Content Marketing Strategies: Tips & Tricks for Taming the Content Beast

Thomas Robbins, Chief Evangelist, Kentico CMS

Who are we?

Kentico CMS is one of the most powerful Customer Experience Management Systems and Content Management Systems on the planet. With over 16,000 web sites in 90 countries and backed by over 1,200 partners. it is used for everything from simple web sites to complex applications.

Kentico CMS is easy to install, simple to manage and reliable.

For more information…

Check out www.digital-marketing-university.com for more great content!

What we will cover

• Why use Content marketing• Organizational objectives of content marketing• Best practices for taming the beast!

What is content marketing

Social Media

SEO

Customer Engagements

Sales Process

Content Marketing

Content marketing is an umbrella term encompassing all marketing formats that involve the creation and sharing of content in order to attract, acquire and engage clearly defined and understood current and potential consumer bases with the objective of driving profitable customer action.

Source: Wikipedia

Corporate objectives of content marketing

Recognized as an expert

• Strong and relevant content enhances the position of your company and shows that you are innovative and aware of the latest trends.

Maintain existing customers

• Providing content at predictable and regular intervals encourages customers to keep in touch with your band.

Grow your business

• Great content demands sharing and relevant content arouses the interest of new prospects and makes them investigate your brand.

Increase social media reach

• Great content guarantees that your company has a wider reach on social media.

Best practice: understand your customer journey

• The first step for any successful digital marketing strategy– How well do you understand your customer?– What channels

are customers using for research?

– What channels are customers using for purchase?

– How does the experience in one channel affect the behavior of another?

Source: Heart of the customer

Start by understanding your sales process…

Sales Process Model

Establish relationship

Needs recognition

Formulate solution

Close the sale

Deliver and evaluate

Content

Content

Content

Content

Content

The Content Lifecycle

• Planning – Defining topics and target audience

• Creation – creating target content• Approval – Approval phase• Publishing – Making content

available to key customer channels

• Measurement – Measuring the success of the published content

• Optimization – Measuring and optimizing published content against defined goals and feeding that back into the next wave of content.

Planning

Creation

Approval

Publishing

Measurement

Optimizati

on Optimized Content

Marketing

Content lifecycle - Planning

Activities• Understanding your

audience (Persona)• Content conversion strategy• Define a sales ready lead• Topic selection• Editorial content planning

Best Practices• Perform a content analysis• Avoid areas that you are unique

and there is little demand• Limit competitive collateral • Focus content on where you can

make a difference• Map content conversion touch

points• Look at organic content growth• Define themes, publishing

frequency, campaigns and scoring rules

Content lifecycle - Creation

Activities• Define content formats• Create shareable content

Best Practice• Make sure all content is

available in digital format for sharing and tracking

• Enable share buttons on your content – Make is as easy as possible for people to share

• Develop different layers of content– Short – less than a paragraph– Long – more than a page– Video and audio

Content lifecycle - Approval

Activities• Make it strategic • Business approval process

Best Practices• Finalize business objectives• Define business process

Content lifecycle - Publishing

Activities• Content placement in

channels

Best Practices• Listen to the reactions of your

content– What’s the reach of content sharing?– What’s the sentiment?– What’s the impact?

• Facilitate as a brand– Go beyond a sharing button– Help your community to share your

content

• Participate– Be part of the conversation– Responsive to questions– Open and professional

Content lifecycle - Measurement

Activities• Measure using relevant

KPI’s – Combination of business

generation and conversion measures

– Audience engagement– Content conversion– Influencer engagement

Best Practices• Use KPIs with a direct impact on the

business objectives of your company– Financial – Lead generation

• Use KPIs with direct impact on the marketing objectives of your company

– Increase brand identification and affinity

• Use KPIs related to conversations– Conversations are the driver of decision

making and business growth– Measure the number of conversations,

the sentiment of conversations and then impact of conversations

Building your first scorecard

• Unique visitors– Number of individuals who visit your website– Best indication of sites overall traffic

• Page views– Cumulative number of individual pages that a visitors click on– If page views are higher than unique visitors may indicate engaging

content• Search engine traffic

– Amount of traffic referred via search engines– Indicates effectiveness at optimizing content

• Bounce rate– Percentage of visitors who come to your site and then leave before

clicking on another page– Industry bounce rate of less than 40% is good – aim to do better!

• Conversion rate– Percentage of visitors to your site that take a specific action– Industry averages around 2% - aim to do better!

• Inbound links– The number of external links to a site– The more high quality links you have the better!

Content lifecycle - Optimization

Activities• A/B, MVT Testing• Channel optimization

Best practices• Review data to better match the right

communication to the right customers • Review and produce content based on

keyword phrases that are driving your organic search traffic and conversions

• Continually review lead scoring and criteria to provide the most accurate score possible.

• Re-imagine content in different forms (blog posts and videos as an example)

• Be brutal about shutting down channels that aren’t performing

Best Practice – Marketing Automation

Why you need automation• Automation offer total management of

revenue performance• Automation establishes core standards

between sales and marketing• Automation allows for quick and

accurate profiling of consumers and their behavior

• Automation helps direct clients through the sales funnel

Questions…

Check out www.digital-marketing-university.com for more great content!

Email: thomasr@kentico.comTwitter: @trobbins