“Begin with the end in mind.” This idea was made famous by Stephen Covey in his groundbreaking book The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. Developing an effective strategy in any endeavor should follow a similar path. The desired outcome is clearly identified, and then the strategy to arrive there can be developed. This holds equally true for anyone involved in creating and distributing marketing content.
What is content strategy?
The dictionary defines strategy as “a plan of action or policy designed to achieve a major or overall aim.” A content strategy, then, is a “plan of action” that is designed to utilize content to accomplish your marketing objectives. Let’s say, for example, that one of your marketing goals is to increase brand awareness. In order to achieve this goal, you might create a content strategy that includes SEO elements to improve outcomes on the search engine results page (SERP).
Whereas strategy is considered critical to business growth, it is often overlooked by most staffing firms when it comes to content creation and placement. Being deliberate about producing high-value content to meet business goals can help companies build trust with current audiences and even expand audience reach.
What goes into developing a content strategy?
In order to create a robust content strategy, a simple three-step process can help guide you. By following the “Three M’s,” you can build a world-class content plan. Here are the three M’s:
- Message: What will you say, and Who will you say it to?
- Method: When and Where will you distribute the message?
- Metrics: Why and How will you measure the results?
The Message
1. Who? To develop a compelling message (or messages), it is essential to understand your target audience. Who are they? Where do they spend their digital time? What are their primary interests? What are they motivated by? Finding out as much as you can about your audience will provide great insight into how to best communicate with them.
One of the best ways to gather this intelligence is simply asking your current staffing candidates, employees, and clients. In essence, develop an ideal customer persona that is representative of who you want to reach. Armed with this information, you can create a unique messaging strategy to reach your audience.
2. What? After you determine your audience, you must identify what problems you solve for them or what needs you meet. What is the competitive advantage you possess? Can you clearly and simply state your UVP (unique value proposition) so that the audience can understand it logically but at the same time react to it emotionally?
The Method
1. Where? You have a wide range of channels where you can distribute your message. Some channels include: “owned” properties, such as your website or company social pages; “earned” properties, including public relations as well as social media shares; and, finally, “paid” properties such as ad space you buy in digital outlets or social channels.
Within these channels, you can also implement a wide variety of executions. You can communicate your message via blogs, videos, white papers, emails, and many more. Some executions are better suited to specific channels, such as videos on social media. There are plenty of combination options to develop and maintain an effective and ongoing effort.
2. When? As if figuring out how to create compelling content and then using the proper channels to publish it isn’t daunting enough, it is also essential to build into your strategy how to manage content. How should it be paced for your audience to see and absorb? Who will create it? By establishing a content calendar, topics and targeted publishing dates can be set and managed to improve outcomes and assert yourself as a thought leader or influencer.
The Metrics
1. Why? Vince Lombardi, the famous Green Bay Packers football coach, once overheard someone saying that “winning isn’t everything. It’s how you play the game,” to which he quickly responded, “If winning isn’t everything, then why do they keep score?” It’s hard to argue with that logic.
In considering the outcomes of your content marketing strategy, it must first be determined why measuring content results is essential. Unlike financial accounting, where the numbers are always exact and quantitative, content marketing can be a little more challenging to measure. However, it is important to see progress (or lack thereof). Establish your current baseline, and then set goals for what you would like to achieve.
2. Where? Where will you see results? Here are some of the more critical metric areas:
- Traffic. This is a must. If no one is landing on your website or social media pages, it doesn’t matter how good your content is. If it isn’t being consumed, it isn’t producing results.
- Conversions. If visitors are landing on your website and reading your content, are they doing anything else? Are they reading or viewing other content? Are they signing up for your newsletter? Contacting you for more information? Define what a conversion means to you and track your progress.
- Engagement. It ultimately boils down to engagement and whether people are engaging with your content and to what degree. What are they viewing, and how much of it? How much time do they spend engaging with your content? The more time invested in engagement, the more valuable they are finding it to be.
- SEO performance. In addition to the traffic that finds your site through an ad or post, you should be receiving visitors from search engines. The primary metric here is your search engine results page, or SERP.
3. How? How exactly will you measure success? Here are five key areas to track and report regularly on:
- Website. Track figures such as how many visitors and unique visitors you get per month, how much time one user spends on your site, and how many pages they view. You can also dive deeper into inbound links, which tell you which sites visitors are coming from. Though your website activity can be influenced by factors other than content, a steady rise in site performance should accompany a long-term content strategy.
- Consumption. To determine if your audience is consuming your content, look at specific website pageviews (individual blogs, for example) and time spent on each page. You can also track how often your blogs were reposted or shared and keep a running list of your most popular topics and titles. This is a great way to identify follow-up or expanded content topics.
- Social Media. An easy way to assess your social media performance is to review follower counts regularly. This allows you to follow your social media audience growth trends over time. Engagement is vital, so look at comments and shares in addition to just views and likes. If people are interacting with and sharing your content, then you’re producing quality content.
- Email. Any email marketing program worth its salt will provide key data such as the email open rate (who viewed it), the click-through-rate (who clicked on at least one link in the email), the conversion rate (who took the desired action), and churn rates (how many people unsubscribed).
- Cost. Easily one of the most important aspects of the content marketing program is the cost. For staffing firms, the key drivers here are cost per application (total cost to applications), cost per candidate (total cost to those who received conditional job offers), and cost per placement (total cost to those placed on an assignment).
Conclusion
Developing a comprehensive content marketing strategy takes time, organization, and a great deal of creativity. Starting with the foundation of the content marketing plan, adding tools to more effectively manage your content, and setting up your strategy can become considerably less complicated if you follow the steps outlined here.