The recent Content Marketing Institute release, a B2C content marketing report, took the attention of all content marketers. It’s an important annual study because it helps shed light on various aspects of content marketing that we’d otherwise be blind to.
B2C marketers with a documented strategy were found to be more effective than those without one in every aspect of content marketing. But yet, only 39% of marketers have a documented content marketing strategy.
Why do you need a one-page strategy?
We’ve already established that having a documented content strategy is far better than the alternative. For people that don’t have a written content marketing strategy, having a simple one is a great place to begin.
On the other hand, if you do have a detailed strategy but are having a hard time with it, simplifying it is going to help you figure out where the weaknesses are and possibly seal them.
A one-page content marketing strategy is advantageous regardless of the size or stage your business is in, because it helps in the following concrete ways:
- It helps clear up holes in your overall business plan.
- Content producers can all be sure of what exactly is expected of them.
- It gives the business a more focused vision.
For smaller business, it might end up being all you need. Most times content strategies end up being too convoluted and ineffective.
Pinpoint the organization’s needs and goals
The first step in creating a simple content marketing strategy is to find out what the organization aims to achieve in that year. Since almost every company’s ultimate goal is growth, they share almost the same objectives. This should be outlined in documents like internal memos. They should help you outline:
- The profit target
- Revenue target
- How growth is to be achieved
With all this data, the next step is to figure out what role content marketing is supposed to play in helping the company achieve those three goals. Don’t forget to have a way to measure the kind of impact content marketing will have had on the company’s end goals at the end of the year.
What to include in your one-page strategy
Having been used to writing five pages of more worth of details for your strategy, how do you know what to include and what to leave out? The following are the most important aspects it will normally boil down to:
Goals
Business goals are the most critical achievements your business should reach in the near fiscal year or over a 5-year period or so.
Examples of goals that could be outlined in your content marketing strategy include:
- Increase market share of your product from XX% to XY%.
- Grow percentage of sales from new products
Objectives
There is understandable confusion among marketers when it comes to differentiating between goals and objectives of a business. Goals are the general guidelines that are going to direct you over the long term and reflect the mission statement and vision of the company.
Objectives are meant to define how the goals are to be achieved – think of them as measured steps towards achieving your final goal. These should optimally have a measurable impact, should be specific and, preferably, have a completion date.
For instance:
- Increase revenue by XX% over the next 12 months.
Strategy
This part of the document should detail how exactly you plan on achieving your goals and objectives. What qualitative impact will content marketing have on the business over the course of the next year? For example:
- Increase awareness of the new product by launching an ad campaign.
- Create a better customer service experience by retraining company representatives.
- Increasing brand engagement by launching a social media campaign.
Metrics
This section should detail how you are going to measure what the content marketing strategy has achieved in the course of a year or so. These should directly reflect on the goals, objectives and strategies the business has put in place for itself.
It’s important to note that all details included in this section should be concrete and measurable. For example:
- Awareness of the new product was increased by XX%.
- Customer satisfaction rating improved from XX% to XX%
- Sales revenue jumped from XX% to XY%.
Other useful details to have at hand
Once all of this is said and done, there are a few more factors you might have to consider when it comes to a content marketing strategy. A one-page strategy is a great rough guide for how the business should achieve its goals, but you may end up leaving out some finer details that are required to get to the end result.
These include:
The type of content to produce
There are several different kinds of content that can be used to reach the eventual end goals.
- Blog posts: Blog posts are an excellent way to increase search engine presence and make your business discoverable on the internet.
- Case studies: Case studies usually coincide with testimonials and are an excellent way to let potential customers know how your customers feel.
- Videos: Videos have risen to the top of the content marketing world because they are one of the most engaging forms of content that can be produced. According to the data presented by HubSpot, videos are 40 times more likely to get ahead on social media than other kinds of content. Granted, it needs a larger amount of investment, but it has a proportionately higher ROI.
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To sum up
A Content Management System (CMS) is a program that helps to manage all the content you create and could have a lot of bearing on how your content appears and what kind of analytics you can harvest from your visitors.
Some of the most popular CMSs out there include WordPress, Contentful and HubSpot. Your business strategy might include new ways you can use and implement a new CMS or how you can leverage the power of the old one to your advantage.
Guest Post: About the Author
Lilian Chifley is a digital marketing expert working mainly with online writing services. Her current assignments are with Assignment Masters, Dissertation writing service and Custom writing services. When she’s not at work, she loves to go out for jogging or cycling, read motivational and inspirational books and spend time with her two young daughters.