Celebrate the holidays with the best SEJ items of 2023.
Our Holiday Flashback Series runs from December 21st to January 5th and features daily reads on key facts, fundamentals, actionable strategies, and insights from thought leaders.
2023 has been quite a busy year for the SEO industry, and our contributors have written some great articles to keep up and reflect these changes.
Check out the top reads of 2023 that will give you plenty to think about as you approach 2024.
This article is taken from Content Marketing Strategy ©2023 by Robert Rose and is reproduced with permission from Kogan Page Ltd. reproduce and adapt.
This article is the first of three Search Engine Journal articles that delve into the concepts discussed in the book ( Read : Content Marketing Strategy Measurement Design and Content Lifecycle Responsibilities). , which was officially released on September 26. in 2023
To express its gratitude to its readers, Kogan Page Ltd. has generously released a 20% discount code only for Search Engine Journal readers. If you are interested in purchasing the book, use the promotional code CMS20 to purchase it at www.koganpage.com/content-marketing-strategy.
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: communications, experience, and operations (which ties the other two together).
These pillars overlap slightly and therefore provide a framework for five specific categories of activities that business managers will undertake.
The columns and their associated tasks are described below.
1. Coordinated communication
As we established at the beginning of this book, the content of business is about communication.
Therefore, the company must take some actions to better coordinate the use of content to attract, retain and grow customers and other audiences.
A successful company communicates with a clear, consistent voice. You'll also be able to communicate in creative and relevant ways that reflect the diversity of your workforce and audiences.
Achieving this delicate balance between unity and diversity requires coordination. This means that the first major category of activities in the communication pillar is the objective. This is content as power.
Many companies fall into the trap of believing that content marketing can be created as a “skill position” within the company.
They hire journalists, editors, creative writers and subject matter experts and train them to be “good” at creating and curating valuable content.
But as mentioned in the previous chapter, companies that run successful content marketing strategies realize that the main goal of a competent content team is not to create good content.
It's more about enabling a company to be good at providing content. These journalists, creative writers, or subject matter experts often work for a company whose sole mission is to “create amazing things.”
In general, there is no shortage of demand, but they are quickly overwhelmed and do not have the capacity, strength or infrastructure to say no when it is too much for them.
Quality starts to suffer and then doubts arise whether the right people are there or whether successful content marketing is possible.
The goal of the activity is to develop and manage clear responsibilities and core processes that continually build and evaluate the resource allocation, capabilities and roadmaps a content marketing team needs to develop a differentiated business capability. .
One of these skills might be content creation, but of course there are others (and we'll explore them later in this book).
This leads to the second category of communicative activity: pattern or content as systematic communication. The template's activities also overlap with the Operations column, which we'll describe shortly.
Any company that is successful with a content marketing strategy has a well-defined and well-understood operational/management model.
For example, the company we just talked to with all those journalists might end up with an entire department dedicated to content marketing with a “focused” team.
The Cleveland Clinic is a great example of this. The world-renowned hospital has created a central content marketing department, which is a functioning business unit.
They started with a few content creators and grew into a diverse, cross-functional yet focused 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, the entire functional model can be designed to enable other parts of the company to create, manage, activate and measure high-quality content across multiple channels.
Its role, like that of the federal government, is really to provide a central location where "laws" (such as standards, policies, workflows, etc.) are created and maintained so that everyone works the same way . . A good example of this is Anthem Blue Cross Insurance (now Elevance Health).
This company has 98,000 employees and several lines of business, 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 content team leader's key factors was creating an official letter for his team.
They created an organizational process where different product teams have coordinated representation so that each can collaborate with the content team.
The Brand Content team is responsible for developing, creating, collecting and distributing brand stories across Elevance.
2. Portfolio of experiences
You just learned that a coordinated approach to communications/content is about managing the quantity and quality of what is said within the organization.
This brings us to the second pillar of a content marketing strategy, Experiences, which is at the opposite end of the spectrum. Experiences are containers designed for content created for the public.
Regardless of the size of your company, you need a strategic approach to how the content you create is used on consumer platforms like email. .
This is a critical aspect of running a media-owned media company.
For example, when a medium-sized company considers its next production, it might start as a film, but then almost immediately activate operational and management processes to test how the same content will be used in books, television, podcasts and entertainment. interactive etc.
First comes the story and then we think about different types of containers that can express that story in different ways.
Remember: for media companies, the experience they get is the bottom line. And they have two ways to make money.
They monetize access to the experience with models like subscriptions or limited ticket sales.
Or media companies monetize the experience by selling access to consumer audiences and allowing sponsors to create content. This is the advertising or sponsored content model.
Our experience with corporate media should be no different. A brand's media channels (website, blog, resource center, e-commerce catalog, print magazine, etc.) should be focused on and considered for existing product/service lines.
As media companies, we need to think about “content” first and then how to create different types of containers to deliver that content.
We manage this as a portfolio of experiences that leverage valuable audience content. Each container should have a purpose, purpose, and strategic objective.
For example, if you say that our website or blog is less important than any of our products and services, you are essentially arguing that they shouldn't exist.
So, as with any product or service, someone must be responsible for ensuring that these experiences are relevant and have specific guidelines, objectives and strategies, optimized to meet the needs of the consumers (target groups) they serve.
They should be designed and developed to meet the needs of emerging markets, continually promoted and measured against overall business objectives. Additionally, like all of our products and services, they should be easily discontinued if they no longer meet our business objectives.
This pillar is based on the idea that there is a team dedicated to the process of creating and managing the company's media strategy platforms, so that they fit the company's business objectives.
The two activity categories within this column are audience and value.
When it comes to audiences, a company must define every experience as a product. In other words, the audience is happy with the product. This goes back to the beginning of the 4Ps.
