Are you drowning in content? Or are you in a content drought? If you’re engaging in social media marketing, email marketing, and web marketing, you have a content problem. Either you have too much content and you don’t know how to streamline it efficiently, or you don’t have any content and you lack the time, effort, or know-how to create it!
A content marketing strategy is a roadmap that not only tells you what you’re going to create, but how you’re going to create it, distribute it, and ultimately use it to attract, retain, and convert readers and viewers into customers.
Let’s take a closer look at how to plan and manage our content needs.
How To Plan Content
Who is your audience?
Much like any communication we develop, if we don’t understand who is on the receiving end, we’re likely to give information that irrelevant or unhelpful.
Before we can create content we have to know who are audience is and the opportunities to engage with them, as well as the type of content they’ll likely find most engaging.
Use data to help guide your audience analysis, but also look to any existing audience analytics you may already be collecting through Google Analytics or other customer relationship management tools.
What types of content are most relevant?
Not all content is created equally. Depending on your audience and their behaviors across different touchpoints and platforms, their interest in different types of content is different. Let’s consider the following:
In person: When someone is shopping in store, they may also be using their mobile device to help them find more information about a product. This means directing in-store users to your website via QR codes or other in-store messaging.
Website: When users are visiting your website, there’s usually specific reason. They may be in the consideration phase and gathering relevant information about your product or service. Or they could be in the decision phase and wanting more information that will convince them to purchase. Consider using 360 videos to show what the product looks like or product testimonials or featuring reviews along side the products. Provide helpful and engaging product descriptions and feature images that show the product in real-world or aspirational environments.
Mobile: When using a mobile device, such as a smart phone or tablet, users may be multi-tasking — shopping while watching television or while in-store. Content made available should be accessible and optimized for smaller screens. If using a mobile app, content should allow users unique experiences to engage — like using AR/VR technology to see how products will look in their living spaces.
Social Media: Recent research from Sprout Social shows the different types of content that consumers want from social media include images (68%), video (50%), and text-based posts (30%). Use social media to inform, educate and engage users using content that helps navigate through their customer journey. Social media content can also help you show behind the scenes information about how products are made, assembled or otherwise produced.
Email: Email is an opportunity to entice the user with images that will make them click through. Content should be concise and designed with a specific goal in mind — don’t overwhelm the user with too many calls to action or distracting text.
How to Map Content
Now that you have a better idea of the different ways content can be used to engage your audience, it’s important to understand your capacity for creating and managing your content.
Take inventory of current content
Chances are you already have a lot of existing content in various different formats. It’s important to understand how much of what currently exists is relevant and what content is out of date. A content audit can help your teams understand what content is currently available.
- What images or video do you already have available? Are they recent? Do they show the product in relevant environments?
- Who is your content designed for and is it content persona and value-driven?
- Are current product descriptions up-to-date and reflect the current specifications?
- Do you have the raw footage or are you dealing with edited multimedia?
- What types of content do you need?
Consider your resources
If you’re creating and managing content in-house, consider the time, money and resources you have available. If you don’t have the bandwidth to support wide-scale content creation and management, you may want to consider the types of content you need or enlist the help of consulting services.
If you’re on a budget, working remotely and engaging in content collaboration, you may want to consider tools that are affordable, agile and appropriate for different platforms. Tools like Canva and Adobe Spark offer freemium and low-cost solutions that allow teams to work together, while optimizing content for different platforms seamlessly. These platforms also integrate with other publishing platforms to help simplify workflows.
How to Create Content (and Sustain and Maintain it)
Taking into consideration the time and resources you have to create content that is most relevant to your target audience, it’s important to develop a content creation workflow that can be easily maintained and sustained over time. If your workflow slows you down or frustrates you, it will be harder to keep up and you won’t have content to help support your content marketing strategy.
A typical content creation workflow includes tasks like these:
- Outline
- Write
- Review
- Edit
- Approve
- Publish
Who will be creating content? How will they know what to create and for what audience and platform? Who will review or edit content? After content has been revised, what is the process for approving, publishing and managing it? Identifying these steps will help the right content get to the right audience at the right time.
