A Simple Guide to Establishing a Content Strategy

You have a fantastic product or service. Great, that’s step one. Step two is finding a way to effectively tell the world about it, but demonstrating your skills or subject matter expertise to prospective customers is not always easy. You must be persuasive, professional, and methodical with your strategy in order to ensure buyers chose your company over that of your competitors. Our experts have seen that delivering consistent, engaging content through the proper channels offers you the best chance of improving your buyers’ experience and therefore successfully converting those buyers into new clients.

Here we have outlined the steps we recommend to successfully establish a content strategy:

Steps to Establish a Content Strategy

1) Define Your Customer

Determine your ideal client profile by evaluating the problem or pain point buyers are looking to solve and establish how your product or service can offer a solution to their problem. When you know who your ideal clients are you can tailor your marketing campaigns around their specific needs and desires.

2) Create a Campaign

If your content is properly focused and valuable, it will create awareness and attract your target client, but after they consume your content, what's next? Make sure to plan the next step by presenting a call-to-action or an offer that gives your prospects a chance for further engagement and nurturing.

A call-to-action (CTA) is a tactic designed to provoke an immediate response. Such as, “Sign up now,” “Get Started!” or “Learn More.” Call to actions can be displayed in a clickable format that directs your prospects to a form where they enter their contact information.

Offers are a tool for lead generation, without them, businesses have difficulty converting visitors into leads. Offers should be high-quality and valuable to your target audience, enough to convince them to fill out a form and provide their information.

3) Identify Keywords

Identify both broad and long-tail keywords to incorporate into your content to rank for keywords that matter to your Ideal Client. For example, if you own a carpet cleaning business a broad search keyword might be “carpet” but a long-tail keyword is a phrase specific to your prospective clients such as “carpet pet stain removal service” or “pet stain carpet cleaner.” Check out Google Keyword Planner to identify effective keywords relevant to your product or service with high search volume.

4) Establish an Editorial Calendar

Editorial calendars are used by small businesses, publishers, and bloggers to schedule content across different media, such as newspaper, social media, and email or print newsletters. Editorial calendars are more than just a platform for publishing dates. A successful editorial calendar maps content and schedules resources, offers, and channels.

5) Create a Workflow

Now that you have defined your ideal client profile, created a campaign, identified keywords, and established an editorial calendar, you are ready to create a workflow. This involves designing and implementing landing and thank you pages, email workflows (automated responses) and, lead scoring. Workflow tools such as HubSpot or Autopilot offer easy-to-use templates and the ability to create beautiful, personalized workflows--customized to fit your ideal clients in every stage of the buyer’s journey.

6) Measure and Adjust

Now that everything is off and running, you might be wondering how do you ensure your content strategy investment is actually profitable. Not to worry, most workflow tools make it easy to track and measure a multitude of data Including how many people are opening your emails, what offers generate more leads, how many leads are converting to clients, etc. Get together with your team and show them the results of your efforts. Decide what’s working and what’s not, and adjust your workflow accordingly.

Final Thoughts

Creating a Content Strategy and building a campaign may seem like daunting tasks at first, but after doing a little homework you will find it all comes down to figuring out what your ideal client is looking for and then designing your workflow and content around that information. Check out tools such as HubSpot or Autopilot to help you build beautifully customized offers, collaborate with your internal team for campaign ideas, poll your existing clients to see what products or services they are looking for the most, and consult experts for advanced advice if needed. Most importantly, don’t worry that your content strategy won’t attract buyers, like the saying goes, “If you build it, they will come.”

Lumiere’s Guide to Editorial Calendars

Editorial calendars are used by bloggers, publishers, and small businesses to schedule content across different media, such as newspaper, blogs, social media, and email or print newsletters. An effective editorial calendar is much more than just a platform for publishing dates. An effective editorial calendar maps content and schedules resources, offers, and channels.

Editorial Calendar Basics

Now that you have decided to create an editorial calendar, these tips will ensure you are the most successful.

1) Create a list of Content

List all the content you intend to publish. If you are unsure of blog titles but know you want to post 4 blogs per month, you can simply write “Original Blog 1” or “Curated Blog 2” to serve as placeholders.  Utilize a blend of both original and curated content (HootSuite recommends a 60/40 split), both of which are very different and  require disparate efforts to complete:

Original Content

Original content is content you have created from scratch and publish for potential leads, subscribers, and customers. You can hire a professional writer or marketing team to create this content for you, or perhaps you or someone in your company has a knack for writing and wants to give it a shot. Just make sure that the content you create is true to your brand and showcases your business properly.

Curated Content

Curating content is the process of sorting through existing online content such as articles, publications, blogs, or social media posts and choosing the pieces relevant to your industry or company and sharing them with your subscribers.

2) Establish Creation and Publishing Dates

Gather the team, get the whiteboard out and strategize. What is feasible for your team? How many pieces can you write per month? How up to date and in demand is your content? Are you outsourcing the creation of your content? If so, what does your budget allow? 2, 4, 8 pieces per month? Great, schedule it! Having creation and publication dates allows for a common goal and transparency across your team and outsourced providers.

