The
ONE-DAY
CONTENT MARKETING
STRATEGY
Conv e rsat i o n
Content Harmony
TM
content workbooks
vol. 1
Authored by:
Designed by:
Kane Jamison
Simon Andrys
1
INTRODUCTION
strategy must address, and we’re going to structure this
process so you can tackle it as a single workday.
Developing a content marketing strategy takes time.
Good strategy requires extensive research to truly
understand your audience. Accurately figuring out who
they are, what content will inform and delight them, and
where they consume content can take weeks or months.
The goal: you (and other members of your team) will
dedicate one single day to hashing out these 12 main
strategy points. You can save the rest of the research for
later. This purpose of this workbook is to facilitate the
conversation that you need to have with your marketing
team in order to have a clear content marketing mission.
The incentives to spend time documenting your
strategy are clear. 2013 Research from Content
Marketing Institute suggests that “While only 44% of B2B
marketers have a documented content strategy, those
who do rate themselves as more effective in all areas of
content marketing.” 1
One more thing before you get started: this book, in
case you haven’t noticed, is tiny. As a result, we’ve placed
a number of follow up resources online, including a
complete example of what this finished process looks
like. You can find everything here:
On the other hand, paralysis by analysis is a very real
danger. While strategy is essential, it’s a real roadblock
to execution, measurement, and improvement. Spending
weeks doing research can delay all of the activities that
actually produce results, leading many marketers to put
it off and ignore it.
http://hmny.co/onedaycm
Good luck, and I hope you’ll let us know how it goes for
your organization!
This workbook is meant to help you bridge this gap by
showing you our template for a Minimum Viable Content
Marketing Strategy. We’re going to take you through the
12 really important things that a content marketing
- Kane Jamison
1 “Business-to-Business Marketers’ Confidence in Content Marketing
Continues to Grow, Usage Rates Up”, http://hmny.co/b2b-cm-confidence
2
PART ONE
12 Really Important Things
Your Content Marketing
Strategy Must Address:
7. How does our target audience find and
consume content?
Reddit? Email Newsletters? Direct Mail? Facebook Feed? Book Clubs?
8. How should we differentiate within our market
(not just from direct competitors, but within
our topical domain)?
1. Why are we doing this?
2. How will content marketing support our
broader business goals?
9. How do we define success, and how do we
define failure?
The answer to these two questions should be the same. It’s important
enough that it requires two questions.
This is the beginning of the conversation that addresses metrics and
KPIs to reflect our broader business goals.
3. Who are our target audiences that will buy
from us?
4. Who are our target audiences that want to
consume our content?
10. Where will we focus our content distribution and
promotional efforts?
There should be some kind of difference between those two groups of
people. Is the difference budget, or is it something else?
This is your channel plan and will address how you handle owned,
earned, and paid media channels.
5. Who is going to do the work?
11. When do we publish?
12. When do we measure results?
Literally - we want names and what they’ll commit to doing each month
- we have to know our resources before we can decide WHAT
we’ll be doing.
See? Not that complicated. Seriously - other stuff is important, but this
is the real roadmap - everything else beyond this is simply clarification
of the roadmap or execution it.
6. What can we offer to our target audiences at each
stage of the customer lifecycle?
Ready to get started?
Excellent...
Feel free to substitute sales funnel if that makes more sense to you.
3
PART TWO
A M St r at e gy S ession:
In which you’ll address the Why and the Who.
8:00 AM
Kickoff
Welcome to your one-day content marketing strategy session. Hopefully you’ve
blocked off your schedule and aren’t trying to cram in other meetings and stuff.
Grab a coffee, we’ve got work to do.
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8:10 AM
Increasing Revenues:
•
•
Why Are We ‘Doing’
Content Marketing?
•
•
•
Answering this question is the most important part
of the process. Six months from now, when your boss
asks you whether your current achievements justify
continuing your content marketing efforts - this will be
what you point to if you haven’t caught traction yet.
