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2. A Fashion E-Commerce Website

Most of the content on an e-commerce website is likely to be on product pages, and therefore stock. More fashion sites are beginning to publish lifestyle flow content, particularly around celebrity style and music. Some, such as ASOS, are allowing users to curate their own looks and upload styles.

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3. A B2B Marketing Website

Websites such as Smart Insights normally offer a blend of stock guides with some industry news flow. Occasionally, this is curated from elsewhere.

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Defining Content Types

Once you’ve established the balance of stock and flow, and potential opportunities to experiment, you should consider which ‘content types’ can be included in your planning. You will want to go another level from ‘stock’ or ‘flow’ to define this. For instance:

rr Is your flow content largely news updates, or could it be another content type, such as microblogs or tweets?

rr Is your stock content how to guides or product pages?

rr What mediums will you produce in - such as text, video or photography?

For a comprehensive range of content types, take a look at Smart Insight’s Content Marketing Matrix infographic.

The 70 / 20 / 10 Content Planning Model

rr Q. Are we testing innovative methods of content?

Many content strategies play it rather safe using similar content to competitors in their sector.

Even with a combination of stock, flow and curation, people often don’t want to take risks with their marketing, thus the tone of the content stays the same and seldom changes from a sometimes impartial branded voice.

Instead of one dimensional planning, a 70/20/10 approach content planning can help innovation in content. The concept ‘borrows’ from Google’s model for innovation:

þþ 70% of workers time should be focused on the core business. þþ 20% should innovate off what works.

þþ 10% should be dedicated to projects unrelated to the core business.

Applied to content planning this means:

þþ 70% of the content should be low risk, bread and butter marketing. þþ 20% should innovate off what works.

þþ 10% should be high risk ideas that will be tomorrow’s 70% or 20%.

There’s a very good explanation of the process on Neil Perkin’s blog.13 It’s important to use because with the web, you never really know how audiences are going to react, or where a new audience may come from. Things move rather too quickly.

Stick to the safe stuff, you’ll grow slowly and gain much more of the same. Add something a little different every once in a while, and you might find jolts of better reach and engagement from an entirely new yet valuable audience set, who in turn may bookmark you and return.

Team Planning

rr Q. Are the right resources in place for content creation and editing?

Many content jobs are the domain of trained Journalists and Copywriters, but this doesn’t always add up. On the web, many of the best examples of engaging content, and certainly the most sharable, are visual in nature, and often application based. Thus creating content

13  Neil Perkin, ‘The 70, 20, 10 Model’, Only Dead Fish: http://neilperkin.typepad.com/only_dead_fish/2012/02/ the-70-20-10-model.html.

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teams full of writers can be a misnomer.

If you have a large site, with hundreds (or perhaps thousands) of product pages that need writing, then hiring Copywriters to get the job done makes good sense. But if you’re also looking to create a good blog, regular email newsletters and possibly applications that integrate with social networks, then you’re going to need some Designer / Development resource as well.

If things are going to be promoted well, then a Community / Outreach Manager would be useful. Finally, to measure everything properly, getting an Analyst to review and report on the strategy is essential.

A content marketing team model

The operations of content strategy therefore rely on five fundamentals to be effective. This is explained in The Content Marketing Team Model below.

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In this model, the size of the ‘block’ visualizes the investment in each department. Thus in the model above, analytics has the lowest investment and content the highest (something common within publishers for instance).

The arrows represent relationships and dependencies between departments. Analytics effects everything, but if we take content as an example, it is reliant on design and development, while outreach relies on content to be effective.

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Practicalities of the Content Marketing Team Model

Content Marketing relies on five different departments to thrive – and only one of them is content! This may give the impression that to do well, content marketing is expensive and resource heavy. It’s possible to do things on a shoe string, but finding the most effective people without the right remuneration can take a very long time, and is often down to luck – you can’t simply expect a content marketing strategy to be cheap and easy because you’re not paying for media. Getting a strategy properly lined up and working effectively will come at a cost.

However, it may not be necessary to invest in even one full person for each department. But it is important that the strategy has access to at least some resource from each department within an organisation.

For instance consider these scenarios:

rr If you never get any reports or information on performance, how could you know that the strategy is being effective?

rr If your Content Management System is unusable, then content creators may struggle to be time efficient.

rr If your design is outdated, then your user might not engage with the content.

rr If no one is assigned overall responsibility for content, how will it be governed, edited and published?

rr If you content isn’t promoted on social media, then it will get shared less.

