Content marketing is hardly a new concept. But it’s only recently moved to the forefront of digital marketing strategy, inspiring brands to devote significant levels of investment.

This can mostly be attributed to the evolution of search marketing and, in particular, Google’s search algorithms. Now Google has become more accurate in identifying good and bad content, forcing marketers to put more emphasis on content as a discipline.

At the same time, consumers have become much more sophisticated in how they engage with brands, both on- and offline. Consumers want to be more informed, they have different expectations on how they engage with a brand (and how brands engage with them) and, in a multimedia, multi-device world, they’re much harder to reach.

This change in consumer behaviour has put content at the forefront of marketing communications. Poor quality content just gets lost in the noise we ignore every day.

Whilst content has always played a role in marketing, it was often a by-product in the creation of assets and its integration into the business was historically overlooked. It was seen as an isolated function, rather than a core component of lead and sales generation tactics. Many of these problems are rooted in organisational structures and cultures.

This whitepaper provides a framework for content and marketing strategists to audit their existing business capabilities and structures in respect to developing a strategy for content marketing, and to define meaningful metrics for effective measurement.

It will help brands integrate content into their wider marketing and branding activity, transforming content marketing from something they “feel that they must do” into something that delivers a genuine and meaningful return on investment.

Why Content Marketing?

To develop a meaningful framework for a content marketing strategy, we must first define what we mean by ‘content marketing’.It’s a term that has a number of interpretations but, for the purpose of this document, we’ve used the definition from the Content Marketing Institute:

Content marketing is not a mediumspecific activity. It can incorporate print, online, mobile, multimedia, social media and in-person marketing (to name just a few channels) and it can be deployed to serve any stage in the buying process. Where many content marketing strategies fail to meet this definition is “driving profitable consumer action”. Instead, many brands simply produce content with no real insight as to its impact on consumer behaviour (whether that’s securing a purchase or an endorsement). This is because they are unsure how to measure that impact, or are neglecting to measure it entirely.

Indeed, many brands are producing content purely as a ‘box ticking’ exercise, largely on the recommendation of their search marketing agency. This approach makes it difficult for brands to justify further investment in content, despite it becoming an increasingly important aspect of search marketing and customer engagement.

Why content is critical to communication

Content marketing is used in all marketing channels and is central to a brands ability to communicate with its audience. Even if you don’t have a dedicated content marketing strategy, your brand will be using content to communicate with your audience.

Customer engagement and conversion is directly attributable to content and its placement across a wide range of assets including, but not limited to:

As you can see, it’s virtually impossible to do any coherent or discernible form of marketing without content.

The relationship between content marketing and search marketing in particular has grown in importance. The need for a considered, scalable and sustainable content marketing strategy is confirmed by the correlation between search engine

rankings and ‘content related’ performance metrics, including time on site, bounce rate and copy length. These connections are clearly visible through Stickyeyes’ search engine ranking tool, Roadmap.

[Download PDF to see Figure 1]

Figure 1 above demonstrates the relationship between search ranking and average time spent on site.

It clearly shows a positive correlation between longer average time on site (indicating that users are consuming more content, or consuming content for longer) and higher search rankings.

Similarly, we see a positive correlation between organic search ranking and unique page views (Fig 2), indicating that sites that provide more pages of meaningful, easy to navigate content, tend to have stronger rankings in search engine results pages.

[Download PDF to see Figure 2]

Similarly, the graph below shows that negative content factors, such as bounce rate, have a negative correlation with search engine rankings. A high bounce rate, for instance, could be an indication that a page is not delivering engaging, easy to understand content. In this case, the chart below demonstrates that sites with lower bounce rates tend to hold more prominent search positions (Fig 3).

[Download PDF to see Figure 3]

This evidence makes the business case for content marketing much more compelling. With clear indications that content factors are now a strong ranking factor, content marketing has to be a central aspect of any search marketing strategy.

The Practical Challenges Facing Brands

Whilst content is pivotal to the marketing and sales process, most businesses face a range of practical challenges and barriers that either prevent them from fully understanding the role of content, or make it difficult to integrate it into the wider business and marketing process.

These challenges can vary, but they are often rooted in the corporate culture and structure of a business, irrespective of the size. These challenges include:

Limited or no clearly defined marketing budget

The ways in which many brands allocate budget to content marketing (and in some cases, marketing in general) is extremely varied. Only a handful of brands dedicate a meaningful level of resource to the creation, distribution and measurement of content.

