So what are the secrets of success for effective content marketing?

Success factors in a nutshell:

• Being able to prove a positive return on investment (ROI)
• Having a documented strategy and plan in place
• Producing high quality content
• Strong communication both internally and externally
• Never forgetting to ask for the sale
• Investing in the right tools to streamline work practices
• Analysing and measuring to continually improve on results

Proving positive ROI

To answer the question ‘was our content marketing campaign successful and effective?’ you need to have a clear understanding about what success is. This will depend on the goals that have been set. Measuring brand awareness is very different to measuring lead conversions. Many marketers fail to prove a positive ROI because their goals haven’t been set properly from the beginning.

In order to prove a positive ROI you need to be clear on what you’re tracking, analysing and reporting on. If your focus is mainly on lead conversions then make sure your software tools are talking to each other and can assist with closed loop reporting. When your business model is e-commerce you need to delve deep into your data to find the numbers to extract.

Example: If you have to prove that campaign X brought in Y amount of new customers then do you have the tools in place that you will need to be able to trace the connection through from the initial contact to the sale? Can you show how much your website was involved in converting each lead? How about your nurturing emails? Your sales team? Other channels?

Ask these kind of questions in relation to all the KPIs that are important for your organisation and which your content marketing efforts need to achieve.

Top Tip: Keep a marketing activity log and maintain it well. Know exactly what happened when, what was changed and why. Only then can you look back and analyse your various activities accurately

Strategy

There is no question that having a well thought through and well documented content marketing strategy is vital if you’re going to be successful. Survey after survey of content marketers across the globe show the same thing - those who are winning at their content marketing think before they act and record what they are doing.

Remember, it is about playing the long game. And because there are no immediate results when you first start out, you need to take the time to think about strategy and plan your activities. That is the only way you’re going to be successful in helping to grow the business. If you do not know why you’re doing what you’re doing, or who it’s for, and what you actually want to achieve, then you’re going to struggle. Just doing a bit of content marketing here and a bit there, with no real direction, is not going to lead to results.

Internal success factors

Executive buy-in

Getting executive buy-in is a major ingredient for content marketing success. You need at least one champion backing you on the executive level, whose buy-in will help you keep your content marketing alive. As there won’t be any overnight results, this initial buy-in can prove difficult to get, but that’s also why it’s so important. It usually takes at least 6 months (usually more) to show a little movement. But to prove a positive ROI it’s crucial to look at a time frame of at least 12months – better still 24months - before evaluating the entire strategy.

Don’t just focus on executive buy-in though, you will need lots of help from all the other departments too. It’s really important that they get what you’re doing and understand what content marketing is and how it can help the company, as well as their own individual targets.

To prove a positive ROI it’s crucial to look at a time frame of at least 12-24 months

Top Tip: Spend time holding a pre-launch workshop within your company. Don’t just present them with what is going to happen, but involve them in the thought process. This may take more time to begin with, but in the long run will be far more effective. And then don’t forget to present the results back too.

Get everyone on the same page

In order for content marketing to work you need to be able to produce high quality, engaging content in large quantities. Gathering information for this purpose is going to be made much easier if the entire company is on board and understands the concept and what is needed. Often the information you need will be sitting in employees’ heads, or on their hard drives. If everyone understands the ‘why’ and ‘what’, it will be easier for them to help the entire process move along.

Top Tip: Think of the company as one united team. Working in isolation is never going to bring you the results you’re after. Content marketing is a team effort, not only within the marketing department but throughout the entire company.

Content marketing is a game of trial and error - track and measure everything

Agility

Modern marketing departments need to be able to change on the fly. Team members need to be able to adapt quickly and remain flexible. Content marketing is a game of trial and error - you need to be tracking and measuring everything, analysing the results, applying the knowledge you’ve gained and trying again. What works for one company might not work at the next, so no one blueprint exists that will be suitable for everyone. If you can foster a culture of change and openness you will have a much better chance of winning the game. If not your entire organisation, then at least your marketing department needs to be able to work like this and be able to make adjustments quickly, without red tape holding things up. If every blog post has to first be approved by three senior execs then something’s not right and you will struggle to achieve the desired results.

Top Tip: Read up on how agile marketing departments are run and what tips and strategies you take from them and incorporate within your own organisation.

Have a dedicated team

When you decide to start a content marketing campaign you will need to have at least one full-time person working on it and in charge of it. This can be particularly important when you’re working with an agency who produces the content and other communications for you. Depending on the level of your engagement with the agency you will also need to have some in-house talent dedicated to the task at hand. Don’t be tempted to just dish this out to employees. They won’t appreciate it on top of their current workload.