Just as we would create a plan for any product or service we would like to launch, we now need to create product plans for our media experiences.
This means designing a solution that meets market needs, conducting market research and a good understanding of your target audience, and setting specific, measurable goals for each content-based experience you launch.
This book is about public activities.
Treating experiences this way helps us achieve their ultimate goal: courage. Value is contained as knowledge. Achieving all defined objectives of the experience portfolio is what creates the value of a content marketing strategy.
During this activity, we integrate insights and plan exactly where, when and how content marketing strategies will be delivered. Developing a measurement and value approach is a key part of this book.
And this brings us to the third pillar of a content marketing strategy, the glue that holds coordinated communications and experiences together.
3. Strategic actions
Consider for a moment the practice of accounting.
It is one of the oldest trading practices in the world, dating back to the 15th century. from the 19th century onwards, when the mathematician Luca Pacioli developed the double-entry accounting system and introduced the idea of books, newspapers and bookkeeping.
The reasons for accounting rules and policies are easy to understand.
Finance touches every part of business. Everyone in the company does some form of accounting, from preparing calendars to purchasing orders, dealing with suppliers, selling goods, and even using raw materials for goods and services.
Now think about content and marketing. Today it is as popular as accounting and in some cases even more. Creating content for corporate communications affects all areas of the company. That's the water we swim in.
However, most companies engage in content creation, management, distribution and measurement on an ad hoc basis.
Remember, it's not just marketing that changes, but your entire business strategy. As a result, the CEO or entrepreneur's relationship with marketing and content is also changing.
In a 2022 article by McKinsey Consulting, a former CEO of a retail company stated:
“Data has changed the way senior management interacts with marketing. Now it's very difficult to separate business strategy from marketing strategy."
If this is true, it's difficult to even separate business strategy from our content strategy.
Today, marketing departments are seen as factories, places where something successful can be reproduced millions of times.
To replicate consistent success and become a core business strategy, content marketing must be a well-defined, repeatable process that can flexibly adapt to new ideas as they arise.
The activity of this column is as standard frame or content.
If the activation of engaging content is at the heart of marketing today, it is the actions on content that make the heart beat faster.
The right content marketing practices give creators the freedom to provide creative services that enable business strategy and allow marketing teams to operate at scale.
As we discovered, everyone in the company creates content: the web team, the marketing automation/demand gen team, the content marketing team, agencies, executives, front-line account managers, sales reps, HR, and even invoicing . , contracts and articles of association.
In fact, today it's probably easier to count all the people who don't create digital communications with customers. We have found that establishing communication coordination is an important pillar of the standardized content approach.
Additionally, companies today operate in a multi-channel world, typically with dozens of channels (experiences) that need to be integrated with content in various formats.
For example, imagine a company that releases two to four new products every quarter. There are 10 resources for each new product launch, including brochures, technical product descriptions, a thought leadership document and more.
It may not seem like much, but each of the 10 assets must be customized for the five major marketing support services partners, and each of these service partners has advertising assets that must be customized for different types of content or channels. Specifics (social networks, videos, etc.).
Finally, all these resources will need to be translated into four languages. The final result is that the 10 contents provided become approximately 300 digital assets 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 for new product launches.
Therefore, regardless of the size of the company, it is necessary to establish repeatable processes governed by standards, policies, guidelines and technologies.
We call these framing operations because, like the structure of your home, they hold everything together. It is included by default.
This third pillar, Operations, consists of people, processes, and technologies that help create a repeatable, consistent process to systematically connect content creators (Pillar 1) with content-driven experiences (Pillar 2).
With the right content operating model, you can scale and measure enterprise content.
Together, these three pillars and five key activities form the competency framework for your entire content marketing strategy. Pressure points are what help determine how strong or weak your strategy is.
For example, if I work with a company that is having trouble meeting their company blog goals, I might click the Public button first. I see how strong we are as a company in understanding how well we are doing this business at scale.
I can analyze what makes this business category different or optimal.
This then helps me understand how to modify activities or strengthen communication coordination, operational processes or management pillars.
This circle provides a conceptual framework for important questions that need to be answered.
- What skills and competences are needed in the company of people, processes and technologies in the different pillars?
- Working models are requested, evaluated, recognized and rewarded in relation to the current content strategy.
- How do we define internal media operational processes so they can be scaled and measured as an effective business function?
- How does the framework provide measurable objectives, the results of which provide insight into the value of the target audience and the company?
- How do you approach a distinctive operational approach to content marketing that is developing a competitive advantage for entrepreneurs?
You may think that there is a common template, cheat sheet, or standardized answers for these topics. Fortunately, or perhaps unfortunately, for those looking for a quick answer, there isn't one.
Welcome to the art and science of content marketing strategy. It reminds me of the challenge faced by James Kealton in 1948, when he introduced the marketing mix, and Jerome McCarty in 1960, when he introduced the 4 Ps.
While the circle can be helpful, there is no one-size-fits-all answer to the marketing mix or how to use the 4 Ps for any business. The components of your perfect content marketing strategy will be up to you.
There is no model. There is no perfect recipe.
One of the most important things we've learned in content marketing strategies over the past decade is that what you put into these business categories is much less about your conscious decision to do something to position yourself there.
Just as there is no perfect marketing mix, there is no perfect content marketing strategy. you will develop Jump. Because you and your company will change.
As statistician George Box once said: “All models are wrong, but some are useful.”
Successful content marketing consciously or unconsciously uses elements of this model to strengthen its functioning. As mentioned, happy and successful content marketers seem to function the same way.
We have found that this model works. It has been tested.
At some point you will notice that the rest of this book covers every category of activity in your content marketing strategy.
Formulating, structuring, and testing your activities in each area will help you develop a great content marketing strategy.
Let's do it.
