I was most impressed by her first section on creating a balance of educational and selling content. She uses a ratio of 3 education pieces to 1 soft sell and 1 hard sell, and produces a lot of content over the course of a year.
It’s a good idea and I’m going to suggest it to some of my clients who want to make a bigger splash with their content marketing.
CAUTION: Kindly IGNORE her terrible suggestion of going to olance or elance for freelance “writers.” For Pete’s sake, are you kidding me? You tell me the kind of quality you’re going to get from an inexperienced writer who accepts a few pennies per word. That’s right — pennies. Per word. Especially with technology marketing.
I love working for myself. I swear to you that I not complaining. But sometimes it’s hard to balance two really crucial things — no, not work/life balance, I manage that pretty well.
I’m talking about the bane of the freelancing life: balancing customer work with marketing.
I like having assignments in hand. Sure money is part of the reason, but it’s only part. I like having something concrete to do. I like seeing the fruits of my marketing labor. I like taking a mass of half-baked ideas, facts and opinions and and turning them into a great piece of content that will bring more business to my client.
Marketing, not so much. Don’t get me wrong — I don’t mind doing it. Parts of it are even fun, especially the creative challenge. And it’s always good to see positive results. But when I’m heads down creating content for my clients, marketing feels like an imposition, a break in the flow.
Yet I know that the key to marketing is to keep doing it even when I’m busy. When I worked as an analyst I worried about start-up clients who had a lot of initial success and were flying high. They usually stopped spending money on us, their PR agency, and their marketing agency because they were convinced that their market momentum would continue forever.
It didn’t. Without being fed it never does. They lost a lot of ground and had to scramble to get the attention back. Sometimes they did it on time. Sometimes they didn’t.
The same advice I’m giving myself I’ll give to the people I work with and whom I might work with someday: the right time to invest in marketing is exactly when you think you don’t need to. I’m glad you’re flying high, I really am. Keep that wind beneath your wings.
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General Electric has an incredible content marketing machine but most of us aren’t GE.
The good news is that even small teams and solo practitioners can strategize and produce lead-generating marketing content. The key to creating a content marketing plan for any organization is an integrated cycle: strategic planning, content creation and distribution, engaging in conversation, and measuring results.
Set marketing goals and objectives. Decide what you want to accomplish with a content marketing campaign and how to measure it. Draw up your buyer personas for your sweet spot and ideal prospects.
Create new content and leverage existing content. Collect your existing content, decide what you can leverage, and identify gaps that require new content.
Optimize content for search and curate for reuse. Revise both new and existing content for keywords and updated messaging. Break content into pieces to increase reuse. Curate your content so you can easily identify content for future campaigns. This is where an expert writer comes in — strangely enough, I recommend myself. 🙂
Distribute content and engage in conversation. Distribute through your channels: social media, website, publications, publications. Track and engage your commenters. Measure results and adapt content to next cycle.
Measure results by your goals and objectives, adapt content accordingly, and begin the cycle again.
This cycle stays the same no matter how large or small your team might be. The difference is quantity: more resources can create more content. There need not be any difference in quality or meeting your goals and objectives as long as you have reasonably assigned your resources.
I was taken aback by a post in HubSpot about “ghostwriting” (the blogger’s words) and how no self-respecting business should ever hire a writer to write thought leadership content. It is his contention that business leaders should write their own content because a ghostwriter – again, his term – will know little or nothing about the industry or about a particular business’s key messaging.
My comment to him was that I cannot imagine how a business could hire a writer who a) has no credentials or knowledge in the business’s field and b) writes with no or little client input. Maybe that happens in cheap keyword stacking articles, but it sure as heck doesn’t happen with technology B2B content. Not that I have seen in many years as a writer and analyst.
I registered my opinion in comments and I don’t need to slam the poster publicly, so I will not link there. And to be fair to the poster there is absolutely nothing wrong with writing your own content, and he correctly stated that a good editor can help polish his pieces. But I maintain that a good writer can create excellent content given subject matter expert input and their own deep experience in the industry.
