I’m absolutely exhausted.
Completely drained.
No… I’m not saying this because the Eagles lost last night or because my 6-month-old was screaming in my ear for an hour last night.
That’s not what I’m talking about at all.
I’m exhausted because I’m really getting tired of marketers and marketing agencies selling the idea that ‘content marketing’ is simply the act of creating content. It’s truly draining to hear this rhetoric year after year. New gurus enter the market and preach the importance of creating valuable content on podcasts, LinkedIn, and every corner of the internet.
And this results in people listening.
It results in up-and-coming startups finding content marketing agencies only to sign a contract with a company that will give them a content calendar and tell them good luck.
Here’s the thing:
Content calendars are not content strategies.
A solid content strategy is rooted in understanding your audience, understanding your industry and creating a playbook that outlines exactly how you’re going to achieve specific marketing goals rooted in your brand’s ambitions. This is what good marketing is.
But for some reason…
We constantly find ourselves falling into a trap. A trap where instead of focusing on thinking long term we trivialize the role of marketing by placing our attention on the production schedule associated with our blog and content. We prioritize a content calendar over a content strategy and are left scratching our head when we see mediocre results from the work we’re doing.
Smart brands think differently.
Smart brands realize that you have to play a different game if you want to win at content marketing in today’s market.
What’s that game you ask?
It’s the game rooted in understanding that our industry – “Content Marketing” is two words and not just one. A lot of marketing agencies today make the mistake of serving their clients by simply producing blog posts week in and week out. Nothing else. Just content creation efforts and an expectation that this will help them become the next great brand.
Spoiler alert…
It won’t be enough.
In the same way that a content calendar isn’t a content strategy, you need to remember that blog posts aren’t the only type of content.
Most people believe that “Content Marketing” consists solely of blog posts, white papers, videos, podcasts, and landing pages.
But my fav assets are often overlooked:
Free Tools / Generators / Calculators…
This is a tactic embraced time and time again by smart SaaS companies.
For example, when it comes to Shopify and its SEO efforts, more than 2M people visit their free tools a year. Here are some of the free tools offered by Shopify:
- Logo maker
- Slogan maker
- Invoice generator
- Pay stub generator
- QR code generator
- Privacy policy generator
- Shipping label template
- Refund policy generator
- Bill of lading template
And there’s more you can read here: The Shopify Toolkit
But, they are not alone.
More and more brands realize the value of investing in things other than blog posts.
Companies like Stripe have been able to use the API documentation to unlock a ton of organic traffic for their brand.
Why does this all matter?
It matters because you need to research upfront to understand what you should create.
Yes, keyword research is important.
But you also need to deeply understand your audience to unlock an understanding of their pains that allows you to create content that doesn’t fit into a marketers ‘pretty little box’ around what we should be creating.
I’m a believer that smart content marketing teams embrace research before they start creating pieces because they know that this is going to set them up for success.
Abe Lincoln said it well:
“If I only had an hour to chop down a tree, I would spend the first 45 minutes sharpening my axe.”
This is the mentality of a great marketer.
Let’s normalize the idea of spending 50 hours researching our market, audience, and content before creating 50 pieces of content and hoping that something sticks.
Let’s start to embrace what I call the ‘Content Marketing Growth Framework.‘
A four-step framework that outlines the lifecycle of a content asset as well as the four key areas that content marketing teams should focus on as they develop their plans for the year and decide where to invest their energy and time: Research. Creation. Distribution. Optimization.
Step 1: Research
Research is the process required to better understand the people you’re looking to influence and the industry you’re navigating. It’s in the research phase that you’re looking to uncover content-channel fit and content-user fit with your audience. What does that mean?
Content Channel Fit: This is related to identifying the channels where your audience spends time. Suppose you’re looking to reach 20-25-year-olds just starting their careers— TikTok is a good place to start.
This is useful because it allows you to start researching the types of content that resonate with this audience on TikTok, and you can use that information to guide your own strategy. OR…, if you know your target audience is on LinkedIn and is a group of Finance Professionals, you can study the content they consume on this channel to see what resonates the most with them.
Content-User Fit: The second type of fit you’re looking for is insight into the content they consume once on that channel. If you find that on TikTok, green screen educational videos are taking off with your audience – that’s a powerful insight. If you find that X threads (formerly known as Twitter threads) with memes injected in them are working well for your audience – that’s a powerful insight. These insights can guide your strategy.
And once you have these two things understood. You have content-market fit.
Content market fit can only truly be understood by studying the content habits of your ideal audience, and it can only be found by researching your audience. But once you have content-market fit, you have clarity on exactly what type of stories your audience cares about and the channels they spend time on.
What’s next from there?
CREATION
Now it’s time to Create Like The Greats.