Increase Brand Visibility
Increase Prospective Customer Engagement &
Interest
Increase Leads & Sales
Increase Customer Retention & Repeat Purchases
Increase Customer Referrals & Reviews
Decreasing Costs:
•
•
•
•
Most business goals can be broken down into one of
two categories: increasing revenue, or decreasing costs.
Decrease Cost Per Lead/Sale
Increase Bandwidth of Existing Sales Team
Decrease Customer Support Requests
Decrease Customer Churn
It is entirely possible that every one of these is
important to your company, but you can’t realistically
do everything at once. Pick the top 3-4 that best match
your organization’s current goals and highlight those as
the main focus areas. If you try to cover too much, this is
going to look like an expendable project.
I’m a big fan of triple bottom line concepts (serving
people, planet, and then profits), so I hate to break it
down this way, but for better or worse it’s the language
that your boss and your client speaks.
At the top of the next page you’ll find a list of the
more common ways content marketing can help you
achieve your business goals:
Take these 3-4 items, add a couple sentences
addressing how it applies to your organization’s goals,
and print this out on a single sheet of paper.
This is your WHY.
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9:00 AM
The first question is fairly subjective, but is still built
upon your knowledge of your customers.
Who Exactly Are We Doing
This For?
The second question is more important because it’s
pulled from your actual data, but it can be deceiving as
well.
I’ll be honest. If your company doesn’t already have
demographic and psychographic data on your target
buying audiences, this part is kind of hard. In the context
of a one day conversation, this section easily has the
most follow up research necessary - primarily, producing
accurate customer data and then building audience
personas that reflect reality, not hunches.
For example, recent updates to Google Analytics
allow you to gather demographic data about site visitors,
however this data can draw attention away from actual
buyers if it isn’t segmented down to focus on customers
who have converted.
Contrasting these two questions will give you the
best idea of your true audience personas, which you’ll
continue to refine over time.
Every time we build audience personas for a client, we
approach it a little bit differently, so it’s hard for me to
write this section and pretend that I’ve developed some
8-minute abs method for handling it. At a high level, you
want to answer 2 questions:
There is a nearly bottomless list of places to start
looking for customer data, but here are the areas that we
typically start with.
1. Who are our top 2-4 buyer personas who will
actually purchase from us?
2. What other audiences can help us spread and
share our content?
Use these to provide your initial round of data for
discussion purposes, but don’t pretend that you can
finish all of the personas you’ll need to produce in one
hour.
6
• Process your email list through a tool like Full
Contact to pull name, location, and social media
data on your customers.
• Take a look at your Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn
analytics pages. What basic information can you
pull, like gender, age, location, and similar interests?
• If you have Universal Google Analytics set up
properly, view the demographic and affinity data
provided, and then segment down to customers
who have converted in some way.
• Run queries on Facebook Graph Search such as
“Pages liked by people who like [My Brand Name]”
or “Pages liked by people who like [Competitor
Brand Name]”. You’ll see some interesting results in
other pages that these audience members follow.
For a full list of resources and tools we recommend for
producing audience personas, visit http://hmny.co/
personaresources.
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11:00 AM
As time goes on, your team should be able to set
average benchmarks on time per project (eg “5 hours
for average blog post with research and editing”), so the
hours will be a more effective estimate at this stage.
Who’s Going To Do What?
The second thing you’ll want to address is how much
you’re interested in handling outside the company. This
includes expenses like freelance writers, agency support,
social media management, and so on. You’ll want to look
at this in terms of your desired budget, and the areas in
which you think you will need the most assistance.
The bigger your organization is, the harder this
part will be. During the next hour, you want to produce
two lists:
The first list should identify who in your company is
willing to help create content, and list a conservative
estimate of what they’re willing to contribute. If one blog
post per year is the most you’re going to get out of your
CEO, be honest about it.
Getting a full-scale content marketing program off
the ground is hard, so take a deep look a what skillsets
your team is lacking, and see if you can effectively
outsource those activities until it makes sense to handle
them internally.
