managing-content-marketing-smart-insights

Managing Content Marketing

Practical content and tools for effective content marketing

Contents

3 Introduction

5 Content marketing Technique 1: Audience Research

13 Technique 2: Establishing Communication Standards

18 Technique 3: Content Auditing

26 Technique 4: Defining an Information Architecture

36 Technique 5: Defining an Editorial Plan

53 Technique 6: Executing an Editorial Plan

56 Technique 7: Managing Outreach

Conclusion and Resources

Managing Content Marketing

Content 3 Communications 2 Audience 1 Audit Standards Research

plan: Editorial 6 plan: Editorial 5 information 4 Execute Schedule Architecture

Manage 7 Outreach

Introduction

This guide has been written to give practical advice for marketers who are implementing a content marketing strategy. It accompanies the Smart Insights Content Marketing Strategy guide.

As with other Smart Insights guides, you can use it as a checklist, with each section including its own mini checklists, tips and useful tools to help marketers avoid common pitfalls and ultimately execute a content marketing plan that helps grow an audience who are encouraged to convert.

Using this guide will show you a wide range of processes and tools to help shape your content marketing strategy. The sections of this guide are focused on practical approaches and tools which are tried and tested processes to assist content marketing.

This guide include these key content marketing management activities:

þþ 1. Audience Research – methods to find out more about your current audience, and your potential audience.

þþ 2. Establishing Content Standards – getting stakeholders to agree on a set brand essence, message architecture and the creation of an editorial style guide.

þþ 3. Content Auditing – using SEO auditing techniques, methods to make your qualitative and quantitative audits

þþ 4. Establishing Information Architecture – building consistent categories and tags to help shape your content.

þþ 5. Defining an Editorial Plan – structuring what kind of content you aim to publish, and who will do that.

þþ 6. Executing an Editorial Plan – how to regularly review your content marketing and effective tools for planning in the short term.

þþ 7. Managing Outreach – how to get your content to meet the right influencers and be shared.

When planning your content marketing strategy, it is recommended that you follow PR Smith’s (www.prsmith.org) SOSTAC® Planning System process of features which is recommended as a planning technique in many of Smart Insights guides:

rr Situation – where are we now? Assess your current content performance and resources.

rr Objectives – where do we want to be? Set yourself Specific, Measurable, Attainable,

Realistic and Time Based Objectives. A number of methods for setting objectives and measuring content marketing are set out in the first chapter ofContent Marketing Strategy: Seven Steps to Success, so are not covered again here.

rr Strategy – how do we get there? Think about the broad framework of how your objectives can be met.

rr Tactics – how exactly do we get there? Think about the more specific actions your need to take to match your strategy.

rr Action – what is our play? Work out who does what, and when they should do it.

rr Control – did we get there? Review your strategy regularly and look to continually optimise this process.

Managing Content Marketing

Content 3 Communications 2 Audience 1 Audit Standards Research

plan: Editorial 6 plan: Editorial 5 information 4 Execute Schedule Architecture

Manage 7 Outreach

About the Author

James Carson is founder of Carson Content, a London based Content Strategy consultancy that focuses on building commercial audiences for media companies and brands. Prior to creating his own company, he was Head of Digital Marketing at Bauer Media’s Lifestyle division, overseeing content strategy and digital audience development for major media brands such as FHM, Grazia and heat. He also previously held content roles at SEGA, Greenlight Digital Marketing and Holiday Extras.

The first technique we will cover is audience research.

Content 3 Communications 2 Audience 1 Audit Standards Research

plan: Editorial 6 plan: Editorial 5 information 4 Execute Schedule Architecture

Manage 7 Outreach

Content marketing

Technique 1

Audience Research

Effective content marketing is based around great understanding of your audience. Most companies have a broad understanding of their potential customer and their brand values, but this can lead them to overlook the detailed research needed for success in content marketing. Audience research is essential for later stages of the process, and is relevant for all section in this guide; without it, you run the risk of not being relevant to your audience.

What do you already know about your audience?

You should be able to find documents detailing brand values from the marketing department, or at least have a discussion with senior marketers within the company about what exactly these are. Beware though, if they are not already defined, then different people may say different things!

You may also be able to obtain demographic profiles of customers from sales figures and previous market research. Information around age, gender, location and earnings are all important in forming an overview of your potential audience.

