Maximise Your Content Marketing Investment

Yes­ter­day I par­tic­i­pat­ed in a webi­nar on max­imis­ing your con­tent mar­ket­ing invest­ment with Lewis PR. Giv­en that 88% of UK mar­keters use con­tent mar­ket­ing* and its promi­nent posi­tion in our own mar­ket­ing efforts I was pleased to give my thoughts. If you didn’t man­age to watch the webi­nar, then I’ll begin with my key takeaway:

Make sure your con­tent mar­ket­ing objec­tives align with your over­all busi­ness strategy.

A con­tent strat­e­gy that does not tie back into your busi­ness is wast­ing your time (and mon­ey!). Are you devel­op­ing con­tent to raise brand aware­ness, increase engage­ment with your tar­get audi­ence, increase con­ver­sion, enhance SEO, gen­er­ate sales leads or to become a thought leader? If you do not have these ques­tions front of mind when devis­ing your con­tent mar­ket­ing strat­e­gy then you won’t have the focus of direc­tion to be successful.

Con­tent mar­ket­ing at Adobe: CMO.com

One of the big chal­lenges that we were faced with at Adobe sev­er­al years ago was that every­one knew Adobe for the Cre­ative side of the busi­ness but there was much less famil­iar­i­ty with the Mar­ket­ing side. We launched CMO.com with the pri­ma­ry goal of improv­ing Adobe Brand Lead­er­ship Posi­tion in Dig­i­tal Marketing.

We want­ed to cre­ate a pre­mier des­ti­na­tion for dig­i­tal mar­ket­ing insights, exper­tise & con­ver­sa­tion. Become a must-vis­it resource for “help & how to” guid­ance in going dig­i­tal. Instill a pref­er­ence for Adobe – for both our prod­ucts and POV. Estab­lish CMO.com as a best prac­tice for con­tent mar­ket­ing and show­case of Adobe technology.

Right from the very begin­ning, we were very clear that this was not about ‘sell­ing’ but rather about pro­vid­ing inspi­ra­tional con­tent as well as help and advice for senior mar­keters. This clar­i­ty of pur­pose helps enor­mous­ly when think­ing about the tone of voice, how fre­quent­ly you will pub­lish con­tent, con­tent for­mats and chan­nels, the in-house experts you have to use as con­tent con­trib­u­tors and the key met­rics you will mea­sure against.

Tai­lor your con­tent to your tar­get audience

To help inform your con­tent strat­e­gy, think about your tar­get audi­ence; map your buy­er per­sonas and cus­tomer jour­ney. Think about demo­graph­ics, buy­er behav­iour, habits, inter­ests, and so on, and how you want them to inter­act and engage with your con­tent. In order to become more rel­e­vant to our Euro­pean audi­ence, we intro­duced CMO Europe, a Euro­pean edi­tion of the site fea­tur­ing news from across Europe.

There is no escap­ing the fact that man­ag­ing the con­tent is real­ly chal­leng­ing. It’s imper­a­tive that the site remains dynam­ic with fresh, inter­est­ing con­tent. You will need to decide if it’s more cost effec­tive for you to man­age the con­tent mar­ket­ing in-house – in which case who will lead on this? — or out­source the day-to-day con­tent pro­duc­tion and optimisation.

When we start­ed out with CMO.com it was much dif­fer­ent than today and it was an entire­ly curat­ed site. There was no orig­i­nal con­tent except maybe an occa­sion­al blog or two that our edi­tor would write, but it was pure­ly curat­ed con­tent from most­ly the main media sites; sites like Medi­a­Post and AdAge and we did that for quite some time just to get off the ground. And then slow­ly, we began to sort of morph into a con­tent cre­ator as well as a con­tent curator.

We hired for­mer jour­nal­ists to write con­tent for CMO.com who had the expe­ri­ence to fil­ter out the right sort of con­tent for the audi­ence. Even with some in-house resources, unless you have the bud­get to recruit an army of writ­ers, you will need to find alter­na­tive sources for content.

Com­mu­ni­ty

This is where your com­mu­ni­ty comes in! There tends to be indi­vid­u­als who are will­ing to con­tribute con­tent. The more we have estab­lished our cred­i­bil­i­ty and rep­u­ta­tion, the more demand we have found for peo­ple to con­tribute their con­tent. CMO.com has become a plat­form for smart marketers.

Your con­tent strat­e­gy should also be informed by com­peti­tor research. How can you deliv­er some­thing dif­fer­ent to your com­peti­tors? How fre­quent­ly are they pro­duc­ing con­tent and which chan­nels are they using? One of our key objec­tives was to build close rela­tion­ships with the Chief Mar­ket­ing Offi­cer. Just because we owned the site CMO.com, it didn’t mean CMO’s would auto­mat­i­cal­ly flock to the site! What we did rec­og­nize was that CMO’s were inter­est­ed in con­nect­ing when you asked them to talk about them­selves! So, a reg­u­lar fea­ture has been the CMO.com Inter­view which involves sit­ting down with a Senior Mar­ket­ing Exec­u­tive and inter­view­ing them on a rel­e­vant sub­ject. We have inter­viewed hun­dreds of CMO’s and Senior Mar­ket­ing Exec­u­tives and these con­tent pieces have proven incred­i­bly valu­able in sup­port­ing our over­all busi­ness objec­tives. The Sales team cer­tain­ly get inter­est­ed when they see that we have inter­viewed the CMO from one of their cus­tomers or poten­tial customers!

Don’t stand still

One last point to make here is that you should be reg­u­lar­ly review­ing and updat­ing your con­tent strat­e­gy in line with key trends and devel­op­ments, to ensure you are max­imis­ing your investment.

* Con­tent Mar­ket­ing in the Unit­ed King­dom: 2014 Bench­marks, Bud­gets, and Trends, Con­tent Mar­ket­ing Institute