Content marketing is a long-term marketing play. It takes a while to see results. The impact of each piece of content is subtle. Your content builds up over time and each piece adds to the cumulative effect.
“The secrets of a great #contentmarketing strategy with @wpcurve” goo.gl/MTmDc2 – CLICK TO TWEET
If your content focuses on a certain audience and goal, each piece will contribute to achieve those goals. Like a team of rowers in sync. Unfocused content without defined goals is more like a tug of war game, a lot of effort but little movement.
A documented content marketing strategy gives you the focus and clarity to create content that moves your business forward. In this post we’ll share some questions that every content strategy should answer and examples from our strategy.
You can also see our full strategy and download it at the bottom of this post.
What is your vision?
Source: www.falloncorporatephoto.com for Content Marketing World
A vision for your blog is what you want your blog to look like when it reaches its full potential. This may be something that you are constantly working on improving and moving towards, so you should aim high on this. If you craft a vision of a blog that you are excited and passionate about, you will create the desire satisfying content that Tom Webster is talking about.
Our vision
The WP Curve blog is designed for entrepreneurs who have an established business with customers and revenue that are looking to increase their earnings, grow their business, better market their product/service, and establish authority.
What are your values?
Source: TechCrunch
Vales will help you make choices for your content. David Hahn’s advice is critical here, a core value should be helping your audience. When faced with a tough decision, you should be able to look to these values for the answer.
Our values:
- Transparency – We want to be honest and open in our content, and we want to make sure we are sharing real results, not selling a dream.
- Real advice – Our content is something that can be immediately used and shares specific and actionable solutions to well-defined problems. It is not theoretical or hypothetical.
- No fluff – Every sentence adds value and is worth reading. Sentences and paragraphs are short and concise.
- Readability – No pop ups or other distractions from the reading experience. Large blocks of text are broken up with helpful images, bullets and headers.
- Uniqueness – Our content is not found anywhere else and offers unique value to the reader.
- Practicing preachers – focus on people doing interesting things right now.
Who is the dedicated content marketing team?
In your strategy, it is important to write down who is responsible for creating the content. If nobody is ultimately responsible for content getting published it will often get lost in other busy tasks.
WP Curve has always been committed to content marketing. It has been the primary growth channel for our business since its launch in 2013. Almost all our marketing budget focuses on content, aside from a small Adroll budget. I am the team member dedicated to our content marketing. I focus completely on delivering and promoting content.
What are your content marketing goals?
There are many goals that content marketing can achieve. It all depends on the audience you want to create and at what point in the buyer’s journey your content addresses. Some example goals are:
- Lead generation
- Customer education/success
- Brand awareness
- Sales or upselling
- Customer evangelism
Our goal
Our organizational goal for the blog is brand awareness. Content marketing is difficult to measure accurately. We rarely see a direct correlation with a single piece of content and new customers. But our long-term growth is evidence that it works. We believe that with consistent, high-quality content we build trust with our audience.
What are your metrics?
You use metrics to determine if you are achieving your goal or not. This is the information you can gather to determine the ROI on your content. Some good example goals are:
- Sales
- Lead quality
- SEO ranking for keywords
- Time spent on website (or a piece of content)
- Conversion rates
- Web traffic
- Social shares on content
Our metrics are quite simple, a 5% increase in traffic and email opt-ins every month. One of our overall business goals is 10% growth in monthly recurring revenue. This is something we track in our monthly reports.
● 10 posts per month
● 1 post per month with 50+ tweets
● 5% increase in traffic and conversion per month
● 5% increase in email subscriptions each month
Although this is difficult to define as a metric, we look for qualitative feedback from customers in the form of comments on our posts. Signs of successful content are long comments or questions that start discussions. Another good indicator could be a phrase like “this was just what I was looking for” or “you read my mind.”
What tactics will you use to achieve these goals?
This is mainly what kind of content you will create. When you choose your tactics, choose what you can do better than most, or choose an area that your service or business is underrepresented in. Here are some sample tactics:
- Infographics
- Video
- Email newsletter
- Written posts
- Social media content
- Ebooks
- Webinars
- In-Person events
- Research
- Case studies
- Presentations
- Downloadable resources
Our tactics
Currently our sweet spot is written content, which drives traffic. For conversions we use our downloadables such as our website review template, C Metrics plugin, and email courses by offering them within our posts. Our website review template has been very successful in converting visitors. Our strategy lists each of these “lead magnets” that we have available. This makes it easy to select what call to action we will use at the end of our posts.
What tactics are effective for us
The 7 Day Startup has created a new marketing channel in itself bringing traffic from Amazon. Our content promotion procedure repurposes our blog content for social media and other sharing sites.
By far our most effective driver for traffic and engagement is our weekly email. It keeps our readers engaged and updated. One of the reasons our email is effective is because of our consistency. We send it out every week, and keep it very simple and to the point.
What audiences will you target?