This information isn’t available within all companies – particularly ones that are quite young. Even with it, it’s useful to consult other sources of information. Fortunately, if you’ve had a web presence for more than a couple of months, then your data points will be plentiful.

Review digital analytics

rr Q. Web analytics reviewed to understand popularity of different content types by users?

Your analytics package is a useful place to start to understand audience preferences.

Strategy Recommendation 1 Use your analytics system to understand audience preferences

Use your analytics system for your own site to start your review of audience preferences.

Attempt to draw out at least the following information:

þþ Traffic Sources – How are people arriving at your website? Is it largely through direct, search or referrals? Generally speaking, relatively...

þþ High direct and branded search traffic (over 40% combined) will indicate a high level of brand awareness.

þþ High search traffic will indicate effective search marketing which you will want to build on more through your content marketing.

þþ High referral traffic (above 40% as above) is most likely to mean a good proportion of traffic is coming from social media, although it is important to check exactly which sites are referring the traffic.

Managing Content Marketing

plan: Editorial 6 plan: Editorial 5 information 4 Execute Schedule Architecture

Manage 7 Outreach

þþ Location – Which countries are you website visits coming from? Can you sort them on a local level? Check to see if there are particular local traffic strongholds – do your brand, content or products appeal to people from a particular area?

þþ Content – What content is getting the most page views and highest average time on page? Are there any specific reasons for this? Top performing content grouped by the content drilldown in Google Analytics is often prominent within an Information Architecture (for example, highlighted in the navigation, so it is popular with users already on the site) or high on search engines (so it is clicked by users via particular keywords – a potentially new audience).

þþ Getting an overview of your content will help you when it comes to the Content Audit phase of this guide.

Best Practice Tip 1 Use the Content Drilldown and Advanced segment options in Google Analytics

Content Drilldown, which is described in our 7 Steps guide to using Google Analytics, is useful for content analysis since it groups content together based on the hierarchy in site, if the information architecture of the site is designed in this way. You can apply standard advanced segments of new and returning visitors to see which content is most popular with these different audiences.

þþ User Behaviour: Are their particular actions on you site or paths on your site where there are high/low levels of user engagement?

þþ Which goals have a good conversion rate?

þþ Is there any click tracking data that you can use, particularly with regards to the main navigation?

þþ Some metrics that might sound warning bells:

þþ Bounce rate over 70%

þþ Pageviews less than 2 per visit þþ Goals with few or no conversions

þþ Email Database: If you capture data for newsletter sign up or purchase, this can be a very useful insight who your current customers or audience are. Email databases can often be segmented by age, gender and location, so they can be a very useful tool.

Managing Content Marketing

plan: Editorial 6 plan: Editorial 5 information 4 Execute Schedule Architecture

Manage 7 Outreach

Social media analysis tools

rr Q. Social media tools reviewed to understand audience consumer preferences?

If you have a decent sized email database with clean data, you’ll be able to make some pretty solid conclusions about the demographics of your audience. If you want to get a fuller picture, or if your email database is small or has poor quality profile data, then social media analysis tools can help. In particular, two tools can give you useful demographic insights into your social followings:

rr Followerwonk – I recommend this tool throughout this guide, because it is so effective in helping marketers find influential people in their verticals, and since it allows you to analyse your own followers or who you follow. There is a range of metrics to check, including follower counts of followers, location and most active hours for followers.

Unless you are a verified account, Twitter does not have a built in analytics tool, but

Followerwonk is a very capable substitute.

rr Facebook Insights – Facebook Insights provides a range of information on your Facebook Likes, which can also be downloaded in more detail and is accessible via the Facebook Insights API. The tool gives you demographic data, including city and age (which is missing from Google Analytics) of Likes, as well as what content from your page that they’ve shared the most.

Social media responses

Your website, email and social analytics will tell you what your audience is doing and some information on who they are, but unless you want to deduce emotions from numbers and demographic data, it will tell you little in how users are feeling. Fortunately, there are plenty of ways to cheaply gauge audience attitude on your site and social media:

rr User Comments – If you have these switched on, you should be able to get a top level check on the type of person who would like to comment. Are they generally positive, negative or neutral? What else can you deduce from what they say?

rr Surveys or Questionnaires – Paid for tools like Polldaddy can be excellent for gauging user attitude through polls and surveys, but it requires a license and is best used with Wordpress. Google Forms offers a free embeddable solution that links to a spreadsheet.

rr Social Media Response – One of the beauties of a decent reach on social media is being able to ask your audience certain questions and gauge feedback rapidly. On Twitter you could do this via a particular hashtag, while you could use the poll functionality on Facebook.

