the story, you have a paying customer, and you’d like to keep them around in the hopes they might refer you, offer a great review, provide a testimonial, or, best of all, remain a paying customer. The best type of content to retain a customer is:
Now that you know what type of content you want to develop and where it fits in the buying cycle, you should create a calendar so the team knows what they need to do and when they need to do it. Do you need help keeping your content marketing efforts on track? Do you find yourself publishing content haphazardly without a clear plan or strategy? If so, it's time to consider creating a publishing calendar. But what exactly is a publishing calendar, and why do you need one? In this blog post, I'll explore the answers to these questions and provide tips on creating a successful publishing calendar that will help you achieve your content marketing objectives. What is a publishing calendar? A publishing calendar is a schedule that outlines when you plan to publish content, what type of content you plan to publish, and where you plan to publish it. It's a roadmap for your content marketing efforts. Your calendar should include goals so the team understands objectives clearly — this is essential to ensure your content is relevant, valuable, and aligned with your business strategy. Why do you need a publishing calendar? There are several reasons why a publishing calendar is essential for effective content marketing. First, it ensures that you have a steady stream of content going out on a regular basis. This helps build your brand's visibility and credibility in the eyes of your target audience. Additionally, a publishing calendar makes it easier to coordinate your efforts across multiple channels and team members, ensuring that everyone is on the same page. When working with a team, it is important to have some flexibility in your content calendar to allow for last-minute changes, updates, or additions. Leave some room in your schedule to accommodate any unexpected events. When should you create a publishing calendar? The best time to create a publishing calendar is at the beginning of an overall marketing campaign. Let’s say your company wants to develop leads for a specific product, territory, or audience type. To generate those leads, you’ll need several types of content, all working in harmony, to create a branded, coherent, consistent message that educates the audience on why they want to choose your company. Different types of content take different lengths of time to generate — while a blog post might take a day or two, planning a webinar or shooting a video could take a month or longer. The calendar will keep you on track so that all the different content pieces can be produced, published, tracked, and analyzed in sync. Doing so will help you create a comprehensive content campaign that generates new business. Content types to include in your publishing calendar Now that you understand the importance of a publishing calendar, let's take a look at some of the content types you can include in your calendar: Blog posts Blog posts are one of the most popular types of content for a reason. They're easy to create, they're shareable, and they're great for driving traffic to your site. Use blog posts to highlight thought- leadership, recap recent webinars, or write an employee spotlight post to support recruitment efforts. Your calendar should include time to interview an SME, draft, review, edit, and publish. And don’t forget to include the Graphic Designer so they have time to create a header image, that will also match the image used in the social media post. Social media posts - paid and organic Social media is a great way to connect with your target audience and build brand awareness. Include a mix of curated content and original content to keep your followers engaged. Always promote your blog posts on social media — this will help drive top-of-funnel traffic — so you don’t have to rely on SEO alone. If your company attends industry events, post which events you’re attending and encourage people to schedule a time to meet with you. And don’t forget to use hashtags and tag people to help drive awareness. Webinars and videos Video content continues to be increasingly popular, and for good reason. It's engaging, shareable, and great for building brand awareness. Always allow for more time to create a video than, say, a blog post due to the additional steps involved. While a blog might consist of an interview, draft, review, edit, and publish process, creating a video includes all that and writing the script, planning the shoot, filming the video, editing the video, and adding music and special effects. All of this takes time and should be planned at least a couple of months in advance of the blog and social posts. For webinars, don’t forget about adding an email campaign. eBooks and whitepapers eBooks and whitepapers are great for lead generation. They provide in-depth information on a specific topic and are perfect for attracting prospects who are interested in what you have to offer. They follow the same basic process as a blog in terms of interviews, drafts, and revisions, but for an eBook you’ll want multiple SMEs and will need additional time for review. Email is another integral part of any content campaign and should definitely be included in the calendar to coincide with social media posts — the idea being, they see the email in their Inbox and then they see a similar post on LinkedIn — this builds brand awareness through repetition. For webinars, you’ll want to send out at least 3 invitation emails, each with new information, that start a month before the event. And always send a follow up email after the event. For emails, you’ll want a simple banner image with your logo, and it’s always a good idea to A/B test Subject lines, email body, and even landing pages. Landing pages To generate leads, you’ll need forms for prospects to fill out. That’s where a well-designed landing page comes into play. To drive visitors to your landing page, you need to include links from your email, blogs, social media, and even pop-ups on your website — so people are funneled into your lead generation platform, like Hubspot. In conclusion, a publishing calendar is an essential tool for effective content marketing. By planning and organizing your content strategy, you'll be able to build your brand's visibility and credibility, while also improving your overall results. For more examples, contact Michael Rohde today and kick-start your publishing calendar today. To gain a competitive edge in your industry, it's crucial to analyze your competitors. You can develop strategies to improve your business by understanding their strengths and weaknesses. However, gathering and analyzing competitor data can be time-consuming and challenging. That's where ChatGPT comes in. In this blog post, we'll show you how to use ChatGPT to analyze your competitors quickly and easily.