Limited resource, or resource which is over utilised

The sudden growth of content marketing as a prominent channel has resulted in some brands trying to squeeze a content marketing function into their current structure

Historically, few brands had a dedicated content marketing resource, so the responsibility fell on existing teams within the business. Usually, this is either one or a combination of the social media, SEO, branding or PR teams, who then have to build content marketing into their workload.

This approach inevitably results in a limited and ad-hoc approach to content marketing, as there isn’t enough resource to fully consider its role throughout the purchasing cycle.

Other brands have adopted more of a ‘brand newsroom’ approach, with dedicated resource, often working outside traditional office hours, empowered to publish both proactive and reactive content as quickly as possible. This makes your content marketing much more agile, but requires a significant investment and is not without risks.

Limited skills and expertise

As well as having to overcome the resource gap, many businesses also find it a challenge attracting and retaining people with the relevant skills and expertise.

Because content, as a marketing channel, has grown to prominence in such a short period of time, there is something of a skills gap that businesses are struggling to fill. Many brands have turned to the journalism industry to recruit what are often referred to as ‘brand storytellers’, but their digital skills can be lacking.

Whilst there is a large talent pool of talented copywriters, content marketing requires a much broader skill set. Aside from the core marketing and measurement skills, content marketing involves the creation and distribution of content across various media, including video, infographics, interactive content, micro content, advertorials, thought leadership and functional content.

The Content Marketing Maturity Model

Another key challenge faced by the proponents of content marketing is obtaining approval and buy-in at board level.

Whilst content marketing dates back to the early days of the printing press, it has only recently achieved the prominence that it has today. In the face of more established channels, most of which provide a much greater level of insight and accountability on financial return, many brands are reluctant to invest in content marketing.

Many brands, particularly SMEs (although the same critique can apply to many larger brands), deploy marketing campaigns targeted at each individual consumer group and stage of the buying process. Often, the marketing teams and business functions are siloed in their individual departments, with minimal cross-team interaction, leading to a fragmented and inconsistent approach to content.

These challenges are highlighted and addressed in our content marketing maturity model.

The model helps to identify and map an organisation’s approach to content deployment. It illustrates the key phases an organisation has to go through to achieve a mature state of content marketing.

Organisations that don’t have a content marketing maturity plan often have a misguided view on where they are with content and what total immersion looks like for them. Typically, they struggle to achieve a cohesive, business-wide strategy.

In order to address the practical challenges in your business, the completion of a maturity model or scale is recommended (Fig 4). This will enable you to determine how developed your organisation is.

The model can be filtered and mined at each stage to ensure a realistic response that reflects your overall business strategy and takes into consideration key operational elements (employees, technology and process etc.).

Ultimately, the model helps your business understand where you currently are with content marketing and to develop a phased approach to get you where you want to be.

It assists in planning, resourcing and training. The end result is a content marketing strategy that is managed and influenced openly across departments and is fully integrated into your organisation’s processes and strategy.

[Download PDF to see Figure 4]

At one end of the scale we encounter a brand that is a relative novice in terms of content marketing strategy. There is weak buy-in from board level and the majority of efforts are relatively ad-hoc and in isolation to the overall marketing and branding strategy.

As this brand matures, it starts to develop more robust processes and procedures, measuring the overall output and return on investment from its activities. Resource in content will also increase throughout the maturity process.

However, it is only in the intermediate and advanced stages of the model that we start to see brands develop tangible outputs and measurement metrics. Content becomes more critical to marketing outcomes and resource matures from a dedicated team into a cross-departmental responsibility that is aligned to the overall aims of the brand.

At the advanced stage, we also see a process that is focused on the refinement and optimisation of content, making future strategic decisions based upon previous successes and failures, as well as external factors such as search engine ranking, product seasonality, content engagement, brand perception and market changes.

The critical thing to consider when developing your own content marketing maturity model is to be realistic with where you are and define where your strategy and organisation needs to develop. This model, together with the ‘Five C’ framework, allows your brand to develop a realistic roadmap for a successful content marketing strategy.

A ‘five C’ Framework

The process of content marketing can be summed up by our ‘Five C’ framework. This ensures that all content produced and deployed is in line with the core objectives of your business. (Fig 5)

Context

This stage is about understanding the current state of your brand and the effectiveness of your existing content marketing strategy.

