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Planning Flow Content

If you’re going to create a lot of news might seem slightly incongruous. Since you can’t see into the future, how will you be able to plan which pieces to write?

The best method is to assign flow content to content creators for particular dates – you don’t need to write the headline; you can simply fill out everything else with the description ‘select the best news to report on.’

The crucial thing here is to research the particular dates and times of important announcements and events in your industry. With this, you can foresee when particular stories are likely to be important and then plan accordingly. There is more on processes with recommended tools for planning flow content in the next chapter.

Defining an Editorial Plan Recap

Thorough planning of your content marketing strategy will give you a central reference point when you come to execute. It is important that subject matter and content types are established, as well as who will create it and where they will place it.

þþ Telling Your Story – With either a persona (formed in Chapter 2) or your company as the protagonist, form a story arch about how your products solve particular challenges, and plan content around this theme.

þþ Defining the Content Mix

þþ Subject Matter – You should have already set your categories, but within them what specific matter will you focus on?

þþ Stock, Flow and Curation – How much of your content will be news (flow), evergreen

(stock) or curated from an online community?

þþ The 70/20/10 Planning Model – How will you be prepared to innovate and take risks in your content marketing?

þþ Defining Content Types – What is the format of your content mix, and what mediums will you use?

þþ Team Planning

þþ The Practicalities of the Content Marketing Model – you need to have five departments working in unison for content marketing to thrive, but you don’t necessarily need five new people. Find existing resource from around your business, or hire multi-skilled marketers.

þþ Workflow Planning – Understand your team’s strengths and weaknesses and consider these in your plan.

þþ Cross Channel Planning for Content Marketing

þþ Apps, Mobile Sites and Desktop – Create a content plan that can adapt to different screen sizes. Start with small screens and work up.

þþ Social Network Presence – What functional role do you see each social network playing in your strategy?

þþ Editorial Calendar – Create an editorial calendar that defines the who, what, when, where and how of your content strategy.

þþ Planning Flow Content – Assign flow content to content creators for particular

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Technique 6

Executing an Editorial Plan

For your potential audience, defining an editorial plan unfortunately creates nothing – your results will ultimately down to the execution. As mentioned earlier, many content marketing strategies fall flat or run out of steam due to the lack of planning, but now you’ve mapped your story, the content types and who will execute that plan, there are two key methods of sustaining it:

þþ Regular Reviews – Checking in content production and performance, but how regularly should you do this?

þþ Being Adaptive – Working on what works, and pivoting for sustained growth.

Regular Reviews

rr Q. Regular reviews of content marketing in place?

Workflow management is simply the assessment of your content team’s ability to deliver the content plan, particularly in how this content is meeting the Objectives, outlined in the SOSTAC phase.

Having set your objectives from the Introduction, you will now need to regularly check on performance to see that these are being met. The frequency of how often you do this could be as follows:

þþ Monthly – any company that’s serious about content marketing should check in performance at least once a month.

þþ Weekly – teams with two or more contributors should check their analytics on a weekly basis and plan more material.

þþ Daily – teams publishing more than 10 pieces a day should check performance daily and plan according to the latest trends.

Streamlining Your Reports

rr Q. Do we have dashboards in place to review effectiveness?

It’s important not to get overwhelmed by reporting, particularly if your analytics resource is slim, but there are two important methods in streamlining this:

þþ Dashboarding – it’s possible to eliminate report curation and syndication altogether by creating dashboards. While you could create your own system with development support, you can also buy licenses for readymade dash boarding solutions such as Leftronic and Geckoboard. These allow you to combine data sets from different sources in one place.

þþ Email Templates – create email templates that allow you to take snapshots of key data and drop in or use reports in Google Analytics for a similar review.

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Combining Reporting with Flow Content

If you require daily reports to be distributed to a team, or you want to deploy a dashboard, then combining reporting with what should be planned next can be a powerful combination.

Five Methods to Assist with Short Term Planning

Short term planning is crucial in flow news based strategies, the below methods can help you do this:

1. Trendsmap

Twitter trends are the digital conversation’s heartbeat. Simply checking them regularly can inform you of the topics that people are most likely to be talking about. Rather than just using the simply # trends on the Twitter app though, Trendsmap is a tool that also shows the location of the conversation – important if you’re a local business searching for stories relevant to your area.

