This article is adapted from Content Marketing Strategy by Robert Rose © 2023 and reproduced with permission from Kogan Page Ltd. reproduced and adapted.
This article is the first in a series of three articles published in Search Engine Journal that delve deeper into the concepts covered in the book. We are also pleased to announce that the book will officially release on September 26, 2023.
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Just as we have the 4 Ps to describe the entire marketing mix, we need a new model to describe the content marketing strategy.
A content marketing strategy starts with three main pillars: communication, experience, and operations (which connect the other two).
These focus areas overlap slightly and therefore provide the basis for five specific categories of activities that business leaders will undertake.
Here you will find the description of the pillars and the activities connected to them.
1. Coordinated communication
As we said at the beginning of this book, business content is about communication.
Therefore, a company must undertake certain activities to better coordinate the use of content to attract, retain, and expand customers and other audiences.
A successful company communicates clearly and consistently. Furthermore, he is able to communicate creatively and in a particularly appropriate way, reflecting the diversity of his staff and his audience.
Achieving this delicate balance between coherence and variety requires coordination. This means that the first main activity category in the communication component is the goal. This is content as a skill.
Many companies fall into the trap of thinking that content marketing can simply be created as a “skill position” within the company.
They hire journalists, editors, creative editors and subject matter experts and encourage them to “learn” how to create and manage valuable content.
But as I said in the previous chapter, companies that implement successful content marketing strategies recognize that the primary goal of a competent content team is not to create good content.
Rather, it's about enabling the business to use content effectively. These journalists, creative editors, or subject matter experts usually join a company with a single mission: “to create great things.”
There is usually no shortage of this demand, but they are quickly overwhelmed and don't have the skills, power or infrastructure to say no when the going gets tough.
Quality starts to suffer and then doubts arise whether these are the right people and whether successful content marketing is possible.
Therefore, the business objective is to develop and manage clear core responsibilities and processes that create and continually evaluate the allocation of resources, skills and clear charters necessary for a content marketing team to become a high-performing, high-performance and differentiated. .
One of these skills might be content creation itself, but there are definitely others (and we'll look at them later in this book).
This brings us to the second category of activities of the communication component: model or content as coordinated communication. Modeling activities also overlap with the Operations component, which we will describe shortly.
Every company that has managed to implement a content marketing strategy has a clearly defined and understandable management/operational model.
For example, the company we just talked about, with all those journalists, could end up having an entire department dedicated to content marketing as a “centralized” team.
The Cleveland Clinic is a great example. The world-renowned hospital has created a central content marketing department, which is a functional business unit.
They started with a few content creators and grew into a diverse, cross-functional yet centralized team with clear, standardized operating procedures.
Other companies may use a "federated model" where the content team is only responsible for creating a small percentage of the content. In fact, their entire business model can be designed so that other parts of the company can create, manage, activate and measure high-quality content across multiple channels.
Their role, like that of the federal government, is to provide a central place where "laws" (e.g. standards, guidelines, work processes, etc.) are created and maintained to ensure everyone operates within them the same way. A good example is Anthem Blue Cross Insurance (now Elevance Health).
The company employs 98,000 people and combines several businesses, including drug insurance, dental insurance, long-term care and disability insurance.
You'll learn more about his journey in the next chapter, but one of the keys to the content team leader was creating a formal charter for his team.
They created an organizational process where different product groups have a coordinated vision so everyone can collaborate with the content team.
The Brand Content team is responsible for curating, creating, packaging and distributing brand stories across Elevance.
2. Portfolio of experiences
You've just learned that a coordinated approach to communication and content helps manage the quantity and quality of what your entire organization has to say.
This brings us to the second pillar of content marketing strategy – experience – on the other end of the spectrum. Experiences are containers of content designed for a target audience.
No matter how large a company is, it needs a strategic approach to how the content it creates will be published on the platforms it has developed, such as email, websites, feeds, print magazines, PDFs, events, blogs or even social average. .