Having appraised your current position, you then decide which areas of the business content is going to support, or which gaps in your strategy content will fill. Will you use content to support a particular product or service, or will you use content to support a wider branding and business marketing strategy?

Having appraised your current position, you then decide which areas of the business content is going to support, or which gaps in your strategy content will fill. Will you use content to support a particular product or service, or will you use content to support a wider branding and business marketing strategy?

Connection

This step ensures that whatever content marketing strategy you develop fits within your business operation and your existing marketing activities. This helps you to integrate content into your existing activity and your operational structures.

Categorisation

Here you prioritise your content marketing objectives, ensuring that content marketing strategies are applied to the areas where they will have the greatest impact.

At this stage, you need to clearly identify the areas to target, the order in which you need to address them and any specialist skills needed to deliver that strategy.

Crafting

Crafting, as the name suggests, incorporates the creation of content. However, this involves significantly more than simply putting pen to paper.

The process requires the constant assessment of content as it moves through an organisational workflow. This allows marketing directors to address any resource, structural or skills issues that may prevent the effective execution of your strategy, as well as enabling them to judge the effectiveness of various content techniques.

Conversion

This stage involves the identification of the measures and key performance indicators that you will use to appraise the success of your campaign and demonstrate a return on investment.

Step One: Context

Defining your Buying Cycle

It’s important to understand how your consumers discover and purchase your product or service. Defining the steps that your customers take provides you with a series of stages on which to target your content, as you will need to apply different content types, different mediums and different media at different stages of the buying process.

At a basic level, your audiences are likely to go through three key stages:

• Awareness: The prospect gets acquainted with your brand
• Consideration: The prospect will seek to rationalise their purchase, using case studies, reviews and testimonials.
• Decision: The prospect is comfortable to commit to a purchase.

By defining your buying process, and how your consumers behave, you can effectively determine different types of content for each stage.

Building Audience Personas

Building personas of your target audience(s) allows you to tailor your content and brand messages to individual groups based on their needs, expectations and behaviour.

This process is essential to giving your content the best possible chance of successfully engaging your audience, meeting your business objectives and delivering a return on your investment.

[Download PDF to see Figure]

Your buyer persona is not necessarily a demographic profile, based on generic factors such as gender, location, income bracket and other such metrics but is instead, a model of the behaviours that they demonstrate during the purchasing cycle (Fig 7). This should, at the very least, incorporate:

Priority Needs

What are the customer problems and what are their buying needs?

Success Measures

How do you measure tangible or intangible metrics success?

Purchasing Barriers

What are the barriers to purchasing and how can you mitigate them?

Buying Process

What process does your customer follow?

Decision Process

What aspects of each product will the buyer assess in evaluating the alternative solutions available?

Matching Consumer Profiles to your Buying Cycle

When you understand how your target audience engages with your brand and makes their purchase decision, you can match content to each stage of the purchasing process.

Different content and media are more appropriate and effective at different stages of the buying process (Fig 8). The specific content will differ from market to market but, in general, audiences at the start of the purchasing process prefer short, impactful content, seeking out more detailed informative content as they commit to a purchasing decision.

The way your target personas move through this purchasing process will dictate both the types of content, and the media you use to distribute it, be that owned, earned or paid.

[Download PDF to see Figure]

Awareness Stage

This is when the consumer first becomes aware either of your brand, or their need (ie a problem or desire that needs to be addressed). At this point, they will most likely seek top-level information about the options available to them, rather than meaningful detail.

Here, short-form content typically is the most appropriate – especially for B2C. The consumer simply wants to find a solution so immediate, easy-to-consume content that grabs the audience’s attention and makes it easy to purchase will be the most effective.

In B2B environments, where purchases tend to be more considered, more detailed information is necessary to attract interest and generate leads, although this content is likely to have a relatively minimal direct sales focus.

Consideration Stage

Next, the consumer moves on to the consideration stage. At this point, the consumer is likely to be familiar with the options available to them and the brands that can provide the desired solution. They are now in the process of short listing potential suppliers.

At this stage, case studies, reviews and testimonials become incredibly important, as does the quality of your sales copy.

Decision Stage

Finally, the consumer is ready to commit to the purchase. They probably have a strong idea which product and supplier they are going for, and are looking for reassurance they are making the right choice. At this point, your more detailed content becomes critical.

The onus is on you to demonstrate your experience, expertise and specialism in your chosen area, so the consumer can be completely confident making their purchase.

