Here at JCK we’re always planning marketing “content” campaigns, and I thought it would be a good idea to share with you a couple of processes that we’ve ‘adopted’ to help us clear the waters – as it can be quite a daunting task when you are putting together thoughts and ideas for marketing your business for the coming year.
One book that I turn to ‘to keep me on track’ is content is currency by Jon Wuebben, the book is a couple of years old now, but I still recommend it if you are new to the idea of content marketing.
There are a couple of takeaways from the book that I want to share with you which will help you create that connection with your audience through your content. The first is the idea of the whole lifecycle of a piece of content. Quite often a business will create a piece of content but not work out the whole process that needs to happen around it: we follow the points Jon mentions in his book which are;
- Content planning and strategy – what do you need?
- Content creation – what types of content will work best?
- Content distribution – yes you have to market your content!
- Content management and curation – what support does your content need?
Our content templates help us with the planning, creation and distribution of our work, you can download them for free here,
Depending on what stage you are at with content marketing, will depend on what you need to produce but we can broadly put them into the following categories
- Website pages – have a review and update
- Landing pages – do you need to create any new ones?
- Lead generation – what would work best? -white papers – case studies
- Customer retention – e-newsletters, VIP offers, social media engagement
You will need to work on all of these areas to create a whole marketing landscape, so try and put together one campaign for each category as a starting point and then rinse and repeat it if it works.
For each type follow the lifecycle process, so let us take one as an example – a website page.
What do you need?
Let’s assume you have launched a new product or service, so you need a new web page detailing this
What content works best?
- The written words describing the benefits
- Images of the product, or suitable images for the service
- A download pdf maybe
- A video of how to use it or client testimonial
Content distribution
- Twitter / LinkedIn
- Flickr / Pinterest / Instagram
- Slideshare
- Youtube / Vimeo
Management
If you’ve got a download – perhaps you’ve collected an email address, then you’ll need an autoresponder. Even if you haven’t asked for an email, you could create a funnel in analytics, so you know how many people have downloaded your pdf.
Now, every piece of content you are creating will have a purpose, because it will slot neatly into one of these areas and you’ll have a defined process on how you will distribute it and more importantly what your success criteria looks like.
How do you put together your content plans? We’d love to hear any good ideas you may have….