This is an important aspect of the work of a media company that owns media properties.
For example, when a media company is evaluating its next production, it might start with film, but then almost immediately operations and management processes come into play to explore how the same content will be used in books, on television, in podcasts and interactive entertainment. . , etc.
First comes the story and then reflections on the different types of containers that can express that story in different ways.
Remember: for media companies, the product is the experience they monetize. And they have two ways to profit from it.
They monetize access to this experience through models such as subscriptions or selling a limited number of tickets.
Or media companies monetize this experience by selling access to the audience that consumes it, allowing sponsors to create content within it. This is an advertising or sponsored content template.
Our business-specific media expertise should be no exception. All media channels owned by a brand (website, blog, resource center, e-commerce catalog, print magazine, etc.) should be treated with the same care and attention as existing product/service lines.
Like media companies, we need to think about content first and then how to create all different types of containers to deliver that content.
We manage everything as a portfolio of experiences that leverage valuable audience content. Each container should have a purpose and strategic objectives.
For example, if we argue that our website or blog is less important than our products and services, we are essentially saying that they shouldn't exist at all.
Therefore, as with any product or service, someone must be responsible for updating this experience and optimizing specific policies, objectives and strategies to meet the needs of the consumers (the audience) it serves.
They must be designed and developed to meet new market needs, be constantly promoted and align with overall corporate objectives. Additionally, like all of our products and services, they can easily be discontinued if they no longer meet our business objectives.
This pillar is based on the idea that there is a team focused on the process of creating and managing a company's media strategy platforms optimally for the company's business objectives.
The two categories of activity within this component are audience and value.
For the public, a company must treat every experience as a product. In other words, the audience is the content as a product. This brings us back to the beginning of the 4Ps.
Just as we would create a plan for every product or service we release, we now need to create product plans for our media experiences.
This means developing a solution that meets a market need, conducting market research and understanding your target audience, and setting specific, measurable goals for each piece of content-focused content you publish.
This book delves into social activism.
Processing the experience in this way helps us achieve our ultimate goal: value. Value is contained as knowledge. Achieving all the goals you set for your portfolio of experiences is what creates value in your content marketing strategy.
In this activity, we integrate the information and determine exactly where, when and how the content marketing strategy will provide it. Developing an approach to measurement and evaluation is a central element of this book.
And this brings us to the third pillar of a content marketing strategy: the glue that holds communication and coordinated experiences together.
3. Strategic operations
Let's look at accounting practices for a moment.
It is one of the oldest business practices in the world, dating back to the 14th century, when mathematician Luca Pacioli developed the double-entry accounting system and introduced the idea of books, newspapers and bookkeeping.
The reasons for adopting predictable accounting principles and policies are easy to understand.
Finance influences every aspect of business. Every employee in a company maintains some form of accounting, from preparing time sheets to delivery requests, dealing with suppliers, selling products, and using raw materials to produce products and services.
Now think about content and marketing. Today it is as common as accounting and in some cases even more so. Creating content for corporate communications touches all aspects of the business. This is the water we swim in.
However, most companies create, manage, distribute and measure content on an ad hoc basis.
Remember, it's not just marketing that changes, but your entire business strategy. It also changes the way a CEO or entrepreneur thinks about marketing and content.
In a 2022 article for McKinsey Consulting, a former retail CEO said:
“Data has changed the way executives interact with marketing. It's very difficult these days to separate business strategy from marketing strategy."
This is true, but it is also true that it is difficult to separate business strategy from content strategy.
Today, marketing departments are seen as factories, places where something successful must be repeated millions of times.
To achieve consistent, repeated success and become a core business strategy, content marketing must have a clearly defined and repeatable process that can adapt to new ideas as they arise.
The default activity for this column is frame or content.
If activating engaging content is at the heart of modern marketing, then it's content operations that make the heart beat faster.