2. Reviewing Daily Newspapers

It might seem old hat, but daily newspapers and print coverage has a serious effect on search (as well as the TV schedule). If you have a broad focus – particularly if you operate in lifestyle or sports, then curating daily newspaper headlines can be an important indicator for what you should publish next.

3. Create a Curated Dashboard Using RSS

You can easily create a dashboard that combines news sources in one place using an RSS reader. Simply create a dashboard (for a particular topic) and add your chosen feeds. If you have this as your home screen, then you’ll see all the latest news in one place as you open your browser.

4. Soovle

Mentioned in the Keyword Analysis section in Section Two, Simply typing into the Google search box and seeing what Google Suggest comes up with can be useful in creating your next news piece, Soovle is a suggestion engine that curates from 11 different sources, including the other major search engines and Wikipedia.

5. Recommended Enterprise Tools

If you’re looking to curate content or find topics from a wide range of sources, and have it in the same place as your reporting suite, then it would be worth investing in an enterprise

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solution. This would suit larger brands with an analytics budget.

Two of the best tools for doing this are:

rr Parse.ly Dash – A predictive analytics tool that crawls millions of web pages and can suggest trending topics, as well as monitor real time content performance and author statistics.

rr Chartbeat – a powerful real time analytics dashboard, from which you can quickly gather how your content is performing and where people are coming from.

Being adaptive

Measurement will help you find out which topics, page types and content creators are working best for you – and also what isn’t performing so well.

If you’re applying the 70/20/10 planning technique covered in Technique 5, then experimentation and adaptation should soon become second nature. When your more experimental pieces do come off and find an engaged audience, it’s important to continue to explore the reason why that format worked so well. If the engagement is sustained, then you may want to bring what was once experimental into the core of your strategy.

While you should stay true to your Message Architecture, if new topics and content types work, then be prepared to adapt it slightly. When they don’t, forget about company dogma and report the facts; there is no point pursuing things that clearly aren’t meeting your objectives. Be ready to adapt, fire what isn’t working and focus on the content that’s building an engaged audience.

Executing an Editorial Plan Recap

All of your audience research, website structuring and further planning comes down to the execution. This is the part where your well planned content finally meets an audience. It’s vital that you regularly check on your progress vs. your objectives, you can do this in the following ways:

þþ Email Reporting – Either daily, weekly or monthly using the template provided. þþ Dashboarding – To check outside of normal reports.

þþ Tools to Assist with Short Term Planning:

þþ Trendsmap

þþ Netvibes

þþ Google Reader þþ Soovle

þþ Parse.ly Dash þþ Chartbeat

þþ Be Adaptive – Use your reports to see what is really working. Focus on what is best meeting your objectives, and discard what isn’t working so well.

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Technique 7

Managing Outreach

As mentioned in Section 6: Defining an Editorial Plan, Outreach is a vital part of the content marketing process.

What is it? Content marketing outreach

In this context, Outreach is the ‘managing’ of content so it can reach the most influential people and websites, be shared and linked to regularly to gain you a greater reach than you would otherwise get through your own media. With that in mind, it is effectively a form of Public Relations.

Effective outreach largely relies on finding the right people to share your content through a defined process (often referred to as ‘seeding’). It can often seem a lengthy or tricky process, as people can be unresponsive or even when you are in contact, unreliable.

However, through using a defined process, you can cut the time required considerably, and also seamlessly interview your outreach with your content creating through influencer contributions.

Identifying Influential People and Websites

rr Q. Approach for finding relevant influencers defined?

You will have built up a preliminary list of influencers through following the process in the first section, but we can take this further here and get a little specific through recommended processes and tools.

Most of the below relies on SeoMoz tools – namely SeoMoz Toolbar, Opensite Explorer and Followerwonk.

Followerwonk

Followerwonk is a great tool for finding influential people within a vertical. It has a very useful function for searching Twitter bios, thus you will likely to be able to find people related to your vertical quickly by using keywords. If you were looking for influential from the UK who have the word ‘accountant’ in their bio, it will create a quick list. You can then download this list into Excel format if you have a subscription.

