In today's digital landscape, our time and attention are at a premium. Every organisation is now a publisher producing content, and every consumer only has so many hours in the day to consume it. In this introduction to content marketing, we look at the factors in play when seeking to differentiate yourself from the competition and how to connect with an increasingly discerning audience.

What is content marketing?

Content marketing is a foundational piece of the inbound marketing method. A quick introduction, or recap for those already acquainted with the concept, content marketing is:

“…a strategic marketing approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly defined audience and, ultimately, to drive profitable customer action.”

— Content Marketing Institute

In other words, content marketing is an indirect form of persuasion that concentrates on attracting new prospects to your brand and establishing a relationship based on trust, a compelling value proposition, and an ethos of customer service, rather than a more traditional direct sales pitch approach.

Content Marketing Strategy

Marketing content must be as unique as your customer base. In a crowded marketplace, where the attention of your prospects is a scarce commodity, a coherent strategy is vital. When 86% of companies in the market are using content marketing as a strand in their overall strategy, how do you stand out?

Consumers, faced with an avalanche of new content every single day, must prioritise between sources of information based on their individual preferences. Some will prefer a range of sources offering a fresh perspective, others a trusted few providing comprehensive coverage on the issues they face. Some will prioritise video content over written, and some will prefer short-form pieces to long form. Being clear on the preferences of your target audience, how they consume content, how they want it delivered, and how often, gives you a better chance of becoming your prospects' 'preferred supplier'.

Only 39% of organisations would class their content marketing maturity level as either 'Sophisticated' or 'Mature'. The majority of marketers would agree that in this fast-paced environment, we've all got something new we could learn. In addition, where content marketers said their organisation's overall content marketing approach was more successful compared to the previous year, 68% attributed that increased success to the development or adjustment of their strategy.

The time to work on your strategy is now.

What are the differences between B2B and B2C content marketing?

There are many similarities between B2B and B2C content marketing strategies. It doesn't matter whether you're talking with someone with a personal or business focus; you are still talking to a human being. What distinguishes B2B from a B2C focused strategy, however, is the precise way in which B2B content needs to provide value. B2B content needs to reach specific influencers and decision makers within any given company, endure over a typically longer sales cycle, and answer more in-depth and perhaps technical questions, as well as be actionable in a way that helps your prospect solve their issues.

How to create a content marketing strategy

It's tempting just to get started, to feel the satisfaction of having created something and put it out there, but working through the strategy process first means you can proceed with more considerable deliberation and confidence. If you're investing a chunk of your marketing budget and team's resources in this strategy, it's worth making sure you have solid foundations to build on.

So, what are the steps you need to take to have a robust and documented content marketing plan in place?

1. Define your goals

Every successful strategy, like any successful journey, has a clearly defined destination in mind. With a clear target, you can plot a route to get there and, if you start veering off track, you're able to adjust tack to head in the right direction again.

Your goals define what success looks like and hold you accountable. They not only give you something to measure your overall performance against, but also every individual piece of content you produce. Knowing the 'why' your content needs to serve helps your content creators to stay on target further down the line.

2. Define your audience

To create content that will be found and valued by the people you want to reach, engage and, ultimately, do business with, you need to know as much as possible about who they are. It's common sense. If you aren't interested in what they value, how they assign priority, what challenges them, and what immediate problems are on their plate to solve, you can't have a meaningful conversation with them.

You'll likely have more than one type of person in mind, so construct detailed personas for each of your target audiences that cover:

- Name, job position, perhaps even a photograph to humanise your avatar.

- Company information: industry, revenue, number of employees.

- Role: how their job is measured, the skills they require, who they report to, who they manage.

- Objectives: what success looks like to them, what they value most, what their biggest challenges are, what are their objections.

- Information preferences: how do they prefer to communicate, which sources are trusted/respected providers of industry news, why do they have these preferences, which publications do they read, which associations are they part of, which social networking sites do they use, where else can you find them.

- Personal background: married, children, ages of children, education level.

In the process of creating your personas, you'll start to focus in on the prospects who are most likely to convert. These are the people to whom you target the bulk of your content.

3. Define your topics

Now you know more about who you want to reach, the questions they have and the problems they're trying to solve, you're equipped to position yourself as the expert in the marketplace uniquely qualified to provide the answers and solutions they need. The next step is to determine which of the topics they're searching online intersect with your brand voice, expertise and product offering compellingly, and where you can extend the most value. This will provide your team with a framework to create a consistent narrative and will also become the foundations of your SEO and social media strategies.