Step 1: Gather Data on Your Competitors To analyze your competitors, you'll need to gather data about them. This could include their market share, revenue, customer base, products and services, and marketing strategies. There are several ways to gather this information, including online research, industry reports, and customer feedback. Once you have this data, you can move on to the next step. Step 2: Define Your Research Question Decide on the research question you want to answer. For example, you should know which companies are leading your industry, which are gaining market share, or which companies have the most innovative products. This will help you focus your efforts and obtain the most relevant insights. Step 3: Use ChatGPT to Analyze the Data You can use ChatGPT to analyze the data you've gathered on your competitors. ChatGPT is an AI-powered assistant that can help you find answers to your research questions quickly and accurately. You can ask ChatGPT questions like "What are the top [industry] companies?", "Which companies have the most innovative products in the [industry]?" or "What marketing strategies are effective in the [industry]?". Step 4: Analyze the Results Once you have the results from ChatGPT, you can analyze them to gain insights into your competitors. Look for patterns or trends that could help you understand your competitors better. For example, if you find that one company is consistently gaining market share, you may want to investigate what they're doing differently than your own business. Similarly, if you find that certain marketing strategies are particularly effective, you may want to consider implementing them in your own business. In conclusion, analyzing your competitors is essential for staying ahead in your industry. By using ChatGPT to analyze competitor data, you can quickly and easily gain insights that will help you improve your own business. So why not give it a try? We're confident that you'll find it to be a valuable tool for your business. Modern content marketing techniques such as Inbound Marketing is growing in popularity while cold calls, direct mail, and spamming email are now considered ineffective sales tools. Inbound Marketing is a term used to describe the collective efforts of blogging, SEO/SEM, and social media. You'll know you have an effective Inbound Marketing program when your leads start coming to you. Here are a few good ways to make that happen.
From a top-level perspective, you'll want your marketing content to position your company/product/service as an expert consultant and not a salesperson. You'll want to generate content that provides insight and guidance in a non-threatening manner. When you do this, you'll draw potential customers to initiate contact with you rather than you calling them. Your customers will find you through your blog posts, social media, and Google searches, which is what makes SEO and an SEM such an important part of the equation. As an expert consultant, you will take the time to learn your potential customers pain points and why they would want your services or products. Your blog and social media posts should discuss those pain points in a manner that shows you understand the problem; and then conclude your content with possible solutions that your company can provide to heal their pain, solve their problem, and help them do their job better. You'll want your content to be friendly, confident, and knowledgeable. By doing this, you will establish trust with your potential customers as you are someone who can help them, not sell to them. At a more granular level, you'll want to write blog posts, but that's only the beginning. After you write an introductory post on how your service can help solve pain points, you'll want to turn that post into a video, an infographic, a webinar, and eventually case studies and white papers. And then rinse and repeat that cycle of content repurposing for each of your verticals or business segments. After creating and posting on your site (and optimizing your content for SEO), you'll want to post it where your customers are, for example, if you're B2C, you might want to focus on Facebook, Snapchat, Pinterest, and Twitter; for B2B, you might focus on LinkedIn as well as Facebook and the others. As you start to attract potential visitors to your social media sites and your company site, you'll want to start collecting information from them so you can stay in touch. A simple way of doing that is asking for a visitor's email address so you can answer questions, keep in touch through a newsletter, or you can follow up with additional information. A good CRM is necessary here. Depending on how large (or small) your staff is or what stage your company is in, you could use anything from MailChimp to HubSpot to Marketo to Salesforce or any combination. To effectively put together a solid Inbound Marketing plan, you will need several people involved, including: a writer, an editor, a videographer, a graphic designer, a social media expert and a CRM expert. You could hire an agency to do all of this work for you, but for larger companies or start ups that are ramping up, hiring and building your own content marketing team could make the difference between you and the competition. If you do prefer to keep your marketing efforts in-house, you'll need a professional with experience in all of these areas who can direct a team to create great, lead-generating content that brings the customer to you. A Lifetime Value Strategy is designed to increase your customer’s value during a certain period of time. For example, the lifetime value of your customer begins at the first interaction, their value increases at the first purchase, and their value further increases after repeat purchases and referrals. The total value of your customer shouldn’t end at the initial purchase, rather, your customer’s value should increase as time goes on. In this article, I discuss how to increase the value of your customer over a period of