PSU – Content Strategy Certificate

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 Transformation

Google Doc:  https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1UW2dXyWuKBq8QIs4HNrqVYMPmYUaXZe3tCw_glFtkhw/edit?usp=sharing