Content Marketing “Campaign” Process Overview
While inbound marketing is more of a philosophy that is not defined by individual campaigns, there can be a more defined content marketing “campaign” process within that inbound mentality. Whether you are a business to business company or a direct to consumer company, you need to start getting familiar with content marketing if you want to achieve any success in the digital world.
Below is a very high level overview of our 11 step content marketing campaign process when we are helping clients build an audience and connect with potential customers.
1. Choose A Product Or Service
First things first when planning out your content marketing campaign, and that starts with choosing the product or service that you want to promote. This gives us the topics that we’ll be creating content around and seed words to do some keyword research with.
2. Choose A Buyer Persona
Now that you have your product chosen, it’s time to choose who you want to attract as a customer. Buyer personas help you define your ideal customer so that you can tell your stories and position your brand specifically for them. When writing for this particular person, you’re able to better attract and connect with exactly who you want as a customer.
It’s been said that the most important part of marketing (of any kind) is getting on the same frequency as your buyer, and the way to do that is by creating buyer personas to create content for.
3. Define Your Value & Stories
With you buyer persona in mind, you can now tell them the exact value that is most important to them that you are able to provide. If you are trying to write for everyone, there’s no way you’d be able to clearly communicate your product’s value in a simple and concise statement.
With this statement, your value proposition, you can now create stories and scenarios to put your product in with your customer persona. This type of approach will have your content start landing in the path of your ideal customer’s decision making path.
4. List Questions Buyers Have Around This Topic
With your product, customer, and value proposition laid out, it’s time to get into the mind of your buyer persona. Think about all of the questions they have from the beginning to end of their buying process.
How do they discover they have a problem? What things come to mind for them? Do they immediately know the solution or do they have to do some deeper research on the problem itself?
What are the popular solutions for this problem? Once they understand the solutions, what are the next questions they have?
When a prospect is ready to make a purchase, what makes them take out their wallet? What factors are most important to them right now? How can you deliver those benefits? What separates you from your competition?
Creating this list of questions makes for plenty of articles, guides, ebooks, and social media content to create and promote. Using
5. Build A List Of Words & Phrases
With the list of questions that you have from your buyer persona, turn them into a list of words and phrases that can be used for keyword research. Planning the correct phrases that are actually being searched for on Google and finding the ones that have weaker competition make all the difference when getting your website’s pages found through search engines.
6. Analyze & Filter Out List Of Keywords
Based on the criteria you set for a “good keyword to target”, analyze and filter out this list that you’ve built. There are several SEO tools to use and criteria that can be set based on your own company’s authority, budget, and goals. We have our own very in-depth keyword research process with a proprietary set of criteria to make sure we are using the most optimal words to target with our content.
7. Create Content Based On This Research
With all of this information now gathered for your foundation, it’s time to start actually creating your content. There are several types of content that you’ll create on your website, on other websites, and for social media for your content marketing campaign.
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Main page targeting your short tail keyword
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Blog posts that link to main page and interlink to each other
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Guest posts that link to main page
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Guest posts that link to other blog posts
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Social posts that link to main page
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Social posts that link to blog posts
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Social ads that link to main page
8. Promote Your Content
Once you publish your new content, it’s time to promote it around the web. Getting your pages ranking high on Google can take some time, so being pro-active with your content marketing approach can drive faster ROI. A few ways to promote your new content:
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Social media posts
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Social media paid promotions
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Start/join discussions in targeted online communities and link to posts
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Email your list (segment your list by personas so that you can speak more directly to the exact person who is interested in your content)
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Individually email old prospects that never closed, this gives you an opportunity to provide them some valuable information and reactivate your conversation in a non-salesy way that will turn them off
9. Measure Your Content Marketing Campaign
How are you going to know if any of this was worth it? You need to be tracking your web presence. This includes your website and social media channels as well as your email marketing. Make sure you are tracking individuals throughout their journey on your website to see how they are interacting with your content and who is completing your desired actions.
10. Make Adjustments
Based on your data, you can make informed adjustments for improving results. Knowing who is doing what, where, will give you insight to what people are interested in, what makes them leave, and what makes them convert into paying customers. Because of the access that marketers have to data now, you should continuously be testing, adjusting, and improving your conversion rates.
11. Wash, Rinse, Repeat
Once you’ve completed your planned content marketing campaign, it’s time to review all of your actions, statistics, and goal completions to make notes for future strategy development (also because this content will exist forever, you can continuously go back and make necessary improvements to this campaign).
How Do You Plan Your Content Marketing Campaigns?
What would you add or remove from this list of our content marketing campaign planning process? Leave your thoughts and questions in the comments below!
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Content Marketing “Campaign” Process Overview
