Content Marketing Starter Toolkit
1 like155 views
This document provides a 7-step content marketing toolkit to help marketers develop an effective content marketing strategy. The steps include understanding your purpose and audience, developing a compelling narrative, identifying relevant channels, creating optimized content, amplifying your content, and using analytics to evaluate performance. The toolkit is intended to equip marketers with fundamentals to systematically develop a content marketing roadmap for success.
Content Marketing Starter Toolkit
- 1. CONTENT MARKETING CONTENTGUY that brought to you by STARTER TOOLKIT
- 2. Introduction While everyone frantically tries to predict the next big thing in the ev- er-changing digital landscape, we believe that one thing will always stay relevant: Great content that resonates with your target audience and caters to their needs. What is Content Marketing? Content marketing is the development and distribution of valuable and relevant content to attract, retain and grow an audience that reso- nates with your brand, and most importantly, help to meet your busi- ness goals. Why Content Marketing? We live in a multi-device world where consumers are exposed to hun- dreds and thousands of ads every day.To stand out from the noise and cut through the clutter, you need to have content that is valuable and relevant to bring forth your brand messages with clarity to your in- tended target audience. How does this toolkit help? There is no one-size-fits-all solution for content marketing but this toolkit will help to equip you with the fundamentals of good content marketing, allowing you to systematically develop a roadmap towards content marketing success. This toolkit is for: - Marketers looking to embark on Content Marketing in 2017 - Startups and SME marketers who want to improve their bottom-line with Content Marketing - Anyone who intends to learn about Content Marketing
- 3. STEP ONE UNDERSTAND YOUR PURPOSE To find success in Content Marketing, you must first have a good un- derstanding of your purpose and to do that, here are some important questions to ask yourself: - Why are you doing this? - Is there a need that you can fulfil or a gap you can fill? - What do you want to accomplish with Content Marketing (besides making a profit)? - What is the one subject (related to your business) you feel you are the best person in the world to talk about? - What sort of value do you want to provide to your consumers through Content Marketing? - How do you differentiate yourself from your competition? - What does success look like to you? Take some time to think about the above questions before you move forward; it is crucial that you get this step right, as doing so will pro- vide you with clarity, meaning and direction for your Content Market- ing initiatives. In the later stages, the purpose will act as a filter to help you make important decisions.
- 4. STEP TWO UNDERSTAND YOUR AUDIENCE To develop compelling and useful content, you will first need to know who you are developing it for. Ask yourself this simple question:“Who are the people who would resonate best with your brand and most likely to benefit from your content?”With that in mind, identify your audience persona. Include details like gender, education level and income, their profession and interests. Example: Male, 25 - 36, university graduate earning > 50K a year, IT professionals who love gaming. Do your research through focus groups, surveys, interviews, etc. and develop a few variations of your audience persona.With the audience personas, you will be able to tweak, tailor and structure your content with more clarity.
- 5. STEP THREE develop YOUR narrative In the previous steps, we talked about discovering your purpose and the type of audience that would best resonate with your content; the narrative is what brings the two together.To tell a compelling story, you can take the following into consideration: Tonality: Every brand has a unique tonality or voice; do you want to sound formal or casual? Define one that will best resonate with your target audience; your tonality is key to how your audience will per- ceive your brand. Value: If you want people to consume your content, it is important to think about what sort of value your story can provide. Does it inspire, entertain, educate or entice people? Making It Interesting: Always remember, you are creating content not to please yourself but to provide value to your target audience. Thus, it is important that you constantly think of fresh new ways to make things interesting for your target audience.
- 6. STEP FOUR Identify YOUR CHANNELS While it is important that your content should be platform agnostic, that does not mean you have to be on every single channel out there. For effective distribution of content, the key here is to identify the channels which your target audiences are residing on and focus your engagement on the selected channels. Example: If your target audiences are primarily housewives aged 25 - 40, then the channel you should be focusing on would most likely be Facebook. Conversely, if your target demographics is mostly made up of millennials, then you should consider putting your attention on plat- forms such as Snapchat and Instagram.
- 7. develop YOUR content STEP FIVE With all the planning out of the way, this is where you go all out and have fun with your content creation process! If you want your content to be compelling and go places, be brave and don’t always stick to “safe” content. But before you go all out and be creative, do take note of the following: Content Optimisation: Always ensure that your content is in the right size and properly optimised for the respective social network. Exam- ple: If you have a physical brochure, you can't just scan it and directly post it up on Facebook and expect effective engagement.To get the best results, you’ll need to adapt the brochure and tailor it into a format that is friendly for Facebook (and for your audience on Face- book). The Right Content Format: This comes with a good understanding of your target audiences. Example: If your target audiences are made up of millennials aged 18-21 (shorter attention span), instead of using an 800-word blog article, it might be more efficient to communicate the same story with a 1-min video. Platform Policies:You’ll need to ensure that the final output does not violate platform policies. Example: Facebook has a 20% text rule for all ad images, in this case, you have to ensure that there is minimal text in your content output.
- 8. STEP SIX AMPLIFY YOUR content Your content is not going to magically reach your intended target au- dience by merely distributing it on your existing platforms.You’ll need to look into ways to amplify your content to the right target audi- ence. Here are some suggested ways you can explore. - Social Media Advertising (Facebook/Instagram/LinkedIn Ads) - Search and Display Ads (SEM/GDN) - Content Discovery Platforms (Outbrain and Taboola) - Influencer Marketing - Partnerships with relevant brands/organisations - Content seeding on related groups and forums Take time to study the above amplification strategies and decide which would be most suitable based on your existing budget and re- sources. ADVERTISING
- 9. STEP SEVEN Analytics and evaluation Nobody gets it right the first time round, but it is important that you learn what went wrong the first time round.Thus, analytics is crucial for your Content Marketing efforts.With analytics tools such as Facebook Insights and Google Analytics, you’ll be able to measure the performance of your content and determine if your content marketing work is successful. Do a thorough evaluation process and seek to: - Continously fine-tune your content narratives to be more relevant and exciting for your target audience. - Determine if you are distributing your content on the right channels - Determine if your content resonates well with your intended target audi- ence - Determine if your amplification strategy is the most cost-effective and figure out how you can keep your cost per acquisition even lower. INSIGHTS
- 10. CONTENT MARKETING CHECKLIST STEP ONE STEP TWO STEP THREE STEP FOUR STEP FIVE STEP SIX STEP SEVEN UNDERSTAND YOUR PURPOSE UNDERSTAND YOUR AUDIENCE DEVELOP YOUR NARRATIVE IDENTIFY YOUR CHANNELS DEVELOP YOUR CONTENT AMPLIFY YOUR CONTENT ANALYTICS AND EVALUATION
- 11. CONTENTGUY that ABOUT Over here at thatcontentguy.sg, we aim to advocate and inspire the progress of value-driven content marketing practices, which we firmly believe is the way forward for brands and businesses. We share insightful and practical guides which marketers and business owners can follow as well as best value-driven content marketing case studies in Singapore and around the world. CONNECT WITH US hello@thatcontentguy.sg +65 97506492 CONTACT US www.facebook.com/thatcontentguy.sg www.linkedin.com/company/thatcontentguy.sg http://thatcontentguy.sg