The common myth around content marketing is that “if you build it, they will come.” In other words, if you create a lot of blog content, a lot of YouTube video content, and a lot of thought leadership pieces for LinkedIn, people are going to be flocking to your corporate website for more details. If only it were that simple. Instead, what you need is an overarching content marketing strategy and a way of seeing how all the different piece fit together.
Step #1: Decide on your platforms
The choice of platform – whether it’s a blog hosted on your business website or a third-party social network like Facebook – will determine the type of content that you create.
If it’s too hard to decide on specific platforms and choose them on an a la carte basis, one solution is to choose an all-in-one marketing and sales solution like Rainmaker Platform. With Rainmaker, you are able to create articles, audio and video that can then be distributed easily across a number of different social platforms. Think of Rainmaker Platform as the engine to power your content strategy.
Step #2: Decide what products you are going to create
For some people content marketing begins and ends with an attention-getting landing page or a few blog entries spaced out every few weeks. But the really savvy B2B marketers are thinking in terms of “products” – e-books, online courses and whitepapers. The idea is to package up all the great thinking that already exists within your company, and find outlets for it online. You can package up a few case studies into a whitepaper, or a number of blog entries and articles into a full-scale e-book.
Step #3: Find a way to measure what you’ve just created
If you’re doing content marketing right, you’ll have conversations taking place all over the Internet. The key, then, is learning how to discover, monitor and engage people within those conversations. How are you going to turn insights into action before anyone else?
That’s where companies like Sysomos come into play – they offer a way of turning analysis and insights into valuable metrics and data for your sales and marketing team.
Step #4: Empower people on your team to contribute
It’s too much to expect that a single person is going to be the one creating and tracking all that content. That’s why it’s important to be able to empower others on your team to take over. Maybe someone can help out with the corporate blog every now and then, or maybe a younger person on the team can take over Twitter for the day to engage with the online audience out there.
Ultimately, you’ll need some form of dashboard to track who’s creating what, and when. The goal is for all that content to fit together seamlessly in order to stay “on message.” If you manage to do that, you’ll find that prospects and customers are starting to come to you – they are finding you via tweets or blog posts and are curious to hear more. And that’s going to be great news for your bottom line.
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Dane
Dane Cobain is a published author, freelance writer, book blogger, poet and (occasional) musician from High Wycombe, UK. Before going freelance, he worked as a social media marker, now specialising in writing about publishing, technology and marketing.