Most people don’t have a good idea of how long it
will take them to produce a piece of content, however,
so ask them to provide answers in terms of time.
If your CEO is willing to commit 1 hour a month, then
they won’t have enough time to write a decent blog
post, However, your content manager could interview
them for an hour and that could provide enough
answers to produce 2 blog posts instead.
8
NOON
Eat Something!
We recommend ordering some lunch for the team to keep spirits high.
9
PART THREE
For now, you want to do two exercises that will
help us identify the type of content you want to be
producing. The first covers a high level overview of what
you brand stands for, which will largely drive your
top-of-funnel content marketing efforts meant to build
brand visibility with your target audience. The second is
more sales-oriented and meant to address customers
later in the purchasing process. Let’s get started.
PM S t r at e gy Se s s ion:
In which you’ll address the What, the How, the Where, and the When.
Let’s get busy.
12:30 PM
Exercise 1:
What Are We Going
To Publish?
Decide on 2-4 high level themes that encompass what
your brand stands for. This part will largely address how
you produce “visibility-driven” content for your target
audience that may be early in the buying process or
unaware of your solution. Let’s walk through an example:
Addressing what you’re going to publish takes two forms:
topics and formats. Focus on the topics right now. Formats (eg
whitepaper vs. blog post) should be driven by the topic and
the information you’re looking to convey, and what formats
you’re target audience prefers. More often than not, you should
also be repurposing content into different formats (like a
downloadable ebook with video and blog post versions).
Let’s say you run a B2B software training company. The
main value that you offer your customers is employee
education. That value can be separated into more
specific benefits like a more efficient and effective staff,
a better utilization of available technology, and increased
employee satisfaction and retention. Let’s also assume that
your organization has 4-5 software education offerings, so
we can add those core competencies as another type of
expertise that you can share with your audience.
You’ll also get a lot deeper into specific content pieces later.
That’s not key to your strategy - not yet.
10
Using this information, you can build an editorial
mission statement that your content marketing efforts
will build upon. For example:
Consider these common sales objections that your
sales or customer service teams might hear:
1. I’m happy with my current solution.
“We educate our readers on the value and ROI of
employee education, and publish instructional
content that proves our expertise in [insert specific
software we specialize in].”
2. Pricing is too much.
3. I don’t think I need this, or I don’t need it now.
4. How are you better than [competitor X]?
Exercise 2:
5. Switching to your solution will take too much
time/money/energy.
This exercise is meant to address sales-oriented content
on your site. You want to consider all of the questions that
a potential customer has in mind at each stage of their
purchase journey. For example:
•
•
Again, you don’t need to have a list of actual content
projects at this point, although you will probably come
up with a good number while talking through each
exercise (write them down for further discussion later).
When someone is unaware that your brand exists,
how would they describe what you do? What
questions would they have about how the service
works? How would they describe the problems
they’re having that your product or service solves?
Your goal from these two exercises is to have a short
list of the master topics that we want to cover on an
ongoing basis that are relevant to your potential buyers
throughout the purchase journey.
When someone is considering your product or
service, what key information do they need to move
along with the purchase process?
11
1:30 PM
Another way is to review the audience research you
did this morning, and take a look at the demographic
and psychographic data that shows other topics your
audience is frequently interested in. We’ll typically take
these related interests and plug them into Google Display
Planner and click “Get Placement Ideas” to find websites
about these topics and their estimated traffic levels.
How Does Our Audience
Find & Consume Content?
There are a couple ways you can go about answering a question like this.
One good way is to simply survey your existing
customers. Push quick polls on the sidebar of your
website and accumulate passive research.
If you have a healthy email list to work with, another
method we like at Content Harmony is to run that email
list through a service like FullContact. This will give you an
idea of the most common social platforms used by your
customers, like Twitter, Linkedin, and Facebook.
Ask customers in comment cards or existing surveys,
such as “What are your favorite websites for learning more
about email marketing?” or “Do you prefer spending time
on Twitter or Facebook?”