Why are we doing it

The biggest question to ask yourself before you begin, and to revisit often as time goes on, is why you are using content marketing. If you lose track of this reason you will end up doing things that have little impact and may lead you off track. Failure is then highly likely.

Whether you find your leads are engaging more digitally, want to use content marketing methods to increase brand awareness, or simply want to increase your client retention or achieve another objective, then make sure it is written down. Everyone needs to not only understand it but to be constantly aware of it and referring back.

What does success look like

As mentioned, content marketing is about playing the long game. Before you get started you need to figure out how you will know whether you have been successful or not. What will success look like? And are you giving yourself enough time to achieve your goals?

When you first start out, Phase 1 you will be about focusing on the overall strategy and setting everything up for success. Then you will produce your first simple campaigns in Phase 2. Once you’ve gained a better understanding of what happened during Phases 1 and 2 you are then ready to roll out Phase 3 as an ongoing content marketing machine. All the while you need to keep track, measure, analyse and improve in order to move towards the goal that you set in the beginning.

Top Tip: Break down your strategy into phases and set different goals for each phase.

Stay on top of developments

You need to make time to stay abreast of developments in your own industry, as well as new thinking and methods of best practice within content marketing. Just make sure you avoid falling prey to the latest fad and immediately jumping to trying it. Instead, stay informed and evaluate every bit of information you come across, looking at how it could help you improve your existing strategy.

Top Tip: Block some time out in your calendar every week for learning and spend it reading up or watching webinars.

Editorial mission statement - focus on the consumer

A key success ingredient for content marketing is having an editorial statement written down and shared with the team. This statement should be all about the consumer and will have little to do with the company, your products or services. The questions you are trying to answer here are about the person who will be reading or watching your content. Who are they? What content are they consuming? And why?

Who are you trying to reach? - Personas

There are two components to answering this question: 1 - who is the ideal target client you are trying to attract? And 2 - what kind of person are they?

Who's your ideal target client and what kind of person are they?

These two parts combined will help you create detailed criteria for determining who is going to be a good fit for your company and what it offers. From a content creation point of view, these personas are really important. But don’t fall into the trap of trying to cover everyone. You just need to have 3-4 personas as a maximum, who are the people most likely to engage with your content and fit your most wanted target description.

How are you going to reach them?

Make sure you understand how you are going to reach these personas and plan accordingly.

What are the topics you will cover?

In your editorial mission statement, pinpoint the type of information you want to be sharing. Which topics will be of interest to your target audience?

What outcome are you after?

The key here is to think in terms of your target audience – what’s in it for them? What happens after they’ve read or watched something? Will they be more educated? Feel inspired? Have a good chuckle? Forget about selling when answering this type of question. This is not about the sale of your goods at all. It is only about your content and what ‘value’ it has for the people who will be engaging with it.

Written and communicated

Summarize your editorial statement in just one sentence and communicate it with the entire company. Make sure everyone understands the components.

Top Tip: Don’t be afraid to change your editorial statement over time. You may find that when you first start out you have a very different idea of what it is that your content marketing will look like, than the reality once you have real people interacting with it and giving you feedback. This is no small thing to do though, if you’re going to do it properly. There needs to be a lot of discussion and thought go into the decision and subsequent change of direction.

Quality content

Now let’s look at some success factors for the content itself.

Plot out the customer journey

If you have existing clients, start by going through the data to pull out as much information as you can about the customer journey. What did it take for these people to become customers? How can your content efforts smooth the way and help with more conversions?

Once you understand the journey your customers make, map out all the pieces of content that you need to produce to cover every part of that journey. Usually this will break down into three main stages - awareness, consideration and decision making. Do you have enough content for each of these stages, for each of your customer personas? Creating all these pieces of content should be your initial content plan. After that you can start building up your content library and venturing off into other topics and types of content.

What formats will you use?

What format are you going to offer you content in - will you just be focusing on blogposts and e-books to download? Or do you also want to produce videos and infographics?

Knowing upfront what different types of content you want to produce will help you in setting up your detailed editorial calendar. It will largely depend on the talent you have available. If you are working with an agency then they will be your talent pool, otherwise you will have to either hire in your own talent, or engage freelancers.

Consider time and cost implications as part of your planning. For example, writing an article and having it professionally edited is faster and simpler than creating a video montage. This may influence the formats you use and how frequently you can use them.