time. Enabling the Customer to Improve Your Company Many marketing strategies that orbit around the idea of Lifetime Value (LTV) focus on the difference between how much it costs to acquire a customer and how much value that customer brings to the company. If it cost $10 to acquire a new customer, but that customer only spent $1 on their initial purchase and then disappears, your company is not going to remain a company for very long. The job of the marketing strategist is to figure out how to increase the value of the customer, so that over the long run, they spend more money than it took to acquire them. One way to do that is to enable the customer to help improve your company. Taking a note from Michael Schrage’s article from the Harvard Business Review, he states that, “customers become much more valuable when… To me, that almost sounds like a focus group on steroids. To collect that kind of information (without herding a group of customers into a closed room), you’ll need an LTV strategy integrated with your Marketing Content Strategy, which coincides with the fourth phase of the buying cycle, which is retention. Not only are you looking to retain your customer, but you’re looking for valuable feedback: how do we improve, what do you want, how do you use the product, what are your pain points, what are your comfort points, and so on. You will need to provide a means for your customers to provide that information, whether through a forum, a chat room, social media accounts, meet ups, interactive webinars, or an opportunity to be showcased in a case study; the avenues to obtain feedback are out there, you just need to implement them. Having an active community that provides feedback, suggestions, reviews, and input are vital to a successful Lifetime Value Strategy. How LTV Applies to the Mobile Game Industry The mobile game industry, as reported in VentureBeat, was worth $91 billion worldwide in 2016. It’s an industry that’s only going to grow as time goes on. And now, with Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality taking off, the mobile space is only going to keep getting larger—which means the competition is only going to get tougher. So, how does the mobile game industry look at the Lifetime Value of their customers? For some, it comes down to Cost per Install (CPI) and Cost per Click (CPC), which translates to: does it cost more to acquire a customer than it does for that customer to install the game, and when they do, how much do we earn through advertising (the value of CPC). If the customer does provide greater value through an initial purchase than it cost to acquire them, then you’re doing great! If not, then you need to look further on how you’re going to increase the customer’s LTV. The first step is to calculate the Lifetime Value of your customers. Lloyd Melnick, author of, Understanding the Predictable: How to calculate, understand, and improve Customer Lifetime Value to build a great company, lists “...three categories of variables used to calculate LTV: Conclusion
Hopefully, this article explained why the Lifetime Value of your customer is very important: not only does it provide a metric that compares spending to customer value, but that by implementing an LTV strategy, combined with your Content Marketing Strategy, you can increase the value of your customer over time—and at the same time improve your company’s product. The initial purchase is only the beginning, after that, you not only need to retain your customer, you need that customer to provide vital feedback. In that way, you can build a supportive community around your successful business. If you are interested in applying a Lifetime Value Strategy to your Content Marketing Strategy, get in touch! Let’s say you work at a company that was founded one to two years ago, you have plenty of venture capital money, you have a thriving community that participates in your forums and frequents your chat rooms, and you have no pressure to bring in revenue until the end of the year. Sounds like a great position to be in, doesn’t it? But wait, the end of the year is only six months away, which really isn’t a very long time to develop a Go-to-Market (GTM) strategy, fit it in with your Content Marketing Strategy (CMS), launch it, and then watch your efforts bring in paying customers. Before you can worry about paying customers though, you need to have an idea of what a GTM strategy is, and even better, how it will fit in with your CMS. Develop a Go-to-Market strategy First, let’s understand what a GTM strategy is: basically, it’s when you have an existing product that you want to sell in order to bring in revenue. Overall, you’ll want to define your product, your market, distribution, pricing strategy, and your marketing channels. And if you take the extra effort to splice your Content Marketing Strategy with your Go-to-Market strategy, you should find yourself in a favorable situation. Define your product and customers If you haven’t already done so, you’ll want to define your product. How does it solve customer’s pain points? What features do your current users love about your product (provided you have some sort of free trial or beta version available). It’s also a good idea at this stage to define your buyers: are they IT managers; line-of-business managers; or are you selling directly to the CEO, CFO, or CMO? At this stage, you’re introducing your product to your potential customers. This is Phase 1 of the buying cycle. At this point, you’ll want your blog posts, introduction videos, and webinars focused on describing features and how it solves your customer’s pain. Determine your marketing channels To determine your marketing channels, you must realize how you’re going to reach your customers and you must describe your competitive advantage—what makes you better than the competition? You can convey this information through your online content along with face-to-face meetings at conferences and meet-ups. For Phase 2 of the buying cycle, you