Gather these content sources together in a list. You’ll
refer back to this list shortly while creating your content
promotion and channel plan.
Next, put together a list of other industry websites that
your customers will look at frequently. These might be
competitors, but more likely they operate in your niche
using a different business model, and your buyers would
be fans of them as well.
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2:00 PM
Gather a list of both types of competitors, and start
reviewing their sites to get a feel for what they’re doing
well (eg webinars and whitepapers) . Look at their social
media channels to see what they’ve been doing recently.
How Should We
Differentiate Within Our
Market?
Plug their domain into tools like Buzzsumo.com to
see which pages on their site have the most traction
on social media. Use tools like OpenSiteExplorer.org
or Ahrefs.com to see which pieces of content on their
website have earned the best links from other websites.
What is everyone else doing? How does it compare to the audience
habits we just identified? Can we focus our efforts on a channel that
others are ignoring? Where do we have to get better regardless of
competitors?
You should also be keeping an eye out for what
they’re doing poorly (e.g. their blog appears to be totally
neglected). Compare their efforts against the topics and
web channels that you identified earlier. Are they doing
a poor job on Twitter despite your research suggesting
Twitter as a strong potential channel?
Now you get to do a little competitive analysis. You
probably have a good idea about who your competitors
are based on product or service offerings, but you also
want to take a look at your “topical competitors”.
Topical competitors are the websites that you’ll be
competing with on social media and in search results.
The good news is that these websites can also make great
partners if you’re able to build that relationship.
These are the types of opportunities that you want to
hone in on. Another example would be video content
– if no one in your space is doing it well, that’s often a
great format where your business can stand out.
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2:30 PM
You’ll want to create a high level overview of all
potential channels, using a traditional earned/owned/
paid media structure, and breaking out social media as
its own section. In each one you’ll identify the relative
level of effort you want to spend on that channel.
Where Will We Focus Our
Content Distribution &
Promotional Efforts?
Here are the channels you need to address:
Owned Media:
At this stage you’re going to build out your content
promotion plan for all online and offline channels.
This should refer back to how your audience finds and
consumes content, contrasted with how you want to
differentiate within your market, and which channels you
have the budget and resources to handle on an ongoing
basis.
•
•
•
Content promotion on your own website
•
Email newsletter
•
Offline & Print marketing efforts
Social Media:
Which channels will we focus our efforts on, based
upon where we think our customers spend time,
and where we have the most opportunity?
What is the relative amount of energy each
channel deserves? Are there channels where we
shouldn’t focus our energy if we can’t keep up a
consistent level of content creation?
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•
Facebook
•
Twitter
•
LinkedIn
•
Pinterest
•
Google+
•
YouTube
•
Instagram
•
Slideshare
3:00 PM
Paid Media:
•
Paid search (Google & Bing)
•
Paid display ads (Google & independent banner
display networks)
•
Paid social (most social networks offer some type
of sponsored content)
•
Paid content distribution (Outbrain, Taboola, etc.)
When Do We Publish?
At this stage, you’re not concerned what time of day
you publish. For this section, you want to identify how
often you want to publish content to the website, and
how often you want to promote that content.
Earned Media:
•
Who should we tell when we launch a notable
piece of content? How can the content team
integrate well with the PR team?
This portion of the conversation will tie back to
your channel plan as well as your internal and external
resources. You’ve already figured out what resources
you have, now decide how you’re going to use them.
Depending on your resources you may put “Nothing”
on some of these channels. For example, a cosmetics
company might decide that LinkedIn is not worthwhile,
but an accounting firm might come to the same
conclusion about Instagram.
Perhaps email newsletters will be weekly, Facebook
will be 1x per day and Twitter will be 3x per day.
Whatever works is fine - just decide on some numbers
that you can deliver on, and later you can analyze
the performance of each channel to decide where to
increase or decrease your efforts.
