WM411 Content Strategy
Instructor: Carmen Hill, Principal Strategist & Writer, Chill Content
Email: carmen@chillcontent.com 503.515.5761
Day 1: Content Strategy Concepts & Approaches
What is Content?
- Content is experience
- Content is a core business asset
- Content is a hairy, complicated beast
- Content strategy is how we tame this beast
- Content strategy is planning for the action, delivery, and governance of useful, usable content.
- Content marketing is a marketing technique of creating and distributing relevant and valuable…
Business
- Goals
- Initiatives
- KPIs
Audience
- Personas
- Journeys
- Preferences
Content
- Story
- Structure
- Style
Context
- Where
- When
- How
Business Goals: What is the purpose of your goals?
- Improve brand awareness
- Attract more traffic to your site
- Build your audience
- Generate new customer leads and/ or sales
- Develop your online reputation
- Boost audience
How Will You Measure Success?
- Email is good. Easy to track.
Audience:
- Be specific, who is your content for?
- What do you want then to do or learn?
- How can you help them? Currently relevant due to COVID-19
- Right Content at the right time:
- Relevant
- Useful
- Valuable
Typical Buyer Persona
- Demographics
- Job title/role
- Personality
- Goals
For Content, We Need to Know More…
- What questions/information needs do they have?
- What is their tole in making buying decisions?
- What do they read, watch, listen to?
- What type of content is most influential in their purchase decision process?
- What formats do they prefer?
- What devices do they use?
How do you know?
- Customer interviews
- Surveys
- Customer data
- Web analytics
- Internal search data
- LinkedIn Profiles
- Analyst research
- Industry publications
- Social listening (this is a big one)
- Topical forums, Quora, etc.
Case Study: LinkedIn
LinkedIn Marketing Solutions
Business goal: answer marketers’ question about how to advertise on LinkedIn, sponsor content on LinkedIn and build an effective content strategy on LinkedIn
Audience persona:
Audience: What is their journey
- How marketing & sales see the buyer journey
- It is not a linear process. It’s confusing and difficult.
Finding your sweet spot:
- what is your unique differentiator?
- Find your niche: what can you do better than anyone else?
- Find a problem no one else is solving
- Fill a content need that someone may not even know
Structure: How is Your Content Organized?
Editorial Theme & Pillars
What Do We Mean by Structure?
Structure is how we organize content, ideally in a way that makes it easy for people to find and consume information and helps content owners to create, publish and manage it.
- Architecture (website)
- Templates (pages)
Simple Content Model:
- Recipe
- Components
- Elements
Mapping Your Model
Style: How Do You Show Up?
- Visual Style
- Voice Style: means more than pretty pictures
Context: Where, Why & How?
- What are they doing?
- What are they looking for?
- Where are they?
- What device are they on?
- What time is it?
Lauren Goldstein
Driving Business Growth: The Power of Content Marketing!
The State of Marketing Today (be timely & relevant)
- Need to deliver value
- Common Business Challenges
- Driving Business Growth
- Improve the customer experience (prospects and customers)
- Understand WHAT marketing investments are converting to revenue?
- Drive better efficiency for sales?
- Scale marketing (leveraging digital as a key ingredient?
- Today, Your Customers Manage 85% of their relationship without interacting with a human.
- Random Acts of Marketing: has to be at the right place at the right time.
- Driving Business Growth
Driving Transformation
Google Doc: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1UW2dXyWuKBq8QIs4HNrqVYMPmYUaXZe3tCw_glFtkhw/edit?usp=sharing
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