This step considers how content marketing can be integrated into existing business functions. It helps you define how you can integrate content into your current marketing activities and operational structures, assess your existing content offering and determine what new content you need to create.

Step Two: Connection

Content that Connects Brands to the Market

Key to the success of your brand’s content marketing strategy is its ability to connect with the market – your target audience.

Content is the bridge between your business goals and your channels to market (Fig 9). It fuels your media distribution activity, so the content has to engage your audiences to work. Even the best PR team or the largest paid media budget will struggle to compensate for poor, ineffective content.

[Download PDF to see Figure]

Connecting Content to Existing Marketing Initiatives

It is important to conduct an audit cross-referring your marketing assets, channel activity and supporting content in the following key areas to make sure they are working together:

Marketing channels and assets, including:

• TV / radio ads, News articles / adverts
• Traditional trade press & magazine adverts
• Public relations using magazine editorial integrations
• Events / seminars / exhibitions
• Marketing & sales collateral

Type and theme of content, including:

• Product information, case studies and testimonials
• Ad copy and creative, articles and blog content
• Thought leadership and advertorial content

[Download PDF to see Figure]

This audit helps you see where your brand currently stands with its content marketing activity, and makes it easier to identify any opportunities to re-evaluate and repurpose your existing content to better fulfil your marketing objectives (Fig 10).

You can then develop fresh content marketing ideas to complement your existing resources in order to meet your brand ambitions.

Content Operations

Many content marketers develop a compelling and effective strategy, only for it to come undone for operational reasons. Typically, these relate to a lack of insight into audiences and the market, poor tracking making it difficult to attribute sales to content (and prove return on investment) and poor editorial planning, resulting in ad-hoc content creation and deployment with minimal content optimisation.

Your content operations need to work together in three key areas:

[Download PDF to see Figure]

Strategy Planning

This is where you set the marketing objectives, define a programme and develop a strategy based around those key objectives. This ensures that the strategy can be objectively appraised and refined based on key performance indicators.

Operational Delivery

This process ensures that content is created and delivered to the agreed strategy. It ensures it is consistent, in line with the relevant objectives and clearly communicated to the rest of the marketing and content team (often via an editorial plan or calendar).

Operational delivery also defines the channels and mediums used to communicate and distribute the brand message.

Insights & Measurement

This informs your content marketing strategy and operation. It includes (but is not limited to) audience insights, analytics insights, search engine analysis, conversion analysis and market and competitor analysis.

These insights allow you to objectively assess and refine your strategy based on key variables, both internal and external to the business.

Step Three: Categorisation

Deciding what to Prioritise

Most brands will need to prioritise which areas they focus on as part of any campaign. This may be due to business demands, market seasonality, consumer behaviour, a lack of resource or a combination of these and other factors.

There are a number of ways in which marketers and brands can prioritise their marketing focus (Fig 12), but typically it will fall under one of the following criteria:

Asset Specific

This identifies and addresses any gaps in your content assets, including websites, brochures, blogs, case studies, white papers, social media platforms and other external communications.

Resource Specific

This relates to the resources needed to create and implement your content strategy structure. A key consideration may be the time and expense of finding external suppliers.

Process Specific

This looks at everything from how content is managed within your business to deployment and publishing workflows.

Time Specific

There may be particular issues that need to be addressed in the shortest possible time frame. These short term ‘quick win’ solutions can be fixed immediately and have a strong direct impact.

In the medium term, there may be improvements which require investment but can still be achieved within a reasonable time frame, whilst significant issues may require a more long-term solution.

[Download PDF to see Figure]

This includes gap analysis and identification of relevant staff, processes and publishing workflows. It helps to identify:

• What skills and expertise are needed to fulfil your content requirements?
• What processes and publishing workflows are required?
• What content techniques do you need in order to maximise engagement?

Step Four: Crafting

[Download PDF to see Figure]

Critical to the success of your content marketing strategy is the skill levels that you have within your content teams. Whilst many brands have taken steps to employ dedicated content marketing specialists, the ideal situation is to create a team of marketers with a wide range of skills that can contribute to a holistic content marketing effort.

The following illustration (Fig 14) is the ‘ideal world’ scenario. It shows the importance of having people skilled in multiple content disciplines. A content marketing strategy based on one form of content, for example written copy, is unlikely to be as successful as one that uses a variety of formats to target different points in the purchasing process.

Content Director

Owns the content marketing initiative, ensuring all content serves your broader marketing and business objectives.