An important point to consider here is your target audience. What format of content would they prefer? Plus, there continues to be a huge drive being made towards visual content across all communications platforms, including social media, so that needs to be factored in.

Mapping it all out

Once you have your customer personas defined, you have plotted out your customer journey and have thought about the best formats, topics and themes to cover, now it is time to map it all out. Have a brainstorming session and let the ideas flow freely. No matter how crazy or weird. Write it all down. Don’t let detail get in the way at this stage.

After that process, sit down and fill in the gaps in your editorial calendar. What you are aiming for here is to fill it, while matching it to a time frame that is realistic and doable. Don’t set yourself up for failure by going too crazy and trying to stretch it too far. To be successful it’s more important that you are producing high quality content not just high quantities of content. This means instead of throwing out three badly researched or weakly written articles, you use your resources to produce one amazing piece of content instead.

What core content pieces do you need?

Many organisations are so excited to get going with content marketing that they forget the basics. Your first step should be to look at your core content pieces - the ones that are about your products and services. But we’re not talking about glossy product brochures here. We’re talking about the content that will answer key questions for potential customers, for example what it’s like to work with you, who has used your product/ service and what success they have had, and a comprehensive list of FAQ based on the questions real customers ask.

Check you have answered these 3 main questions within your content marketing

• Why anyone would change to your product
• Why they would do so now
• Why they would choose you over others

Well written and researched case studies are very important for landing a sale, especially in B2B environments. Buyers want to see what others have done and why, and what results they went on to achieve using your solution.

Top Tip: When deciding on these pieces of content gather input from team members in product development, sales and customer services. They will all have valuable insights that you can use to plan out the core content you need.

Use good writers & editors

As content is at the centre of content marketing it stands to reason that you will need excellent writers to produce great work. A professional editor is worth their money as there is nothing worse than a strong piece of content being ruined by too many errors and grammatical mistakes.

Top Tip: Don’t worry if a specific topic has been written about extensively on the net already. It is important that you show your audience that you have knowledge and expertise on the subject. When researching the competition, look at the search results you get and make sure your article is a lot better than them. Remember quality over quantity

Ensure high quality design

As well as great writers you’ll need excellent designers who can help create your visual content. Anything you produce needs to look great but also importantly to have impact. You may already have these resources in-house but if you do not want to hire your own talent then make sure you work with excellent agencies. Poor design is a big no-no.

Top Tip: Have at least one person in your company trained up and able to do simple image editing, such as putting some text on top of a graphic. You no longer need to have and understand software like Adobe Photoshop to do this. There are loads of online tools like canva.com now available that can make this a quick and easy task. sure your article is a lot better than them. Remember quality over quantity

Target your personas

The content you produce must be aimed specifically at one of your personas, or it’s never going to produce the results you’re looking for. A scattergun approach to marketing that aims at everyone in the world is always a bad idea and is likely to end up a big waste of time. Narrowing the field may mean you are aiming at less numbers in total, but they are more likely to be the right type or person and to be interested. Success is unlikely to come from high audience numbers, what you want is highly targeted traffic.

Top Tip: Have your persona sheets created into something graphic that can be made and displayed so everyone can see them. Anybody who interacts with leads and clients will benefit from being able to better visualise who they are talking to.

Tell a good story

We all love a good story and big brands are increasingly realising the value of producing content, just like traditional media publishers do. One example is Marriott’s short film ‘Two bellman’ (http://twobellmen.marriott.com). While you may not have the budget for this type of content, even a short blog post needs to tell an interesting story. You need to be creating something that will be of value to your audience, in a way that is unique, captivating, and interactive.

Top Tip: Think outside the box of a normal marketing manager and instead think big publishing house. Now come up with ideas that will help you create content that will grab your audience. Loads of good examples exists in the B2B world of companies who have used quality content to build an audience in niche markets. Highly targeted magazines are one example. talking to

Utilise internal experts

Don’t overlook your internal experts when gathering in information that you can use to produce your content. Your company is good at what it does because it is an expert in its field. So use that expertise and use your team members as a source. This will help you go on to create rich and informative content.

Top Tip: Often in-house experts may not feel particularly comfortable writing down their own thoughts, so offer to interview them instead, either in person, virtually or via email. Come up with some good questions beforehand and send them across in advance of the interview, so they can prepare themselves. Record the interview if you can so you can refer back to it and don’t miss anything.