4. Define the content creation process

Feeding the content marketing machine is no mean feat, so you'll want to be organised and know precisely how you're going to create the constant stream of high-quality fuel needed to keep it going.

Who is responsible for writing? What is the process for proofreading, editing, and giving feedback? Who will create or source the images and graphics? Will you be keeping everything in-house, or will you be outsourcing to agencies or contractors? How will you design and track the progress of a campaign or individual piece of content from conception to publication? What should your editorial calendar look like? Do you need to have regular 'editorial meetings' and how frequently? Where will your content be stored? What will the file structure and naming convention be? Do you need a separate media library?

Think about it all up front and include it in your content marketing strategy so everyone knows how the machine works.

5. Define the channels and process for promoting your content

If you've considered your audiences' communications preferences as part of the detailed personas you've created, you already have a clear indication of how best to reach them. Use this information to flesh out a strategy for meeting your buyers where they already are.

When considering the channels you're going to use, also think about how you'll need to tailor the content you're producing and feed that back into the creation process. Take video as an example. Creating high-quality video content is more resource intensive, but the potential rewards are higher. No content builds relationship and converts faster than video. Your understanding of your consumer might lead you to decide to distribute longer form video content via YouTube and your website, but you can maximise the resources you invest in creating that content by considering edit points for more snackable pieces better suited to social media campaigns.

You'll also want to consider how you'll manage the delivery of your campaigns and content to ensure you're publishing a consistent, well-balanced stream that keeps your organisation high in your prospect's consciousness without overwhelming them and weaves together the different threads of your narrative to create a seamless whole.

6. Create your Content Marketing Strategy Blueprint

Documenting your strategy is the only way to keep everyone committed, accountable, and on the same page. It also has the potential to put you ahead of your competitors. 78% of organisations say they have a content marketing strategy, but of those, 40% said that it was a 'verbal' strategy and not documented in any way.

While it's great to take the first step and do the thinking, an undocumented plan is a job half done. Without a document laying out your aims, approach and benchmarks of success, there's no accountability and every likelihood that your team will get distracted or go off on a tangent. Without a document, you'll find onboarding new team members is more time consuming and that briefing the agencies and contractors you want to outsource to far more difficult. You're also at risk of your strategy walking out the door in a team member's head if they move on to another organisation.

Please don't do it to yourself and don't be like the competition. Don't skip to the next stage without documenting your strategy.

Revisit, review, revise

While you're committing to producing a documented strategy, also schedule a time to revisit, review and revise. Best practice suggests you shouldn't view your content strategy as a static document that lives on your company's shared drive. To be successful, it needs to be a living, evolving thing that takes account of both your successes and failures.

Content Marketing Ideas

The best content marketing comes from fresh, daring ideas. Good ideas and lots of them are the lifeblood of any content marketing campaign. As part of your strategy phase, you'll have already made some considered decisions about the topics you want to talk about, based on the sort of problems your prospects need to solve and the subjects with which you want to be associated. Now it's time to get into the nuts and bolts of how you bring that to life.

If you've been doing business for a while, you might be sitting on a treasure trove of content stored in your organisation's filing cabinets, desk drawers and on shared drives. In this case, pick the low hanging fruit first with a content audit to identify which pieces to repurpose in line with your plan to give your content library a welcome boost. You might have existing newsletters or presentations that are rich in ideas for blog posts, for example, or recordings of webinars and trainings that you can mine for video or podcast content.

Whether you're starting from scratch or a core of existing content, we recommend you make content brainstorming sessions a regular appointment in the schedule. Get a breadth of inputs and perspectives by involving people from across the organisation, not just the marketing team, and make sure to make the sessions both fun and physical to engage the creative brain. You want to generate a large pool of ideas so you can sift through, filtering out the ones that don't excite and find the ones that are exactly right for your prospect's needs, your brand voice, and that inspires your team to keep creating and keep coming up with great ideas.

Decide on the form your ideas will take

There are lots of different forms for your content to take, and the choices you make will depend on several factors including the content and communication preferences of your target audience, the job you need your content to do, and your available resources and budget. Your ideas might be best delivered as a blog post, a piece of video or audio, an infographic, or perhaps a downloadable ebook or template.

From here, it’s merely a case of putting the machine into action and converting your ideas into content that brings a reliable stream of visitors to your website, increases your reach on social platforms, and builds relationships with the right people in the organisations that are a perfect fit for your business to work with.