BLOG: Top 5 Tips for Building a Solid Content Marketing Plan

I moved into a content marketing role around six years ago after a decade as a PR practitioner, and while certain aspects of the two disciplines were very similar – story crafting, messaging, creativity, etc. – my eyes were fully opened to the commercial side of the business and how the various parts of an organisation fit together. Earlier this year I was asked to be one of 11 content marketing experts to participate to an eBook on ‘using the content lifecycle to maximize content ROI’. Below is a summary of my contribution, with some additional insight I have gathered recently.

1)      Pool your knowledge

The FinTech sales cycle can, easily take around 18 months and usually involves a plethora of decision makers that marketeers need to know all about in order to best target their content marketing campaigns. That requires serious teamwork and buy-in from all key stakeholders, not just the sales team who often are positioned as the only conduit to the client and therefore the main go-to for marketing. Professional services team members have invaluable on-the-ground insight into the daily dealings at client sites, while product management ideally has a macro-view of the industry and can point to future trends, so tapping into their knowledge is crucial when devising a content marketing plan.

2)      Do your research

It is rare that only one product or solution will need to be pushed to the market through the course of the year and so content marketing plans should be drawn up for each area of focus. Some plans will be more detailed than others to reflect the organisation’s priorities, but at the very least, they should cover information on market drivers, solution description, key messages, target market, buyers journey mapping, key competitors, challenges, localization plans, and a content calendar. This will take time but always pays dividends when it comes to managing workloads and budget effectively, and ultimately measuring effectiveness over the year.

3)      Plan well – but leave some room to wiggle

Budgeting requires you to have a clear idea of the goals you need to achieve in each campaign—goals that have been communicated to and accepted by stakeholders. This does not mean planning and budgeting for every detail of every content piece with no wiggle room over the year. Even the most robust plan and organized team will have unexpected opportunities that are too good to pass up over the year. That’s why it’s always important to have at least a 10 percent contingency built into the budget.

Another value of a strong content plan is that it helps you manage supplier costs. With a well-thought-out plan, many items can be budgeted for upfront, suppliers notified in advance about what work you have planned over the year, and packages negotiated accordingly, giving you a bigger bang for your buck.

It is also crucial to keep up to date with your existing suppliers’ new offerings, and to explore the marketplace for other suppliers who can help you execute new tactics. This kind of market scanning is particularly important for in-house marketing teams so they can keep abreast of the latest techniques and methods.

4)      Embrace the data

Making sure you’re hitting the right audiences with your content can be a challenge, especially when you are targeting multiple stakeholders who make decisions as a group. When you look back on this kind of win, it’s difficult to pinpoint the influence specific content pieces had on that sale. You’re not going to turn around to a salesperson after an 18-month-long sales process and tell her the real reason she got that deal was because of a video or white paper - unless you want to be laughed out of the sales meeting.

Marketing Technology (aka MarTech) can be your best friend here. Whether it’s CRM, marketing automation or content management systems, they can be crucial in making sure content is getting into the hands of key audiences. With CRM data for example, you can build up a picture of what is happened during a sales cycle. Retrospective analyses can reveal how many people in an organization engaged with which content pieces. When it turns out that 12 different people from the same firm have all clicked on multiple pieces of content, or if the person clicks on multiple pieces of content, you have a much stronger case to prove your campaign’s effectiveness.

If the content is not hitting the mark - messages are either not reaching their targets or they are simply not resonating, it’s essential that tweaks are made on the fly. This shouldn’t happen too much with campaigns that are well thought out at the planning stage, however, sometimes you must adjust, try different things, and then stay in constant communication with campaign stakeholders to ensure you remain on the right path.

5)      Stay curious

Another useful tool to help you dive deeper into campaign effectiveness was shared by Raconteur Media recently. They applied the well-known BCG Matrix to the business of content creation:

Figure 1 Content Creation Matrix from Raconteur Media

The general guidance with this is that you milk the cows to feed the stars. That is, dedicate around 70 per cent of your resources to creating more of your best performing content types, positioning them prominently in the customer journey and optimising the process as much as possible.

The remaining 30 per cent of resource budget should be set aside for experimentation. Depending on your appetite for risk, you might split this allocation further between moderate‐ and high‐risk activities.

Originally appeared on The Comms Crowd.