3 Tips to Up-Level Your Content Strategy

The word content marketing has been gaining a lot of notice over the last few years and rightfully so. Content is the lifeline in today’s social eco-system so it makes intellect. But content marketing means nothing without a approach. A content strategy enables and positions a product to tell a very consistent story across the media landscape. It helps draw parallels among what’s significant to customers and what the brand stands for. It enables marketing teams to make more relevant content based on what the brand is comfortable talking about and what it’s not comfortable talking about. It allows employees, partners and customer service to also contribute and be a part of the story too. Here are 3 things to think that will up-level your content tactic in 2013.

1. Move past the “content marketing” buzzword

Content marketing is more just SEO. It’s more than tweeting out a cool photo in real-time during the Super Bowl Halftime Show. It’s so much more than an info graphic that gets embedded on hundreds of blogs blessing your site with a huge number of back links. Content must be exciting, tell a story and aim to change consumer’s behavior, attitude or perception about your product. And, while search is definitely important, your brand’s story encompasses much more than what you write on your blog or website.

The whole thing you do in marketing, online and offline, must align with you brand name narrative. So, yes, blog content, videos, status updates, tweets, photos and even press releases are important. But so is the story you tell through your employees, customers, and partners as well as through your paid media initiatives. This is why you must expand your content strategy before you start marketing it.

2. Expand the content narrative

Your content narrative is dissimilar from your brand narrative. In most cases, the brand narrative cannot change consumer behavior when shared in its pure logic. People reject brand messages. Your content narrative translates the brand narrative in a way that relates to customers. It be supposed to consist of several inputs:

Brand Pillars/Positioning – this is the brand narrative.

What are the issues that are main to the brand? (Politics, sustainability)

Media perceptions of the brand – what do they say when they write about the brand?

Community perceptions of the brand – how does the community react to your current content?

Fan Interests – what are your fans concerned in when they aren’t talking with you?

Historical content performance – basic performance data on what type of content works and what types that don’t work.

Search Behavior – what consumers search for when looking for your product or similar products or services?

Customer Support Pain Points – what are the supports issues that are most relating to your customers?

The output of these ingredients will mold a content strategy that can scale and give birth to content that changes customer performance – whether it’s selling more products, re-positioning a company or helping customers change the way they recognize your brand.

3. Think like a media company

This is what Felix Alonso, publisher of Contempo tech blog has been saying for years now, probably since 2007 or so – that every company is a media company. And while I agree in concept, I also believe that marketers still fight back with it. So maybe every company isn’t a media company, yet. Perhaps it’s an unidentified opportunity that many marketers have yet to grasp. Perhaps saying that they need to develop into a media company is more correct. So the question is, how do you do it? In addition to delivering the content strategy, here are six other things to make this change:

Set up a centralized editorial team – the core team should consist of marketing, public relations, customer support, IT and product/brand teams. They will be answerable for delivering the content strategy across the organization.

Assign the roles and responsibilities of your contributors – contributors can comprise customers, partners and employees. If you work for a large, multinational organization you will have to assign regional editors who will be liable for approving/editing content submitted by the contributors.

Build content ideation, creation, approval and distribution workflows – controls ought to be established to ensure content is being shared outwardly at the right time, in the right channel and to the right clients.

Create a real-time listening station – also known as “social business command centers”, these should be used to not only react and engage with customers but also capitalize on “what’s trending” externally and then deciding if the brand has an opportunity to take advantage of on the news cycle.

Define your converged media – partner with the paid media team and work through various models that can take your whole content and amplify it through paid media (i.e. triggers that will take Facebook posts and turn them into promoted posts)

Invest in the right technology – there are several technology vendors that can make easy this evolution into a media company. For planning and ideation, Kapost, Compendium and contently have capabilities that do this well. For content creation, approval and distribution (i.e. governance) Sprinklr, Spredfast, Expion and Hootsuite Enterprise have built in workflows and agreement processes. And, lastly for real-time content optimization, Social Flow is one of the top vendors in this space.