Once in Excel, the tool has two very useful columns for finding potentially influential websites. Similar to Klout, Followerwonk has an ‘influencer score’ – it’s called ‘Social

Authority’ – it also has a URL column which normally stipulates the website of the company they work for. After de-duplicating the URL column, I was able to find 400 potential partner

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websites with profiles ranked by influencer score for UK accountants on Twitter. So not only did I have a table of the most followed and influential UK accountants, but I also had a list of potential partner websites14.

Other Methods

If you can’t wrangle a subscription for Followerwonk, then the following tools and techniques may be of assistance:

rr Twitter Search: This can help you find influencers within a particular niche, but it won’t give you any other data – you’ll have to research that yourself.

rr Klout: This gives a little more information than a twitter search, because it does supply an influencer score. However, you can’t automatically export this into a spreadsheet. Simply search using vertical keywords in the search box to check bios.

rr Google+: At least at the time of writing, Google+ remains a network for slightly more savvy users of social media. Thus it can be useful in finding influential people quickly using the search box and putting a people and places filter on. However, you can’t search by people and places and location, so again, you won’t get local information. It does have a useful ‘SAVE THIS SEARCH’ function.

Twitter Lists

Once you have located influencers you should aim to place them into Twitter Lists. As mentioned in Audience Research, Twitter Lists can be a very powerful tool in sorting the right influencers, but you may often go further than simply creating a list of ‘influential people’ in your vertical. In lifestyle verticals – for instance fashion – you can take this much further by defining what people do or whether profiles are branded. For instance, you could create lists for the following:

þþ Fashion Journalists – For instance, @JaneGrazia (Jane Bruton) the editor of Grazia, or @AShulman2 (Alexandra Shulman) the editor of Vogue UK.

þþ Fashion Bloggers – Influential people who aren’t professional journalists, such as @ shewearsfashion (Kavita Donkersley) or @Disneyrollrgirl (Navaz Batliwalla).

þþ Retail Brands – Branded accounts, such as @ASOS or @LipsyLondon

Of course, you can be as detailed as you like here, breaking down lists as far as you want to go. It’s recommended to have at least 15-20 people per lists, otherwise you may find them seldom updated and thus not that useful.

Creating an influencer contact List

rr Q. Influencer contact list created?

The export from Followerwonk may give you a useful starting point for finding websites within a particular niche, but it might not tell you them all, or indeed the best ones. Initially, I recommend creating a long website list using a combination of manual assessment, Opensite Explorer and Excel.

14  Followerwonk has a wide range of features to help you find out more about Twitter users within your vertical, but we can’t explain them all here. For more, check www.followerwonk.com.

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Long List Forming

Creating a long contact list of potentially hundreds of websites can be done in less than a day with this process – you will certainly need SeoMoz Toolbar to complete the first part (although you don’t need a subscription). It may be possible to gather a substantial list manually if you can work quickly, but Open Site Explorer (which does require an SeoMoz subscription) can help you do this quicker.

Manual Assessment

Like in content auditing, manual assessment is the only way you’ll know for sure that a website is of good quality, and if it’s a potential partner. Thus, you can use your Followerwonk URL list as a starting point for sites in you niche and begin checking through. You may also have others that spring to mind, or you could check websites on search engines.

Before you get started, it’s important to create a Contact Sheet. Like the Editorial Calendar, this is a collaborative document, so it’s worth putting it into Google Docs. However, we’ve provided an example at the link below:

Contact List.

You can create your own easily enough. You simply need a spreadsheet with the following columns:

Now you can begin checking. While doing this, you should look for four specific criteria:

þþ Domain Equity – SeoMoz Toolbar should be installed on Firefox or Google Chrome, and will tell you the Domain Authority (DA) of a particular site. This is a score of the quantity and quality of links pointing towards a website, with 100 being the highest score. This

is an important factor in Google’s PageRank algorithm and a good indicator of website quality.

þþ Typically, professionally run websites have a score of 60+, while websites below 30 DA aren’t so valuable.

þþ Heartbeat – If the website or blog has a good Domain Authority, but hasn’t posted in the last month, then it’s possible it’s dormant or even dead – obviously such sites wouldn’t be too useful to partner with. Check to see when the most recent post was – if it’s been more than 1-2 weeks you should de-prioritise contacting them.