The right content marketing allows creators to do creative things that drive business strategy and enable marketing teams to execute at scale.
As we discovered, content is created by everyone in the company: the web team, the marketing automation/demand gen team, the content marketing team, agencies, executives, account managers, sales reps, HR, and even the accounting. , contracts and integration documentation.
In fact, nowadays it's probably easier to count all the people who aren't involved in digital communications with customers. We have found that building coordinated communication is an important foundation for a standardized approach to content.
Additionally, businesses today operate in a multi-channel world, typically with dozens of channels (experiences) that need to be filled with content in various formats.
For example, imagine a company that releases two to four new products every quarter. For each launch of a new product, 10 resources are provided including brochures, product sheets, white papers, etc.
It may not seem like a large undertaking, but each of the 10 elements must be configured for the five main service partners that support marketing, and each of these service partners has line elements that must be configured for different types of content or channels. Technical characteristics (social networks, videos, etc.).
Finally, all these resources will need to be translated into four languages. The end result is that 10 planned pieces of content turn into around 300 digital assets that need to be designed and produced.
Multiply that by two new products per quarter and you get approximately 2,400 digital assets created each year just to launch new products.
Therefore, regardless of the size of the company, there must be repeatable processes governed by standards, guidelines, guidelines and technology.
We call it a frame because, like the frame of your house, it holds everything in place. This is the standard content.
This third pillar, Operations, brings together the people, processes, and technologies that help create a repeatable, sustainable process for connecting coordinated content creators (Pillar 1) with experiences based on the content they create (Pillar 2).
With the right content operating model, you can scale and measure your content business.
Together, these three pillars and five core activities form a competency framework for your entire content marketing strategy. These are pressure points that help determine the strength or weakness of your strategy.
For example, if I'm working with a company that's trying to reach their blogging goal, I might click the Audience button first. I see how well we in the company understand how well we run this business.
I can explore what makes this category of activity special or optimal.
This helps me as a strategist understand where I might need to change the business or strengthen one of the other pillars of communication coordination, business process or experience management.
This framework provides a conceptual framework for the important questions that need to be answered:
- What skills and abilities are needed for the different people, processes and technologies in the company in each area?
- What operating models are needed, valued, recognized and rewarded when it comes to functional content strategy?
- How do you define a media company's internal operational processes so they can be scaled and measured as an effective business function?
- How does the framework achieve measurable goals, and how do the results provide insight into the value created for both the public and the company?
- How can we manage a differentiated operational focus on content marketing to deliver the scalable competitive advantage companies desire?
You may wonder if there is a complete template, cheat sheet, or standardized answer to these questions. Fortunately, or perhaps unfortunately, for those of you looking for a quick answer, there isn't one.
Welcome to the art and science of content marketing strategy. This reminds me of the problem faced by James Culliton when he introduced the marketing mix in 1948 and by Jerome McCarthy in 1960 when he introduced the 4 Ps.
While this framework can be helpful, there is no one-size-fits-all answer for your business when it comes to your marketing mix model or use of the 4Ps. The ingredients of your ideal content marketing strategy are actually very different.
No template. The ideal recipe does not exist.
One of the most important things we've realized after working on content marketing strategies for hundreds of brands over the past decade is that what you invest in these business categories is far less important than making a conscious decision about what to place.
Just as there is no ideal marketing mix, there is no ideal content marketing strategy. You will develop. This will change. Because you and your company will change.
As the statistician George Box once said: «Все модели неверны, но сегодня из них полезни».
Successful content marketing consciously or unconsciously uses elements of this model to increase its effectiveness. As I said at the beginning, successful and happy content marketers seem to function in a similar way.
We have seen how this model works: it is tested.
In fact, at some point in this chapter, you may have noticed that the rest of the book is structured to cover every action category in our content marketing strategy template.
If you can formulate, structure, and test your business in each area, you'll be well on your way to developing an excellent content marketing strategy.
Let's go.
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