Side note. I’m launching a podcast with that exact title as a part of the Hubspot Podcast Network. If you haven’t checked out the trailer yet..Today is the day to do so. I’m pretty pumped about what we’re building and am excited for what’s to come. If you don’t mind – I’d also GREATLY appreciate a 5-star rating, subscribe and review On Apple. Whatcha say?
Could you help me out?
Alright… Back to the email…
Step 2: Creation
You want to create things that will resonate with your audience, and you don’t want to fall into the trap of not researching to realize that it’s not just a bunch of blog posts. A great content strategy can result in a very diverse content portfolio. A strong content portfolio makes your site:
- More linkable
- More rankable
- More shareable
- More trustworthy
The best brands realize this and invest in content appropriately.
The next step is also very important. It’s the step that most brands overlook entirely:
Step 3: Distribution
This is the act of actually amplifying and promoting the content that you have created. It’s not enough to just press publish on a piece of content.
You also need to distribute it across the channels where you now know your audience is spending time. That’s the missing part in most organizations marketing workflows and processes. After they press publish on a webinar – It’s over. That’s it. Show done…. MAYBE, You get a recording if you’re subscribed to the newsletter and happen to be on their YouTube channel. But that’s it.
The likelihood of a brand actually doing anything with a piece of content after they press publish is quite low.
Whether it’s a blog post, infographic, webinar, or even a white paper… A lot of brands let these pieces of content collect ‘internet dust’ rather than turning these pieces of content into other types of content. This is the way a great content distribution engine works. You create something once and distribute it forever.
Sure. The piece has to be great.
But once you check that box, you want to invest time and energy amplifying, remixing, and resharing your content.
Here’s a piece I wrote on how I earned 26k page views in 7 days for one piece of content. This methodology is something that every brand can embrace but that few actually see through in practice. Why?
Because content distribution is actually hard work.
It’s an important part of the process, but it’s not something that is easy to do. It requires: (1) the confidence to put your content out there and (2) the time required to take a single asset and spread it across multiple channels or turn it into a few other types of assets. This isn’t easy.
But it will be worth it.
Whether we’re talking about content outreach, paid media, or good ol’ content repurposing, a smart marketer acknowledges that the real work begins after pressing publish. After pressing publish, you need to start marketing the content that you’ve produced so you can tap into its full potential. But for most brands…
This will continue to be overlooked. It will be seen as a nice-to-have rather than a must-have, which it actually is.
Harsh Reality:
Mediocre content with great distribution BEATS great content with no distribution.
Finally… The last step is
Step 4: Optimization.
You’ve researched your audience. You’ve created something great. You’ve amplified it as well. And now traffic is trickling in…
How do you retain that?
How do you avoid competitors from taking your lunch?
How do you establish separation in the SERP between you and them?
You optimize your content.
There are two ways in which you can optimize your content:
Conversion Rate Optimization and Search Engine Optimization.
Both types of optimization efforts are important, but both come with their own set of expertise.
But both are very important.
On the conversion side, you need to think about how this piece of content can lead to a conversion goal. It might be product signups or sales… Or it might simply be giving their email to subscribe to your newsletter. Understand the intent of the reader and then map that with your own business goals and see how you can serve them in a way that leads to a conversion.
On the search side, you must consider the factors that Google considers important in order to rank your piece of content. Are all the data points up to date? Are you aligning your content with search intent? Are you answering the questions in the ‘People Also Asked’ box? Are you including imagery? Videos? When was this post updated? All of these questions and more should be asked.
And they should be asked quarterly.
At Foundation, we offer our partners a maintenance retainer where we optimize their content marketing assets for search every month. We make sure the latest data is in their posts, we make sure the internal linking best practices are strong, we make sure that content is aligned with search intent and we make sure that the content is competitive with the other assets in the SERP. This is an approach you can steal and build into your own workflows. Or you can reply back to this email, and I’ll give you a rundown on how we might be able to help you.
Over the last few years, we’ve had the privilege of working with everything from some of the fastest-growing startups to cloud / SaaS companies that have redefined their industries. In this process, I’ve had a chance to speak with CMOs, VPs, founders, Directors, and any other fancy title you want to give a marketer. Over the course of these dialogs, here is something that I’ve consistently encountered within these organizations:
Everyone wants to embrace the best practices.
But no one really knows how to do it. Especially when it comes to using in-house resources…
There’s no ‘Chief Distribution Officer,’ and there’s rarely a ‘Director of Distribution’ on staff…
That doesn’t mean there shouldn’t be.
But it’s not the case today.
Brands are starting to wake up to the power of building distribution capabilities in-house.
Brands are starting to wake up to the importance of doing things beyond just content creation.
And all of this is good for the industry.
It’s time for us all to put ‘marketing’ back into content marketing.
And if you’ve read this far… Something tells me you’re going to be one of the good ones.
So go get’em. I’m rooting for you!