All of these scenarios point to the reliance that effective content marketing has on other departments. But they do not mean a full time employee is required to see to each element.

Thus a content marketing strategy does not demand a budget of £100,000+ to hire five dedicated professionals. But resource from an organisation should be expected to contribute to the strategy for it to be effective.

Who Do You Really Need?

Bearing all of this in mind, it’s worth considering what you really need to drive a content strategy:

þþ The linchpin of the process is the Content Strategist – as they are the one that plans, commissions and possibly creates assets. In some cases, this person might be multidisciplined – they might be able to oversee elements of design, interpret analytics meaningfully and even write their own code. However, people with such broad experience are rare.

þþ The Analyst is there to measure elements of the Content Strategy. They may monitor website traffic, social media performance and metrics related to SEO, such as number of inbound links built. Crucially, they will be able to explain which elements of the strategy are having the best effects.

þþ Developers can contribute through the creation of front end experiences, or through the enhancement of the backend to enhance editorial workflow. They may also be involved with other team members to create specific applications – for instance an onsite calculator or a Facebook app.

þþ Designers will typically be involved with designing or retouching visuals. For instance, they may collaborate with the Content Strategist to create infographics, or take photos to compliment written content. They may also collaborate with a Developer to make enhancements to front end User Experience (UX) design.

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þþ Finally a Community or Outreach Manager will deal with content distribution via social media or with other websites. They may be part of wider marketing teams or inhouse PR teams.

As mentioned, not all content strategies need a specific full time person to fill these specific activities. On occasion, the Content Strategist role may have responsibilities divvied between the marketing department, while a ‘virtual team’ can contribute from the wider business.

However, the better they are covered, and the more efficiently the team collaborates, the higher the chance of the strategy being a success.

Workflow Production Planning

rr Q. Is there a solid content workflow process in place?

Through the team planning process, you should have located the contributors from around your business to implement a content strategy, or made the appropriate hires.

At this stage, you will need to consider your team’s workflow, particularly with regard to your desired content mix. Do the people you have match that desired mix, particularly with regard to these three questions?

þþ Format – what are the content team’s key strengths and how can you play to these?

þþ Community – how big is the community surrounding your website and how can you tap into this?

þþ Capacity – how much content can the team produce/edit?

Format

In the early days, a pure flow content strategy can be difficult to get right. In most industries, there will be a news source, and standing out from this noise to grow traffic will be difficult with limited resources. News is most effective when it is exclusive, and you have the staff to allow you to react to it fast – without this, focusing on stock content maybe wiser.

However, it still might turn out that your editors are rather more comfortable with flow vs. stock – they have an eye for a story and have a rapid output. Of course, it might be that they have specialist knowledge, and could write extensive stock guides on a topic. If you’re an e-commerce website, then stock product descriptions and titling become rather more important.

Multimedia

Beyond writing, multimedia is the key to enriching the visuals on your content. The most important thing to consider here is does your team have the right skills to produce multimedia? If so, then do they have the right tools? Of course, it is fairly common to

outsource elements of strategy like video production, or license images from photography archives.

When it comes to outsourcing, this will often come at a cost higher than what you would pay for full time staff. However, producing good multimedia, such as infographics takes a long time. Speaking to Danny Ashton, of infographic studio NeoMammalian Studios, he explained that the end to end production process, including idea generation, research and design, typically takes about 35-40 hours of time, with contributions from different staff members. The crucial thing to consider is whether or not you can afford in-house staff to be given the luxury of uninterrupted concentration.

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With licensing, perhaps the most important thing to be aware of is the re-use of stock photography. Not all of it is bad, but it does run the risk of making your content rather generic. With the right apps, smartphones can be fairly powerful photographic devices – and getting your staff to photograph their own scenarios for content can be very rewarding. For a list of photographic apps, see the appendix of content marketing tools.

Community

Some editors are also very well connected in social media circles (particularly in popular verticals like fashion and music) so you might want to use this to your advantage. Additionally, the potential of reaching out to a wider community needs to be assessed, even if your editor isn’t well connected already.

