How to Strategize your Content and Build your Brand

Content is difficult to do well, but a good strategy will set your brand and your company apart. It prevents your business from joining the 96 percent of B2B content marketers who struggle to produce worthwhile content for their audience. Three of the biggest non-value-add of content are the usual suspects: creating content for the sake of content, limited or no involvement of stakeholders, and no clear relationship to the business's goals.

Strategic marketing ensures that every one of your communication and marketing efforts aligns with an overall strategy and plan to connect your value proposition, the information about your knowledge capital, your products, and services with the audience that needs to hear or interact with your business.

The start point has a business strategy with a clear directive and business model that delineates the marketing and communications strategy goals. The key is to develop a comprehensive marketing strategy to create an effective strategic marketing plan and campaigns. Everyone in your business must understand the strategic priorities, align with the marketing goals, and what the plan is to accomplish them. A great strategic marketing plan should provide the following:

• Prioritization of customer segments, target industries, regions to ensure we are reaching the right audiences.
• Established goals, objectives, and KPIs ( Key Performance Indicators ) with a plan to measure critical metrics.
• Selection of strategic technologies, software platforms, and tools based on the needs of the business.
• Definition of targeted campaigns and general marketing tactics that lead prospects through awareness, engagement, conversion, nurturing, and sales.
• Implementation planning for resources, budget, and timeline, to execute across writing, design, programming, data analysis, systems integration, marketing, and report on ROI.

“To be successful and grow your business and revenues, you must match the way you market your products with the way your prospects learn about and shop for your products.” Brian Halligan, CEO Hubspot

Content is a tactic in a strategic marketing approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly-defined audience — and, ultimately, to drive profitable customer action.

Building a brand, in part, involves the creation of a message, the insertion of that message into a piece of content, and the transmission of that content over a channel to an audience. Lately, channels have diversified, and the terms “Digital Marketing” for campaigns done over digital platforms, or “Social Media Marketing” and “Content Marketing” have emerged and are used to denote all there is to advertising.

“Content” is a tactic of a well thought out Marketing Strategy, and it is produced within the execution of a plan, including advertising, SEO, and publicity. If a company creates informational material that aims to rank highly in Google search results, the breakdown for a marketing campaign would be:

• Strategy = SEO (which may need to be added to a new, modern Promotion Mix)
• Content = The blog post
• Channel = The company’s blog/Google search results.

Why is this important? The terms that brands use reflect the assumptions that underlie their marketing approaches — and bad assumptions lead to bad marketing at best and spam at worst. If everybody uses these marketing channels, then understanding which data to collect and measure means analytics is the cornerstone of success.

Analytics is about tracking the metrics that are critical to your business. Those metrics matter because they relate to your business model: where the money comes from, how much things cost, how many customers you have, and the effectiveness of your customer acquisition strategies. In business, the purpose of analytics is to find your way to the right product and market before the money runs out.

Promotion Mix — Samuel Scott

When marketers brainstorm campaigns, they typically ask these questions:

• Who is our target audience, and what are our goals?
• What is the best message for that audience?
• In light of our goals, which strategies within the Promotion Mix — advertising, direct marketing, sales promotion, direct selling, and publicity — should we use to communicate that message?
• What are the best online and/or offline channels for that strategy to reach that audience?
• What marketing collateral and creatives should we create and transmit based on the answers to the prior four questions?
• How can we measure the results based on which metrics are relevant to each strategy within the Promotion Mix that we will use?

Keep in mind that the strategy, message, and marketing collateral matter more than the channel, and so are the analytics and data you can collect from these interactions.

Many startups (particularly in the consumer space) focus on virality first. They implement features and tactics to increase user acquisition as much as possible before really understanding what those users will do. Having lots of users isn’t traction unless those users are engaged and sticking around. The eventual goal of analytics in any field is to gain insights from historical data to make informed decisions for the future. This is accomplished by taking certain data points, metrics, and trending them over time. Regression analysis and statistical algorithms are applied to see what the pattern will be down the road.

In addition to metrics, consumer behavior should be considered.

Storytelling: We are natural-born storytellers. We are also naturally wired to listen to stories. In fact, Spanish researchers demonstrated that stories activate the brain’s language processing center and activate parts that would be active if we experienced the story ourselves. When your goal is to sell an experience, the story has to be central to your strategy. While an important part of branding is to tell a story about your brand, more and more marketers are taking an alternate approach. Instead of telling stories about their brand, they are branding themselves as storytellers.

Turn customers into advocates: This means that your brand should excel at giving your customers all the tools and information they need to go on and talk about your company in their own voice. So, if you can package the experience, the mood, the feeling that you want your product to create, and put it into customers’ hands, then they go out into the world as megaphones for your message.

Stay part of the conversation: create hashtags that define your brand and make sure to include the same hashtag across all social media channels.

Take a stand: but do it ethically and value your consumers as human beings as well.

While I definitely do not advocate anything extreme unless it absolutely fits your brand and audience, countless ridiculous examples should serve as proof that defying expectations can be a powerful method to create interest in your brand.

Smart brands know that content is an essential part of any modern marketing strategy. From blogs and social media posts to YouTube videos and whitepapers, consumers want to see a company’s expertise and values translated into engaging content across the web. Your business is destined to attract an audience when you have tailored a brand for it and have a website that offers useful content or unique products. Audiences are meant to be converted from potential customers into loyal customers. There are so many different ways that a website can increase their retention and conversion rates, but before taking on the endeavor, you must figure out the specific metrics you are trying to improve for your brand.