A Fresh Look at 'What is Content Marketing?'

Content marketing can be explained as a strategic approach to creating and disseminating valuable, relevant and ongoing content to target audiences to enhance organizational goals. A more formal definition can be found at www.contentmarketinginstitute.com/what-is-content-marketing.

Here’s a fresh view of content marketing - a marketing and public relations team unifier, an organizational stress reliever and an ultimate organizing technique. I believe that an editorial calendar, a tool that is commonly used by publication organizations, plays a key role in the plan.

Let’s take a look at some of the key elements of implementing a content marketing strategy before we discuss the value of the editorial calendar.

1. Buy-in

Before undertaking a content marketing approach in your organization, it is important there is buy-in from management and your peers. If no support exists to produce the additional copy content needed to make this plan come alive, you will struggle to implement the details of the plan, diminishing its success.

2. Your audience

Who is your audience and what do you know about them? A content marketing plan is based on research of your customer so you understand them intimately. Research is critical to knowing your audience’s likes, dislikes, income, education, location, reading habits, etc. Polls or surveys of your existing customers produce great information on the best features of your product or service, changes needed or desired and other personal preferences of your audience.

3. Customer-centric content

Customer-centric content resonates with your audience because it provides information or insights to a problem or a desire they have. Content is created with the customer and their needs and pain in mind – not what your company wants to randomly disseminate about their product or service with little understanding or sensitivity of the audience/customer.

4. Editorial calendar

The editorial calendar is one of the most important parts of the content marketing plan. Remember the 80/20 rule – 80 percent of the work will be done upfront so 20 percent of the work can be executed by ‘following the steps’ of the existing plan. It starts with the marketing and public relations teams pulling together to determine year-long, monthly and daily content. Yes, the calendar gets that detailed.

Now for implementation. Know your audiences. You may have a target audience that still relies on mail versus online platforms. Once the content is right, re-purpose it on at least three other platforms. I think you are beginning to see why I referred earlier to the calendar as a team unifier, stress reliever and an ultimate organizing tool. You can get great mileage from an editorial calendar that is a road map for all to work toward.

5. Know what you measure and understand the results

Key performance indicators (KPI) play a key role in any content marketing plan because they usually reflect an organization’s long term goals, are quantifiable and tied to the success of the organization.

Summary

The above elements of a content marketing plan gain credibility through successful KPI results. And as stated earlier, optimizing an editorial calendar is one of the most effective tactics in reaching the plan’s desired end goals!