Content Marketing Strategies: Tips & Tricks for Taming the Content Beast
Thomas Robbins, Chief Evangelist, Kentico CMS
Who are we?
Kentico CMS is one of the most powerful Customer Experience Management Systems and Content Management Systems on the planet. With over 16,000 web sites in 90 countries and backed by over 1,200 partners. it is used for everything from simple web sites to complex applications.
Kentico CMS is easy to install, simple to manage and reliable.
For more information…
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What we will cover
• Why use Content marketing• Organizational objectives of content marketing• Best practices for taming the beast!
What is content marketing
Social Media
SEO
Customer Engagements
Sales Process
Content Marketing
Content marketing is an umbrella term encompassing all marketing formats that involve the creation and sharing of content in order to attract, acquire and engage clearly defined and understood current and potential consumer bases with the objective of driving profitable customer action.
Source: Wikipedia
Corporate objectives of content marketing
Recognized as an expert
• Strong and relevant content enhances the position of your company and shows that you are innovative and aware of the latest trends.
Maintain existing customers
• Providing content at predictable and regular intervals encourages customers to keep in touch with your band.
Grow your business
• Great content demands sharing and relevant content arouses the interest of new prospects and makes them investigate your brand.
Increase social media reach
• Great content guarantees that your company has a wider reach on social media.
Best practice: understand your customer journey
• The first step for any successful digital marketing strategy– How well do you understand your customer?– What channels
are customers using for research?
– What channels are customers using for purchase?
– How does the experience in one channel affect the behavior of another?
Source: Heart of the customer
Start by understanding your sales process…
Sales Process Model
Establish relationship
Needs recognition
Formulate solution
Close the sale
Deliver and evaluate
Content
Content
Content
Content
Content
The Content Lifecycle
• Planning – Defining topics and target audience
• Creation – creating target content• Approval – Approval phase• Publishing – Making content
available to key customer channels
• Measurement – Measuring the success of the published content
• Optimization – Measuring and optimizing published content against defined goals and feeding that back into the next wave of content.
Planning
Creation
Approval
Publishing
Measurement
Optimizati
on Optimized Content
Marketing
Content lifecycle - Planning
Activities• Understanding your
audience (Persona)• Content conversion strategy• Define a sales ready lead• Topic selection• Editorial content planning
Best Practices• Perform a content analysis• Avoid areas that you are unique
and there is little demand• Limit competitive collateral • Focus content on where you can
make a difference• Map content conversion touch
points• Look at organic content growth• Define themes, publishing
frequency, campaigns and scoring rules
Content lifecycle - Creation
Activities• Define content formats• Create shareable content
Best Practice• Make sure all content is
available in digital format for sharing and tracking
• Enable share buttons on your content – Make is as easy as possible for people to share
• Develop different layers of content– Short – less than a paragraph– Long – more than a page– Video and audio
Content lifecycle - Approval
Activities• Make it strategic • Business approval process
Best Practices• Finalize business objectives• Define business process
Content lifecycle - Publishing
Activities• Content placement in
channels
Best Practices• Listen to the reactions of your
content– What’s the reach of content sharing?– What’s the sentiment?– What’s the impact?
• Facilitate as a brand– Go beyond a sharing button– Help your community to share your
content
• Participate– Be part of the conversation– Responsive to questions– Open and professional
Content lifecycle - Measurement
Activities• Measure using relevant
KPI’s – Combination of business
generation and conversion measures
– Audience engagement– Content conversion– Influencer engagement
Best Practices• Use KPIs with a direct impact on the
business objectives of your company– Financial – Lead generation
• Use KPIs with direct impact on the marketing objectives of your company
– Increase brand identification and affinity
• Use KPIs related to conversations– Conversations are the driver of decision
making and business growth– Measure the number of conversations,
the sentiment of conversations and then impact of conversations
Building your first scorecard
• Unique visitors– Number of individuals who visit your website– Best indication of sites overall traffic
• Page views– Cumulative number of individual pages that a visitors click on– If page views are higher than unique visitors may indicate engaging
content• Search engine traffic
– Amount of traffic referred via search engines– Indicates effectiveness at optimizing content
• Bounce rate– Percentage of visitors who come to your site and then leave before
clicking on another page– Industry bounce rate of less than 40% is good – aim to do better!
• Conversion rate– Percentage of visitors to your site that take a specific action– Industry averages around 2% - aim to do better!
• Inbound links– The number of external links to a site– The more high quality links you have the better!
Content lifecycle - Optimization
Activities• A/B, MVT Testing• Channel optimization
Best practices• Review data to better match the right
communication to the right customers • Review and produce content based on
keyword phrases that are driving your organic search traffic and conversions
• Continually review lead scoring and criteria to provide the most accurate score possible.
• Re-imagine content in different forms (blog posts and videos as an example)
• Be brutal about shutting down channels that aren’t performing
Best Practice – Marketing Automation
Why you need automation• Automation offer total management of
revenue performance• Automation establishes core standards
between sales and marketing• Automation allows for quick and
accurate profiling of consumers and their behavior
• Automation helps direct clients through the sales funnel
Questions…
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Email: [email protected]: @trobbins