Contributors
@brandon-leuangpaseuth @derek-gleason-3
Business Benefits
Position your company as the industry leader and create demand for your products and services.
Write down your business and marketing goals, then translate them into SMART goals for content marketing.
Use the results from the previous year to guide you when setting targets. Then create specific, measurable, achievable, and relevant content marketing goals.
Use your ideal customer profile (ICP) data to identify decision makers, decision influencers, and end users by service/product category.
Use job titles, company type and size, industry, pain points, daily challenges, reasons to buy, barriers, and sources of information to categorize your ICPs. Ask sales and marketing teams to supplement information, if necessary.
Write down the problems you’re solving for each of your customer profiles.
Add details on how they find you and what convinces them to close the deal. Include input from your sales team, as well as information from your CRM or customer support tickets.
Write down your positioning and differentiators and the advantages you offer compared to competitors.
Create a spreadsheet with the keywords that describe your services or products and sub-topics belonging to each.
Ask others in your company, like sales staff, customer service staff, and marketers, to brainstorm topics for this list. Perform keyword research using a tool like Google’s Keyword Planner, Clearscope, or Keywordtool.io. Use AnswerThePublic and Google’s suggested topics to extract the most frequent questions for each of your keywords.
Map the buyer’s journey using the Awareness, Consideration, and Conversion model.
For each step of the journey, write down the touchpoints per persona, the types of content you’ll need to create for the online touchpoints, and the search queries you’ll target at each point.
Define the content types for your funnels, focusing each funnel on a single pain point and persona.
- Awareness: create news pages focusing on your company’s differentiators, company stories, thought leadership and opinion articles, trends articles. Use CTAs for content conversions.
- Consideration: create client case studies and success stories, process detailing pages, and comparison articles. Use CTAs to encourage content conversions, such as newsletter subscriptions, and product/service conversions, such as sales calls or demos.
- Conversion: create product demo pages, contact pages, service pages, industry pages, pricing pages, quote request pages, white papers, industry reports, and e-books.
Create a list of at least 10 sites and influencers with whom you’d like to develop partnerships.
For blogs and magazines, pitch topics for guest posts on their websites. For influencers, pitch topics about their stories/industry knowledge for articles posted to your website. Ask them to share the articles in their networks once published. Repeat the process for subsequent groups of potential partners.
Determine what will happen after users interact with each page in your funnel.
Are they enrolled in a lead nurturing email campaign? Are they retargeted? Use this information to define marketing automation flows.
Begin content creation and distribution with consideration and conversion topics.
- Distribute bottom-of-funnel content through promoted posts/paid social media campaigns for quick wins/faster experimentation
- Distribute middle-of-funnel content through partnerships and organic posts in social media and industry-focused communities.
- Distribute top-of-funnel content in your owned channels website, blog, organic social media posts, newsletter. Prioritize keywords with commercial intent.
Last edited by @hesh_fekry 2023-11-14T12:30:30Z