People ask me all the time how I find time to write and share. I have already shared some of my top tips in the above links and this older one.
But one of my biggest secrets is that I don’t spend nearly as much time writing as you might think. I am opportunistic with re-purposing the content I already create.
When I give a presentation, I almost always upload it to my Slideshare or YouTube pages. Then I use my speaker notes to create a blog post that links to or embeds that content, like here.
When I get asked a question or questions via email, I try to turn that answer into a quick blog post. So this is one of those posts, resulting from a request for my top 3 factors that drive content marketing success.
I worked inside and across one very large brand. I have talked to every single person in the content marketing industry I could find, since I started this journey. Recently, I have been fortunate enough to speak to many more brand marketers about the challenges they face in executing an effective brand strategy.
Across all those conversations and observations, a few very important factors have emerged on what drives effective content marketing strategy. They have been validated by research from the Content Marketing Institute, Sirius Decisions, MarketingProfs and others, so this is nothing new. The following three factors are driving content marketing success and are the most important ways content marketing should be measured.
It all starts with having a documented content strategy that starts with the why, and then works through the who, the what, the how, and the when of the brands content marketing efforts.
It can get really complicated from there but for the definitive guide, all you need to do is check out Joe Pulizzi’s approach to creating a content marketing mission statement.
The simple overview: define what you will do, for whom, and what benefits will accrue to the audience and to the brand.
The second most important factor to content marketing success is having a person in charge with the authority and the budget to tell amazing stories.
This person needs to be able to understand how to utilize limited resources to publish and share great content. And also needs to know how to translate that into results the business can understand.
The content marketing lead also needs to be able to push back on the business’ natural tendency to want to talk about itself. That is why the person, their budget and their authority are all so important.
Important Caveat: this does not mean the content marketing lead owns all content efforts across the firm. We could (and I will write) a whole different post on that. But this person needs to create a center of excellence that acts as a service to the rest of the business but also holds the business accountable to content success.
The third piece is making sure content production hits all stages of the buyer journey – from start to finish.
Most brands are seriously overweighted at the bottom of the funnel. And they miss huge opportunities to meet new customers at the point of need. This also usually means that a large portion of the content that gets produced by the business goes completely unused.
As much as 70% of content created by businesses goes completely unused, according to Sirius Decisions. This points to the conclusion that content marketing does not need to always find new budget. It just needs to find the pockets of waste inside the content creation machine and focus those efforts across the buyer journey.
All content marketing measurement efforts have to balance across the main objectives of reach, engagement and conversion.
We can’t just count page views and call it a day. Even time on site and social sharing don’t go far enough. Brands need to measure and improve those stats but also need to continuously optimize on conversion.
Conversion includes things the business can count and where it can measure real value. Page views may not have direct value. But if you earned a visit to your website from a prospect, what would it have cost you to buy that same visit via a banner or paid search? You can do this across all the measures of your content marketing efforts.
This is what I’m seeing. What factors do you see driving content marketing success?