For instance, if you are in a lifestyle vertical, you will normally find a significant goldmine of hobbyist bloggers. This is particularly true of verticals like fashion and music, where many large media publications are giving bloggers a voice on their own sites.

Of course, it’s significantly more difficult in B2B sectors where people don’t view their job as a hobby. You’re probably not going to find many accountants writing about their work on tumblr, but it’s possible that you will find other websites and possibly blogs to team up with.

Capacity

A content editor / copywriter, when they know their subject well, should be able to write approximately 2,000 words and source the correct media in a normal 9-5 shift.

However, issues with this basic workflow can occur when a content editor is asked to write multiple articles on a variety of topics, some of which they will know better than others, or needs to attend press days or create media. Having been one myself, it is also possible that your content editor may have long periods of procrastination and working patterns that don’t blend well with a 9-5 shift. All of this can take its toll on overambitious planning, and it is important to get the correct cover.

Periods set aside for research, idea generation and planning can often be overlooked, but they are nonetheless important – particularly when you need to sustain a content strategy over the long term. Very often, this is done interspersed with writing assignments. The problem here is that facts used often rely on the most obviously available source – Wikipedia.

Again, this can lead to problems of having generic content. It’s recommended that content producers allot 0.5 - 1 days of their time per week for research, idea generation and planning. This gives them ample time to check the best and most detailed sources, take the necessary time to have ideas and plan the best time for publication. This is best done in chunks of no less than four hours – so you could either do it in two half days, or one full day per week.

An example of content production - A Fashion Publishing Website

A fashion website was set up in the last six months. So far, it drives 10,000 visits a month with pageviews of 25,000. It currently employs two people and publishes six 500 word news items a day:

rr Sandy is an English graduate with no previous experience.

rr Jamie is a History graduate with three years’ experience fashion blogging and one year’s writing for the fashion section of a national newspaper website.

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With this structure in mind, it would seem natural for Jamie to mentor Sandy. Meanwhile, Jamie has more experience of the industry and so would probably better suit writing stock guides and focusing more on outreach due to her blogging experience.

rr New items can suit being trimmed to a leaner 250 - 300 words, so we can estimate that Sandy would be able to write about 6-8 of these per day.

rr To add to this, Jamie would contribute 2 short news stories daily, but then also focus on 4 larger features a week, each of about 1,000 words. 1-2 of these features would be ‘community curated’ and she would see to the necessary outreach.

Within this, structure, it’s recommended that both writers spend at least 0.5 days a week on research, with Jamie having the option to take a further 0.5 days.

Thus the content output would be estimated at: rr Flow – 35-42 news stories a week.

rr Stock – 2 features a week. rr Community – 2 per week.

Thus the daily output would be in the region of 40-45 items a week – an increase from their current 30. With this in mind, you’d expect it to grow its audience quite quickly.

Cross-channel planning for Content Marketing

Since the rise of social media, the models of distributing content have become much more fragmented. There are now six social networks with a regular UK audience of over 1m users a month, and three of those have over 10m users. This fragmentation of online audience attention has led some to question the value of a ‘destination website’ – that is a site where people specifically go just to engage with content. However, you would have planned the creation of a content marketing hub in Chapter 4, with an objective of driving traffic towards your content there – but how do you do this with such a range of platforms to syndicate your content?

Apps, Mobile Sites and Desktop

One of the first challenges content marketers face in channel planning comes from the growth of smart phone usage as the preferred method to reach destination websites. Since more and more users are arriving from mobile devices, it now seems essential to create experiences that are mobile friendly.

The best counter to this challenge is responsive design. For a long time it was preferable to either build a mobile site or a bespoke application, but advances in CSS media queries have enabled experiences that can adapt to different browser sizes without the need to create entirely different style sheets or applications. This is a more cost effective method for building websites that adapt to smart phone browsers, tablets and different sizes of desktop monitors. Added to this is that Google has openly stated that it prefers responsive design for search indexation.

Bespoke mobile applications can offer more engaging experiences than desktop browsers, but the improvement in HTML5 and CSS3 is leading to a far more responsive and interactive user experiences. In short, it won’t be long before desktop websites, mobile applications and mobile sites are matched in terms of technology and interactivity. Thus there won’t be much of a debate around building separate applications – they will all be one of the same thing.