þþ Blogroll – A blogroll will point you in the direction of other blogs that the blog author rates. This can be a very useful source in finding other authoritative blogs quickly.

Best Practice Tip 8 Use Blogrolls to find second tier influencers

Although you may not be able to get the feature you want with your “Level A” influencers you can often use blogrolls to find second tier influencers.

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þþ Person – Check the about pages of the website and try to understand the people or person behind it. From here, you should be able to fill in their contact name, email and twitter handle accordingly.

Once you’ve taken a look at blogrolls and filled out your sheet with plenty of potential targets, you can now move onto the optional stage of Long List Forming.

Finding Other Sites Using Opensite Explorer

You should be able to gather who the most authoritative sites in your vertical are according to the Domain Authority. Sort the sheet by this column highest to lowest.

For the ten sites with the highest domain authority, place each of their URLs in turn into the Open Site Explorer search box.

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You will then get a list of Inbound Links pointing towards this list – click Download CSV to get the full report.

You will need to do this ten times (once for each of the target websites). Combine all of the downloaded CSV files into one workbook. You can filter out all unfollowable links, and then remove or hide Followable, 301, Origin and Target URL columns.

Insert a new column A, then insert the following formula and drag to the bottom of the rows:

=LEFT(B2,SEARCH(“/”,B2,8))

After this, remove duplicates in column A for every sheet. Combine all of the sheets into one and then remove duplicates from column A.

You will now have a much longer list of websites and their respective domain authorities. It’s possible that some of this list aren’t related to your vertical and are just linking to the top sites through an odd reference. But through following the Manual Checking process you can filter out irrelevant websites as you check down the list.

Status Column:

þþ When you send a message, take a note of the contact’s status as ‘Contacted – No Reply’. If they don’t answer within a week, you can follow up.

þþ If they do reply positively and say they want to be included, mark them down as ‘Partner’.

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þþ For those who state that they don’t want to be included, mark them down as ‘Not Interested’. You can delete these, but it may be worth keeping their contact details for later.

Seeding Content

By following this process, you would have built up lists of influential people on social media and authoritative websites. You will also have a good idea of who is most likely to converse with you having received (or indeed not received) a response.

Email Blast vs. Personalisation

Typically, once you’ve built up a list of contacts, you might want to send them content all the time via a daily email blast. This isn’t recommended, since it will likely irritate people who weren’t aware contact would be so regular. It’s much better to be as personal and specific as possible, and attempt to be on first name basis with your contacts.

Instead of this, point them to your RSS feed, and then refer to your Editorial Calendar and choose the content that you think they would be most interested in. Generally speaking, people like to share or embed multimedia content such as infographics or video, but they may occasionally be happy to link to an article or ‘recycle’ some of its content in exchange for promoting your site.

Being as personable as possible and keeping your communication specific are key ingredients to a happy and long lasting relationship. Talk regularly to partners on social media, promote them via Twitter and your own website and you’re likely to get similar promotion in return. If possible, you may also want to arrange video conferences via Skype or Google Hangouts, or face to face meetings and forums to solidify the relationship.

Over time, you’ll become more aware of who shares what, and you may want to make an extra column on your contact list. You can just make a simple note of which kind of content they prefer, and how regularly they promote you.

Making Contact

The next stage is to make contact with all the sites that you’ve identified as realistic ‘partners’. It’s generally better to form a relationship first before attempting to gain any favours, so a simple message to break the ice is recommended. You can use the below message as a template, or adapt it to your preference:

Hi [NAME],

I’m the web editor at yoursite.com and we’re looking for partners to push our content and in exchange we’ll be happy to do the same. We might have a relevant YouTube video one week that we’d like you to publish, while you might want us to link to one of your stories or mention your blog on our social media profiles from time to time. Let me know if this is of interest – I think it would be beneficial to us both.

Further to this, you may want to think about ways that you can get third parties on your side. It is fairly common to offer bloggers and other websites in exchange for promotion, although it is preferable to simply do it as an act to create a relationship.

Using Social Media for outreach

rr Q. Tools used for managing social media contacts reviewed?

Of course, your outreach is limited to seeding and syndication on third party websites, but also social media. For companies that have limited experience in content marketing

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