The power of content marketing to propel brands forward in this new anti-interruption era is clear. The jury has returned a verdict, and it’s guilty. Content marketing is guilty of attracting people who have real interest in the solutions a brand can provide. This reality is reflected in the Content Marketing Institute’s 2013 B2B Content Marketing Benchmarks, Budgets and Trends report and HubSpot’s Marketing Benchmarks from 7,000+ Businesses report.
Deploying a continuous content marketing campaign can be a daunting task for some companies. However, with the right plan in place it can be efficient, fun and profitable. For this to happen, marketing departments must scale content production to allow for maximum employee contribution without sacrificing quality or brand standards.
To do this requires three things. People, process, and software. All of which must work together synergistically to get the most out of content marketing.
There are five content contributor personas that can be leveraged by brands. They include employees, ghost writers, brand advocates, experts and professional copywriters. Leveraging the employee persona in a robust fashion organically grows industry thought leadership from within without blowing up the budget and is the most critical contributor to the persona mix.
Every company should experiment to find out which persona mix works the best for production, quality, engagement, traffic, and conversions.
Crafting a process for creating, editing, publishing and tracking content is critical for campaigns to remain efficient and profitable. Many content marketing deployments don't fail because there is no process for editing, publishing, and tracking. However but because there is no process for creating content to begin with.
The process for creating content should include guidance on article titles, structure, optimization, repurposing and content governance.
For a deep dive into content marketing process download The Enterprise Blog Post Optimization Guide in PDF or Kindle format.
There are many software platforms that can empower brands to efficiently create, edit, publish and track content. HubSpot, WordPress, Kapost, Joomla, and Compendium represent possible software solutions for companies to deploy and manage their content marketing.
The best solution will depend on the goals of the deployment and the content contributor persona mix. Additionally, some solutions offer turn-key guest contributor features while others may not.
Scaling content marketing requires the appropriate mix of people, process, and software. Understanding this enables brands to properly plan, deploy and track their inbound efforts. The more efficient companies can be when deploying content marketing the lower the customer acquisition cost (CAC) becomes. The company with the lowest CAC has a major competitive advantage in the marketplace.
The Enterprise Blog Post Optimization Guide in its entirety is available for free in both Kindle and PDF format.