Each piece of content will need to be broken out into several steps and assigned to the appropriate party. Here are some editorial steps to help you get started:

3) Identify Resources

Make sure to assign or list responsible parties associated with the creation of each piece. For example “Original Blog 1” may not only require a writer, but also an editor, designer, or publisher. Editorial calendars make it easy to divide work but also can illustrate gaps in your resources.  If your existing capacity (or skills) are not sufficient to meet the schedule you establish, consider using freelance or outside help. Although they do come with the extra layer of managing, services like Scripted or inbound marketing agencies can provide the writing expertise or bandwidth you lack.

4) Don’t Forget these Important Editorial Steps

It is not as simple as just writing and publishing.  An effective editorial calendar should include all of the steps required from inception through measuring the effectiveness.  

Additional key steps for each piece of content are:

1. Outline - Start with an outline of the content piece with the important points, steps, and keywords.

2. Write - Assign a date and resource for creating the piece.

3. Edit - Review the content for tone and adherence to your style guide and provide feedback to the writer of any changes.

4. Publish - Schedule the content to be published See Social Report’s Best Practices for Scheduling Content.

5. Promote - Most Blogging platforms will automatically promote to your awareness channel. Consider adding content to a newsletter or customer communications as well.

6. Measure - It is important to know how your content is performing. Track views, shares, time on page, leads and customers for a true ROI calculation.

7. Update - Content can become stale very quickly. Schedule a task for reviewing and updating the content in the future to keep it fresh.

5) Determine the Best Awareness Channels

An effective calendar will not only display the title of a piece, the parties responsible, and the due dates but will also list which vehicle you would like to use to share your content with your subscribers. Some pieces may be suitable as blog posts, some as direct emails, while others may be more effective as a simple social media post. Use your calendar to decide and share with your team.

6) Publishing Schedule

Now that you are familiar with the basics of what to publish, let’s discuss when to publish. As the old saying goes, “Timing is everything!”

When it comes to creating your publishing schedule, you will want to consider your audience and any upcoming events that may affect or influence their actions, your business, or your content choices.

Here are some questions to ask yourself:

• Are there any upcoming events to focus your content on?

• Do seasons or holidays impact your product offering?

• Is there an industry-specific season coming up? For example, if you are a sporting goods store, you will want to tailor your content to each sport’s particular season.

7) Utilize Productivity Tools

Now that you have learned what an Editorial Calendar is and what to put on it, you might be asking yourself what is the best tool to use to display your calendar. The answer is whatever works best for you and your team. If you want to start with something fairly simple a Google Calendar or Shared Google Document may suffice. If you want to create something a little more robust, you may want to try a tool designed specifically for project management such as Asana which allows you to assign collaborators, create dependent tasks, calendar, and more.  Whatever tool you choose, the goal is to get creative, get organized, and get going on your fabulous new Editorial Calendar.

If you follow these steps, what could be a daunting task, can be managed efficiently.  A well-thought-out calendar truly helps marketing departments and professionals stay organized and focused--thus increasing traffic and generating customers.

Content’s Role in the Marketing Funnel

The primary goal of a marketing strategy is to create engagement with your potential customers that leads to conversion to a customer.  Customers typically follow a path in making their decision, educating and becoming aware of the solutions, differentiating and evaluating the options and supporting their eventual decision.  This journey is called the marketing funnel and your content strategy should consider the prospect’s behavior in each stage and support their unique needs at each step.

Not all prospects will follow a direct path through the marketing funnel, be prepared to convert prospects to customers at any stage. Conversely, establish a strategy to reduce the exits at each stage.  The marketing funnel consists of three major

Top of Funnel -

At the beginning of the customer’s journey, they are becoming aware of your brand, the issue you solve or need they have, and the products or solutions available. The goal of content at this stage is to generate interest to a wide group and begin engagement with as many opportunities as possible.

Content that is effective at the top of the funnel includes:

• White Papers - Educates the prospect about issues and solutions, problem-solving guide

• Checklists - Appropriate steps to follow

• Infographics - Easily digestible content that helps a prospect identify the need or solution

• Blog Posts - Establish credibility and educates prospects on your capabilities and expertise

“The goal at the top of the funnel is to make prospects aware of their need and your solution”

Middle of funnel

By now, the prospect has become a strong candidate for your service or product.  They are now looking for more specific product details and trying to differentiate between providers and may not yet trust you.  There is a greater opportunity at this stage to acquire the customer but not guaranteed.

Content that should be provided at this stage of the funnel should be:

• Case Studies - Most effective way to provides specific details how your company has delivered solutions to customers.  Should be applicable to their needs.

• Industry Reports - Helps to contrast products or services through third party reports

• Product/Service details - Specific attributes of your product or service

“Content marketing should convert people at any stage of the funnel”

Bottom of Funnel

As the prospect reaches the bottom of the funnel, they have most likely selected your product or solution and are trying to support the decision-making process.  This is your best opportunity to convert them to a customer.  Be aware, however, this is also typically where an additional decision maker shows up.  You should be prepared to address any new participants needs and the right content can expedite this.

Content that should be utilized at the last stage of the funnel helps convert the prospect to a customer:

• Testimonials/Review - Confirms credibility and success with your prospects peers.

• Implementation Guides - Can demonstrate the robustness of the process for onboarding or utilizing your product/service.

The funnel doesn’t end there.  Converting a prospect into a customer is just the beginning.  Content plays a crucial role in retention of customers and building advocacy for your product or service. Strong support documentation, an effective presentation layer and consistent communication improve the experience and create repeat customers.

Each stage of the marketing funnel you are creating content for requires a different approach.