Content Managing Editor

Sets the deadlines in the editorial calendar, implementing your style guide and ensuring all content conforms to specification.

Creative Leads and Creators

Generate content ideas and themes as well as supporting with content production and written output.

Digital Content Designer

Specialises in visual production, illustration and graphic design.

Multimedia Content Designer

Develops multimedia content including video, audio and animation.

Content Publishing and Monitoring

Responsible for publishing content and monitoring activity.

Subject Matter Specialists

Increasingly important in complex or regulated industries, they have in-depth knowledge of the product or service, as well as any applicable marketing restrictions or regulations.

Technical Skills

Provide support with insights and platform considerations.

[Download PDF to see Figure]

Publishing Processes & Workflows

Defining a publishing process and workflow ensures that the brand treats content as a structured and integral part of the marketing operation (Fig 15).

It prevents teams from creating a situation where, primarily due to resource issues, content becomes an ad hoc or reactionary exercise. It also ensures that content becomes a fully functional operation by developing content themes, editorial calendars and publishing workflows.

Ensuring that your Content is Engaging

The engagement tactics you employ in your content will determine how much feedback you get from your audiences, as well as what type of engagement you generate. Different types of content in different mediums will produce different reactions from different audiences. Knowing which technique to apply and when should be a major consideration in the creation of your editorial calendar.

For example, answers to openended questions are highly effective at generating sales leads, as they provide lots of information whilst encouraging the audience to seek more details or clarification.

[Download PDF to see Figure]

These could appear as a how-to guide or product review distributed on your blog.

Conversely, to earn better search rankings and encourage brand discovery, answers to closed questions tend to be more effective as users usually look for a quick answer.

Start by defining your content goals. This will help you determine the best content format and distribution medium for your needs, as demonstrated here (Fig 16).

Step Five: Conversion

[Download PDF to see Figure]

Measurement Objectives

Before any brand can begin to measure the success of its content marketing campaign, it needs to define the objectives that the campaign was created to achieve. These objectives will vary from organisation to organisation, whilst multiple campaigns within the same organisation may have different goals. Typically they will fall into one of three core areas:

Drive Acquisition

Deliver new customers or leads

Drive Performance

Enhance the performance of a customer engagement channel. This could be to improve conversion rates, to increase average order value or basket size, or to reduce marketing acquisition costs.

Drive Exposure

Increase awareness of the brand amongst target audiences.

Measurement Strategy

This determines how you measure the success of your content marketing campaign, and enables you to justify your actions if necessary at board level. The first step, and often the most difficult for content marketers, is to demonstrate the return on investment.

Start off with a basic level of monitoring and reporting which you can develop and refine over time. This could include real-time social monitoring and workflow management, reporting on specific platform or content engagement metrics and reporting on acquisition-based metrics.

There are a number of metrics that brands use to measure their content marketing strategy, dependent on your specific goals. The most common metrics include:

• Reach i.e. potential number of people who viewed the content
• Discussion. i.e. the number of mentions and size of audience
• Posts, shares, comments
• Page views
• Traffic acquisition
• Leads and sales

[Download PDF to see Figure]

Each of these metrics relate to a different stage of the sales process, making this model a useful way to measure how effective your content is at delivering in each area.

If your content is helping people to move through the sales funnel, it is likely that your content is effectively hitting the key metrics.

However, if few customers are entering the sales funnel, or they are dropping out at particular stages, it’s a strong indication that the content at those stages is not effective and is failing to hit your key metrics.

Conclusion

As more and more brands invest in content marketing, consumers are becoming overwhelmed by brand noise. At the same time, it has never been easier for consumers to filter the messages they want to hear from those they want to ignore.

The challenge for any brand is to ensure that your messages cut through that noise and find a way to engage your core audiences.

Many brands are still producing content with no real supporting strategy. In essence, they are producing content for the sake of content. It is:

• NOT aligned to a business objective
• NOT targeted at a defined audience need
• NOT applied to different stages of the sales funnel
• NOT being measured in a meaningful way (often because there is no clearly defined objective).

This approach is not going to cut it with your audiences. Remember, your audience isn’t waiting to hear from you or what you have to say. They are concerned about themselves, their own needs and their own wants.

By applying our ‘Five C’ approach, you can define a content marketing strategy that aligns content to your wider business goals. This ensures that your content has clear objectives, has a clearly defined target audience, that your content operation is correctly resourced, that your editorial output is correctly planned and that, above all, you can measure the output of your content marketing activity.