3 ways to overcome content marketing obstacles
Content marketing has generated enough consistent success to become a mainstream marketing activity.
A recent study of 1,000+ marketers shows that 74 percent have seen an increase in lead quality and quantity as a result of their content marketing efforts. Many organizations have embraced it, with more coming to the table daily. However, many companies lack a documented content marketing strategy, and many of those organizations’ marketers feel they’re just not doing it right.
Most know they should be driving customer acquisition with content, but an effective strategy can be elusive. Seventy-five percent of organizations are increasing their investment in content marketing. However, only 30 percent of B2B marketers rate their use of content as “effective” or “very effective,” according to the Content Marketing Institute, which defines effectiveness as “accomplishing your overall objectives.”
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Why the discrepancy?
Three content marketing frustrations seem to top the list whenever marketing teams are surveyed:
1. Insufficient resources: There never seems to be enough time, staff or money to create the required content.
2. Limited productivity: Fifty percent of marketers find it challenging to generate sufficient volume of high-quality content.
3. Lack of focus and strategic direction: Too many companies lack a documented content strategy. Although 83 percent of B2B marketers have a content strategy, almost half (48 percent) fail to document that strategy. A documented strategy increases focus, alignment and content’s ultimate impact.
Addressing the third item in this list—lack of focus and strategic direction—will help marketers be more effective with their content, including correcting the first two items. With a documented content strategy in place, marketing teams can accurately prioritize their resources and maximize content’s effectiveness.
Keys to a content marketing strategy
Forrester says that successful marketers create interest and relationships with customers by producing, curating and sharing content that addresses specific customer needs and delivers visible value. The components touched upon by Forrester are key parts of the content market lifecycle.
These components include:
Strategy: Personas, content audits, concepts, keyword selection and content campaigns/pyramids.
Production: Creation and curation, editorial calendar, content asset tagging and workflow.
Promotion: Publishing, advertising, promotion across earned and paid media channels (e.g., contributed content, Tweets) and sales enablement.
Analytics: Shares, page views, leads generated and influenced, sales opportunities generated and influenced, revenue influenced and productivity metrics (e.g., content performance by writer, content volume).
How to develop and execute your content marketing strategy
Organizations typically have two main problems when it comes to content production: creating too much of it and being unable to create enough of it.
The trick to solving both problems is to focus on what content you and your organization ought to create, and then to create as many iterations of your best content as possible. This ensures the best use of your resources—such as product marketing teams and designers for content creation—and it delivers greater content ROI because the content created (and reused) is higher quality and more relevant.
The content marketing pyramid
One framework proven to be successful in addressing these challenges is the content marketing pyramid. This documented, strategic framework enables execution of a content campaign, assuring optimal content consumption, reuse and reach.
Each pyramid represents a content campaign—a group of assets intended to accomplish a specific set of objectives to support overarching marketing and corporate goals.
A pyramid begins with content creation from primary research (e.g., surveys or interviews), secondary research and/or innovation. This “heavy” piece of content—which is typically gated for lead generation—is then atomized into bite-size pieces.
The pyramid process is best explained in an example.
Curata sought to establish its expertise in content marketing metrics, so the marketing team collaborated with product management to create an e-book on the topic. This gated asset serves as the “intellectual property” for all content related to this pyramid.
The pyramid was then built out by creating derivative content: webinar presentations, long form and short form blog posts, infographics, SlideShare presentations, social media content and curated content related to metrics.
As we move down the pyramid, content becomes more “bite-size” and easier to absorb. This content is also intended to be used across owned, earned and paid media; thereby using different types of promotional channels. Some content components are created with a specific segment or set of accounts in mind to support an account-based marketing strategy.
The result? Across all assets in the content marketing metrics pyramid, there have been over 16,000 social media shares, 40,000+ page views and more than 3,800 leads.
Big rock, little rock framework
Jason Miller, author of “Welcome to the Funnel: Proven Tactics to Turn Your Social Media and Content Marketing up to 11,” similarly suggests building a strategy around a significant asset—what he calls “big rock” content (similar to the top part of the content marketing pyramid). He suggests that the asset be valuable and relevant to your prospects.
To create a big rock asset of true value, Miller writes, “I recommend starting simple by answering the biggest question your prospects are asking.” Miller then suggests breaking this big rock into little rocks—just like atomizing the top of a pyramid into smaller content assets. Doing so is a super way to increase your content’ss utility and promotion across different channels.
Turkey and turkey parts framework
Another method is the turkey and turkey parts framework, an analogy made popular by analyst Rebecca Lieb in a Marketo blog post. Your content campaign should begin with the turkey—a large asset such as a white paper or e-book that serves as the main course for your audience.
This turkey can be cut into smaller parts that are more digestible for your audience, such as blog posts or infographics. Other parts of the turkey meal can support your content campaign, such as gravy (curated content) and cranberry sauce (social media content).
The following infographic—taken from a Thanksgiving post—provides several parts of a turkey meal to build a content strategy.
Experimentation is also important to a content strategy, in discovering effective approaches for reaching prospects and building trust and relevance. Try reserving some portion—possibly as much as 20 percent of your content marketing activity—for approaches that aren’t driven by a formal, structured framework.
Without an effective strategy, the content you and your team create has a short shelf life and gets repeated and underused; meanwhile, your budget gets depleted, and you fail to improve the company’s bottom line.
Using a documented framework for developing and executing your content strategy—such as the content marketing pyramid, big/little rocks or turkey/parts—provides a cohesive and comprehensive method to execute an effective strategy.
It ensures that each piece of content performs multiple roles across a variety of formats and channels, and it creates the kind of customer experience that develops a productive pipeline of sales leads and conversions.
Pawan Deshpande is the founder and chief executive of Curata.
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