That’s fine - don’t commit to doing things you don’t
think will drive results - focus on doing a great job on
other channels.
In the next section you’ll cover how often you’ll be
publishing to each of these channels.
15
Naturally, a KPI for top-of-funnel visibility is not as
important to the business as a bottom-of-funnel KPI
like sales and revenue, but you can use it as a health and
progress metric for that stage of the funnel. Depending
on your business model, you might also be able to use it
as a leading indicator of future performance.
3:30 PM
How Do We Define Success?
Now it’s time to identify metrics and decide on key performance indicators
(KPIs) based upon the goals established earlier in the day.
Here are the primary goals and metrics we start with
at each stage of the customer’s purchase journey
The first thing you need to figure out is how you define
success and failure. There’s a lot of ways to approach this
task, but for now you want to weigh the costs of your
content marketing program with what improvements you
need to see to do better than just breaking even.
Top-of-Funnel:
• Goal: Build brand visibility with our target
audiences.
• Metrics: Links, social shares, traffic, page views.
Within that framework, what would a great success
look like? What would negative ROI and failure look like?
For some companies 80% year-over-year growth in a KPI
is a good goal, and for other companies, 10% year-overyear KPI growth could be just as successful.
Middle-of-Funnel:
• Goal: Build engagement with our site visitors and
educate them on product and service options.
• Metrics: Email subscriptions, repeat visitors,
content downloads.
You should also break down your goals by each stage
of the buying process. From there, you can identify which
metrics you think best reflect those goals. Within each
section, you’ll also pick one or two KPIs that define that
goal stage best.
Bottom-of-Funnel:
• Goal: Convert engaged visitors who are viewing
product and service-related website content.
• Metrics: Goal conversions from leads, online sales
and revenue for e-commerce.
16
Post-Funnel:
4:30 PM
• Goal: Build up customer retention, repeat business,
referrals, and public reviews.
• Metrics: Engagement with support content,
customer churn for retention businesses, repeat
purchases, etc.
When Do We
Measure Results?
This framework should eventually be converted to
a dashboard using Excel, Google Docs, or a dedicated
online dashboard tool that automatically updates as it
pulls new data from your sales and marketing tools.
You should be updating dashboards weekly or
monthly. You should be revisiting strategy quarterly to
look at how your efforts are progressing, but you should
also be willing to give each portion of your strategy
sufficient time to prove itself one way or the other. For
example: One month of posting won’t be enough to
declare success or failure on a blog, Facebook, or Twitter.
As a rule of thumb, the newer and smaller your
business, the longer you will need to fully dedicate
to your efforts before seeing results. Even larger
organizations may need 6-12 months to truly see the
full potential of their efforts unless they already have a
sizeable and engaged audience.
So, let’s decide on a schedule now. When are you
going to revisit your progress with your management
team? How long should you give each portion of the
strategy to prove itself?
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5:00 PM
Wrap It Up!
Go grab a beer and start brainstorming your editorial calendar. Or you could also
choose to go home and sleep, knowing that you just ignored your email for an entire
day and will be playing catch-up tomorrow.
You’ll want to document the outcomes of your conversations today in a master
document that you can share with the entire team. Whatever you do, don’t let this
document go into a folder somewhere and die.
Print out copies and put them on the wall. Update the document with changes at
each quarterly review. Utilize the goal framework you put together for weekly and
monthly progress reporting.
Whatever you need to do to make sure this doesn’t get lost in the shuffle, do
it. This is your content marketing mission, and it’s important to your success
with content marketing that this document is at the top of your team’s mind
frequently.
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At Content Harmony we believe in finding a healthy balance across
the entire content marketing process. We help growing companies
plan, produce, and promote awesome content to engage their
customers. As a result, our clients see an increase in customer
engagement, sales, and customer retention.
Visit contentharmony.com/subscribe/ and sign up for our monthly
newsletter. We’ll let you know about the best content marketing
examples we spot each month, and we’ll let you know when we
release our next content marketing workbook.