Any bottlenecks or logjams will impede the content workflow from being successful. Processes take time to refine and revise to be most effective and efficient, so don’t give up if it doesn’t work right away. Communicate with your teams and provide information to help content move from one task to another.
An effective content workflow should empower your team to
- Break down the content process into manageable tasks
- Identify each piece of content’s stage of development
- Identify each step for the content to receive approval
- Know who is responsible for each step and when
How to Manage Your Content
Tools like editorial or content calendars will help you track content types, promotional channels, authors, and most importantly, publish dates.
An editorial calendar is a visual workflow that helps content creators schedule their work on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis.
Content calendars instruct the day-to-day management of content–tactical, granular, and detailed. They often include the exact messaging and content to be posted, such as article links, videos, or blog posts for each of your channels and the exact dates for when to publish.
These type of calendars also provide institutional knowledge about content that was used previously, so you can build of off existing content, adapt to current needs ,and learn over time what types of content performed best.
Your content is only as good as how it is managed. It’s important to effectively organize your content so that it’s easy to find, easy to retrieve and easy to store without slowing down systems or servers. When you create content for sharing digitally, you have digital assets. Common types of digital file formats that are digital assets, include (but are not limited to):
- Photos
- Videos
- Slide decks (such as PowerPoint presentations)
- Excel spreadsheets
- Word documents
- Plain-text files (such as Notepad files)
- Graphics (such as logos and other brand assets)
- HTML documents (and associated files, such as CSS)
- Audio files
- PDFs
Digital asset management (DAM) is not just about storing content — it also allows organizations to maximize the potential of digital assets to improve your team’s ability to collaborate and produce great content.
If you have a website, you have a content management system (CMS). All the content that currently lives on your website – your digital assets — should be organized in a way that makes it easy for the people who update the site to access the right information and publish it on the right pages.
Information that is poorly managed, organized, labelled and exists in duplicates puts a drain on content planning. Lots of time and money can be wasted looking for content because it’s not properly categorized or tagged.
Digital asset and content management are a worthy investment and not one that can be implemented over night. It takes a lot of thoughtful planning to successfully build a system that accessible, easy to use and scalable.
How to Know if Your Content is Working
If you want to know whether or not your content marketing is working, you need first to define what “working” means. It will be different for each business, depending on what they want to achieve and their audience’s behaviors, interests and motivations.
The easiest way to know if your content is working, is to go back to the beginning. What was the goal when you created it? Was it to engage customers? Facilitate transactions? Better educate consumers? Promote brand awareness?
What ever that goal was — was the objective met? Here are a few places to help you determine your content’s success:
Analyze your traffic sources:
- Social traffic – Visitors who come to your website via social networks
- Organic search traffic – Visitors who come to your website by Google search or other search engines
- Direct traffic – Visitors who come to your website by typing in your URL
- Email traffic – Visitors who come to your website via your email list
- Referral traffic – Visitors who come to your website via referring websites
- Paid traffic – Visitors who come to your website from paid search campaign
How to Put it All Together
After you analyze how your content is working — identify opportunities to improve.
- Content that is underperforming — update keywords, metadata to reflect relevant information that users are searching for
- Content that is performing well — identify key performance indicators and trends. Do the pages and posts that get the most engagement or drive more traffic have anything in common — images, videos, strong calls to action or questions?
- Content that is irrelevant — update your website and content calendars to retire content that isn’t needed any more or redundant
Digital Content Planning isn’t sexy, but when done well it makes your messaging more attractive.
By taking the time to invest in your content and the processes that support it, digital content planning will be coming easier and better supported throughout your organization. When you understand what types of content are needed to drive the customer experience, it will be easier to allocate resources to help it thrive.
This blog is based on a presentation given at the High Point Market on behalf of the Home Furnishings Association on Sunday, October 17 in High Point, NC.