Repurpose

Once you’ve been doing content marketing for some time – say at least a year – then you should end up with a large library of content. Instead of always trying to think of new topics to talk about, take a look back at your existing material and find new ways to present or repurpose it. For example, turn a couple of blog posts into an e-book. Or take your most downloaded piece of content and create a webinar around it. And see if there is material that could be collated and turned into an interesting slideshare.

Top Tip: Don’t worry about using the same content in different forms. Certain people will enjoy accessing content in certain ways. Some may prefer to read blog posts delivered to their inbox, while others may want to download it all in one go via an e-book. Others may prefer to watch a video or listen to a podcast. Mix it up as much as you can, covering off all the different styles.

Spend time on a strategy for your nurturing campaigns

Nurturing campaigns are meant to encourage website visitors to move along the buyer journey from the start, and their first encounter with you, right through to the end and closing the deal. Even going beyond this and helping them to become happy, repeat customers. It is a long journey, particularly when it comes to B2B relationships.

What is the promotional plan?

This is about figuring out what the most effective way will be to get your content out there. You’ll want to ensure it is seen by as many targeted eyes as possible. If you already have an audience then this will be easy to do, but if you need to build the audience then you need to spend some time strategising how you’re going to do that.

Top Tip: A quick way to reach an audience is by taking out targeted ads on social media platforms. This will work best if you have thought about and created content with the specific social media platform in mind.

Communication

Effective content marketers meet more than once a week to discuss and work on their content. At the very least they meet regularly, as it is important to keep everyone in the loop. Externally you also want to make sure that all your communications have a similar style and sit well together to keep the conversation going.

Top Tip: Have clearly defined communication strategies and boundaries upfront. Find ways to lessen any concerns that the exec team may raise by educating them and giving examples of what similar companies are doing.

Advocates, influencers and ambassadors

These are the people who will tell others about you. Getting them onboard is the best marketing you can possibly get. Word of mouth remains the most effective and powerful advertising there is. In the 24/7 digital world, asking for and providing recommendations has become very easy to do. ‘Dark social’ is the term now commonly used for the direct traffic hits that may come from those hidden conversations people have about you and the links they send out.

• Advocates: these may be customers, partners and employees (another great reason to always involve team members in your content plans)
• Influencers: people/organisations with similar, or even the same, target audience but on a larger platform
• Ambassadors: people who love your brand and help spread the word

Each of these groups deserves their own strategy for how you will involve and leverage them within your overall plan. Successful content marketers realise the power of these individuals and will work actively to increase the numbers they associate with in each of these groups.

Make the sale

Sometimes, amidst all the excitement and buzz of creating wonderful content, it can be easy to forget to actually ask for the sale! Great content marketing isn’t an ad for the company, or a glossy brochure. It is about telling stories the audience will love and then connecting them back to the creator of that content – the company and brand.

The overall objective for any marketing activity is always going to be to help the company achieve its business goals. So don’t forget to ask for the sale by placing relevant calls to action (CTAs) everywhere. These may be very subtle, or large and in your face, it all depends on the content and where it’s placed - but don’t forget about it. Here are some examples:

• The last page of any e-books should be about you and your products
• Every page on your website needs to have at least one way of taking the visitor by the hand and helping them on to the next step
• All your printed marketing materials need to include strong CTAs
• Ensure there’s a CTA at the end of any video content
• In nurturing emails, include a CTA directly linking to your actual product/service, as after all that is the whole idea!

Top Tip: Remember to always ask yourself the question ‘what do I want them to do next?’ and then offer that next step.

Tools

Every tradesperson needs their tools and it’s no different with content marketers. Apart from the tools you need to produce your content and to automate it, there are also tools that can help you with your project management and asset management.

If it’s just you working on the content marketing, then you’ll know where everything is. But as soon as the team grows or the contents starts to get more complex, it can all go start going wrong. Many a marketer is stuck in spreadsheet hell! Investigate tools that can help you work faster and smarter.

Analysing and Reporting

If you want to prove your ROI then you need to know what success will look like. Set up the key KPIs you want to measure from the beginning and keep adjusting as you go along. Start with the basics of conversion and engagement, depending on your overall goal.

As an example of how you need to think about things - Is having X many followers on Facebook really a good indicator of whether Facebook is working for you? Would it perhaps be better to look at how many new contacts you found via Facebook, or how many customers are engaging with you on the platform? This is only one example but gives you an idea of why it’s so important to think carefully about the KPIs you put in place.

Top Tip: To make sure you are measuring the right numbers, ask yourself for every KPI ‘why am I measuring this and what does it tell me?’