The main thing in this mix of screen sizes, is that you create a content plan that starts with

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small screens in mind and works up. Consider that if you have a large following on a social network that the majority of users will be using that social network on a mobile. Thus the majority of traffic likely to be driven from that website will come from mobile. Granted, right now the most advanced HTML5 and CSS3 tricks won’t work on all browsers, so it’s worth considering that doing technologically demanding projects might not work on mobile.

Managing social network presence

As already mentioned, another challenge for marketers is being able to successfully manage the number of social networks at their disposal, along with being able to manage their own websites and email marketing.

Strategy Recommendation 3 Keep your social distribution focused

Too much content or social media ‘strategy’ advice leaps upon the latest social network that tips, based on assumptions that ‘everyone is one there’. Working in this manner can often fragment marketer’s attention from where it’s really needed. In attempting to align with the latest craze (usually driven by an overzealous tech press), marketers lose the focus on where they already have the greatest levels of engagement.

The best ways to avoid this ‘fragmentation’ problem is to consider who you want to reach on each platform and what you want from each of them – don’t jump onto it without this definition.

Audience Reach and Targeting

Facebook has by far the largest audience reach for any social network in the UK, so if you’re a consumer facing business, then being on there would almost certainly be recommended.

However, if you’re a B2B company, a network liked Twitter or LinkedIn will likely give you a smaller but more finely targeted reach.

Generally, it’s recommended that you use a mixture of social networks if you’re looking to distribute content. Having a presence on Facebook and Twitter is generally recommended, but expanding beyond these stalwarts really depends on what specific function you want to get from each network.

Specific Platform Functions

Given you’re likely to get the highest reach from Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, why should you bother with any of the other social networks? It is notable that each social network normally has a particular strength, and you may want to leverage this strength if your brand suits it. Here are some key strengths of each of the social networks in the UK with a monthly audience of more than 10m:

þþ Google+ - while a versatile platform similar to Facebook, Google+ is popular with a tech crowd, particularly for its video hangout function.

þþ Tumblr - most popular in fashion and music circles, tumblr offers a slimmed down blogging platform that enables easy sharing. It could be defined as an online scrapbook.

þþ Instagram – allows users to filter and place effects on photos. Rather than it being about reach, it can be used to enhance imagery used in a content strategy.

þþ Pinterest – best for curating collections of images. This may be because you want to source images from around the web, and Pinterest allows good systems for doing so.

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Take a look at the Platform Function Diagram that we introduced earlier in this guide. It shows how YouTube and Instagram are used as content production platforms that push to all other platforms, which syndicate the content. The content marketing hub (destination website) acts as both syndicator of content (from the production platforms) and a producer in its own right (from its content feeds such as blog and product pages). In turn, this content is syndicated onto platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest to gain a greater reach.

There is more detail on social network management and each of the core social networks in the series of guides you can find on our social media marketing hub-page.

Managing content production through an Editorial Calendar

rr Q. Operational content calendar in place?

Having considered what your content mix might look like, who you are going to get to execute your strategy and which platforms you will use to produce and syndicate content, you will be in a good position to create an Editorial Calendar. This is a central document that informs teams of what should be published, when it should go live, and how it should be promoted.

The need for an editorial calendar should be clear, but if you need to convince others, emphasise that these are the benefits of using an editorial calendar:

þþ Provide consistency and quality in your content – content quality is key to making your brand engaging

þþ Align the team – Anyone involved in the research / creation / publishing / responding area of content marketing

þþ Give a framework and process to plan and manage the creation of content – structure means control and less of a last-minute approach

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þþ Enforces accountability – specifies who does what and when

Maintenance of an Editorial Calendar is best done on a collaborative document like Google Docs Spreadsheets, although it is also possible to do via Excel (the example we provide

is in .xls format, but this can be copy and pasted to Google Docs. You can download that document by following the link below:

Smart Insights Editorial calendar spreadsheet

We have given a wide range of columns on themes, but we prefer to hide some columns for simplicity. Here is a snapshot of how we use this calendar:

Best Practice Tip 7 Avoid re-editing content

It’s important in the editorial calendar creation that you account for any potential re-edits that may have been highlighted in the Content Audit phase. Create a timeframe of when you want editing completed by, and bear this in mind when planning the creation of new content. It can happen that old content is marked for re-edit, not accounted for in the planning process, and then subsequently and needlessly recreated!

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