Source: Business Wire
Being specific about where your audience spends time will help you determine what topics you will discuss and problems you can solve with your content. Taking some time to define and understand your customer will help you determine what communities you will target. Follow Andrew Davis‘ advice here, don’t try any target too many places. Pick one, and focus.
The audiences we target
We target specific communities such as the startup subreddit or bootstrappers.io for our content. We also have built relationships with other startups and content marketers over time. We collaborate on content and when beneficial to the audience, promote each other’s products.
Empathy maps for our audience
We also have created empathy maps for our audience to help guide our content creation. These are located in our style guide not in our documents. I thought it would be useful to share this to give a better idea of how we frame our audiences.
Below is an example of one of our empathy maps:
This is a map of the visceral experience we are trying to create on our blog and the sensations your writing should aim to create.
Thinks: They have hopes of creating and growing their own business to a point where it can support them and maybe their families. But they constantly fear it could fail, or that their competition is too strong, or they won’t be able to stand out online. They have some basic experience creating websites in WordPress, but there is still a lot that seems foreign to them.
Hears: They hear about a product like WP Curve, making things easier for them by taking care of all the small fixes their site needs. This lets them focus on marketing, sales and moving their business forward. Instead of learning how to code or hiring an expensive developer.
They hear (read) plain and clear language on our blog, not businessy or marketing buzzwords.
Sees: When they read the blog they see a clean reading experience. The introductions are straightforward. There are no pop ups or other distractions in the sidebar. Just simple content and clean design.
They don’t notice it, but they see high quality images that are consistent in size. Images are relevant and add to the value of the writing or the emotional pull of the story.
Feels: They feel safe on our site because we are not trying to force conversions. They have a sense of authenticity from our content, and feel that value is being generously offered to them.
For example, this comment appeared on a post: “Wow. This is exactly what I needed. At this exact moment. Cheers man.”
We value trust and transparency. we are honest in our content, whether it is describing how we do something or our progress for the month.
This comment appeared on a post: “Terrific! Thanks for pulling back the corner of your drapes to let us see in. Definitely some good stuff here.”
They feel a personal connection. When they comment, they get a fast and thoughtful response.
Pains:
- Short on cash – they are bootstrapping a business and need to get value out of every penny and moment.
- Non-technical – They need help with their website. They can put the basics together but having someone available to fix the technical problems is helpful.
- Too much garbage content to sift through – There is so much poor information, cheap copies of content and click bait online, it’s difficult to find any information that’s worthwhile.
- Hard to work with Elance – There are so many low-quality developers just looking to give a quick solution to a problem and make a fast profit that it is hard to know who to go to for help with their website problems.
Gains (motivations):
- Creating their own sources of income
- Freeing up their the time and effort trying to fix their website to work on growing their business
- Doing what they are passionate about
- Growing their business
What social media channels will you use?
Choosing one or two social media channels to promote your content is a good way to start connecting with your audience. It’s important that you choose the right platform for the problem you solve. Facebook is a popular choice but it is not always the best option, especially for B2B.
Channels we use
Twitter, Facebook and Linkedin are our primary social media channels. Twitter is consistently the highest traffic driver, but every once in a while we’ll see a post take off on Facebook, Linkedin or even StumbleUpon.
We track where people are sharing our content with Like Explorer and look at where people are sharing our content.
What are your publishing goals?
How often will you create content? This will help you determine about how many hours per week you will need to dedicate to your content marketing.
Our publishing goals
We have a goal of getting 10 pieces of content up each month, which is 2-3 posts per week.
To keep up with this pace it is good to have a plan. We use Trello as a project management system and editorial calendar to help us hit these goals each week.
Related: How we effectively use Trello for project management
What are your initiatives for the year?
Source: Content Marketing Institute
Scott Abel‘s advice rings true here, you should always be improving and adapting your content. It’s good to include some initiatives for how you will improve your content. These can be short or longer term goals that give specifics for how you will better achieve your organizational goals.
Our initiatives
Creating more engaging/higher quality content – This is my goal as the new full-time content manager. I aim to increase the quality, volume and reach of our content.
We have been developing processes and documents like our content strategy. These documents help guide and streamline our content creation internally. We are refining guidelines for our guest writers.
Doing better at converting website visitors/organizing content on website – We are looking to organize and categorize our older content on our website and update them with calls to action. Our approach will be creating hub pages around certain themes we discuss a lot on the blog. This will create a place for visitors to find some of our classic articles and access downloads and email courses on the subject.
We also want to create more downloadable content, plugins, and guides for more compelling calls to action in our written posts.
Finding more/better ways to repurpose content – There’s lots of potential in our archives to drive new traffic if we can find effective ways to repurpose the content. We’ve been working on an infographic for our WordPress speed article.
Conclusion
Our content strategy has been a helpful tool in guiding our content and directing everything that gets published on the WP Curve blog. It’s well worth taking an afternoon to build and an hour or two every few months to keep updated and refined.
Here’s a link to our strategy and a framework you can use for your own: 5 minute content strategy template.
The post The WP Curve content strategy, and how to build your own appeared first on WP Curve.