Other ideas for finding key influencers

By going through the steps above, you would have found out a lot of information about your current audience, but it’s also important to find out who the most influential people in your vertical are. This will give you an insight into potential audience preferences, and who you may be able to curate content from in the future. There are a number of sources that you can take stock of influencers:

rr Amazon – Influential people often publish books, so a search for a particular subject on Amazon will often return books written by the most influential people.

rr Conference Line Ups – Use a search engine to find conferences in your sector – these

Managing Content Marketing

plan: Editorial 6 plan: Editorial 5 information 4 Execute Schedule Architecture

Manage 7 Outreach

could be business or consumer events. Most of the speakers will be very knowledgeable about their sector and have an interesting in sharing content.

rr Klout – Just by searching Klout, you can find out the top influencers on social media for a keyword quite quickly. However, there is no local filter on this.

rr Followerwonk – You can search Twitter bios by keyword and by location without any licence, and sort by a score called ‘Social Authority’ – with a range of helpful indicator metrics to build your list.

At this stage you’re not looking to create an outreach plan, that’s a later stage, but you should look to get a top level understanding of who the most important influencers are to your audience and company. A list of no more than twenty should suffice.

Keyword analysis

rr Q. Audience keyword searching approach and Target keywords defined?

Having run a thorough analysis of both user behaviour, demographics and key influencers on your website you can now think a bit more deeply about your potential audience, and matching your headlines and content against search demand.

Keyword analysis is the method of discovering relevant keywords from search engines and their relative search volumes. Essentially, this is a guide to how people search for content in your vertical and which terms you are targeting. It is covered in much more depth in the Smart Insights Guide to SEO.

Forming an Initial List

An initial list of keywords can be brainstormed from a combination of your own ideas and what keywords are already driving traffic to your website. To add to this list, the following tools are recommended:

rr Mergewords – allows you to merge keywords using up to three terms and create new combinations automatically.

rr Ubersuggest – this is an extended version of Google Suggest (the related terms that appear when you type into the Google search box). When you search for a keyword it will add a suffix for all letters in the alphabet and give you related terms.

rr Soovle – a search suggestion box that informs you of related search patterns from eleven key search sources as follows.

plan: Editorial 6 plan: Editorial 5 information 4 Execute Schedule Architecture

Manage 7 Outreach

A search for ‘Kate Middleton’ on Soovle brings back search suggestions from a range of search engines and sources.

An initial list doesn’t really need to be more than one hundred keywords long, because you can use Google Adwords’ Keyword Tool (view Smart Insights tutorial) to extend this. You will need to sign up for a Google Adwords account (free) for use of this tool.

To get further words, input your list into the Word or phrase box, check the [Exact] Match Type box and uncheck the Broad box.

plan: Editorial 6 plan: Editorial 5 information 4 Execute Schedule Architecture

Manage 7 Outreach

You can add variables such as location or device using Advanced Options and Filters. Once you are happy with your choices you can press the search button, and the tool will present you with a list of up to 800 Keyword ideas.

You can add extra columns of data into this list through using the Columns drop down, and then Download into a .csv file:

Sorting the Keyword List

When you have the list, you will need to manually check the keywords to ensure all you have download are still relevant. Simply scroll down the list and remove irrelevant rows. For instance, you might be focused on content to do with a particular personalities, but the Keyword ideas sheet may suggest related personalities that aren’t relevant to you.

Categorising the Keyword List

After weeding out irrelevant keywords, it will often be beneficial to group keywords into ‘word groups’ or content types so that you can get some structure into your planning.

Best practice tip. Categorise your keyword list

If you group keywords by customer behaviour you will gain a better understanding of content needs since you will understand the qualifiers they use. There can be a column for group within your spreadsheet.

For instance, you might see a lot of demand for ‘how to’ content within your vertical, or perhaps ‘video’ or another form of content.

plan: Editorial 6 plan: Editorial 5 information 4 Execute Schedule Architecture

Manage 7 Outreach