want to educate your potential customers. To educate your customers, you’ll want infographics, demo videos, data sheets, and case studies. For example, if you’re selling directly to developers, perhaps all you need is a detailed spec sheet with a price tag at the bottom; or, if you’re selling directly to the CEO, then you might need to include additional information such as ROI and how your product will streamline and make life more productive for employees. Distribute your product Let’s say you’ve sold your first product. Now, how are you going to deliver that product? Do you provide a download, is your product web-based, do you have a physical product that needs to be shipped? However your method of delivering your product, you need it well defined and thought out. You’ll also want to figure in your distribution costs to fit in with your pricing. Distribution of your product falls in line with Phase 3 of the buying cycle, which is conversion. If your customer needs their product delivered, it means you’ve converted a potential customer into a paying customer. Your Content Marketing Strategy fits in here by requesting feedback and looking for testimonials. Of course, you’ll want to successfully deliver your product before requesting feedback. Timing is of the essence here. Determine a pricing strategy Determining a pricing strategy is one of the last things you’ll want to do after you’ve defined your product, market, and distribution. You can take the costs from each of those earlier steps to see how much you need to sell your product and still come out ahead. Your pricing strategy could have a direct impact on retaining your customers. For example, if you believe you have a premium product and want to charge premium prices, then your product and distribution better be worth it. Otherwise, your early customers might not come back and you’ll never grow your customer base. Your pricing strategy could have a direct impact on Phase 4 of the buying cycle: retention. Your customer is not going to sign up for a newsletter or participate in your forums or provide feedback if they feel that they overpaid for your product. Conclusion
This is a quick overview discussion on how you can develop a Go-to-Marketing plan that mixes in with your Content Marketing Strategy and how it all fits in the buying cycle. Please contact me, Michael Rohde, to discuss how these strategies can help bring your product to market. A successful content marketing strategy will grow your audience and enable you to increase your potential customer base. This article will walk you through the basics of developing a content marketing strategy along with an overview of how it fits within the buying cycle. For a closer look at an introduction to content marketing, please read my earlier post here. Developing a Content Marketing Strategy One of the first things you’ll want to do when developing your content marketing is to learn the overall goals of the company. For most start ups, the overall goal of the company might be taking the product to market, or in most cases, simply to grow. Content marketing fits in great with both of these overall goals in that you can use your content to both educate consumers on your product and to increase awareness of the product through different mediums—forums, blogs, websites, webinars, infographics, etc. Determining Your Audience After you learn your company’s overall goals, you’ll want to discover who your audience is. For example, are you looking to target middle aged parents looking to buy a new car or developers who are looking for a solution to their problems? Either way, you want to learn their pain points. For my client Carjojo, their customer’s pain point is negotiating the best price when buying a new car; their comfort point is that Carjojo can either do the negotiating for them, or at least, provide data to help them do their own negotiating. One way to determine your audience is by looking at who participates in your forums, or who replies on Twitter, or who likes you on Facebook, or who comments on your blog post, and so on. Developing Themes around Your Audience Now that you have an idea of who your audience is and you know their pain and comfort points, you can develop themes. You can showcase these themes through introductory blog posts that describe upcoming features to help your customers with their pain points. Good blog post topics also describe your product’s features that make current customers happy. This is also a good time to develop an editorial calendar, which I discuss in this post. Fitting Your Content Strategy Within the Buying Cycle
Here, I provide a quick outline of how your content strategy will fit within the buying cycle. For a closer look at this topic, you can read my earlier post, Understanding the Buying Cycle.
Using Metrics to Determine Overall Impact Before you start publishing your content, you’ll want to have a good analytics program tracking your progress. For example, Google Analytics can be easily applied to most online platforms and will instantly start providing key insights as to who is on your site and what they are doing there. It’s a good idea to watch several different key indicators to get a feel for what your audience is doing, but it’s best not to focus on any one metric in particular, and don’t get hung up on why there was a spike on Tuesday and a slump on Thursday. It’s better to look at overall trends when determining how to adjust your strategy. You might get a good idea of what’s working and what’s not working after collecting about a month’s worth of data, but you’ll see the larger picture when you have six months to a year’s worth of data. By following this content marketing strategy, you should increase awareness of your company, which should help the overall goal of your company. Don’t expect this to happen overnight. It will take daily updates, revisions, and close analysis of your metrics to make it happen. |
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