Let’s talk about time.
The other Sunday I was practicing with the choir, and my pastor started talking about time for this and time for that. I immediately launched into a rendition of, “Does anybody really know what time it is? Does anybody really care about time?” Fortunately my pastor has a sense of humor and I got a laugh.
I wasn’t that concerned about time at church, but if we’re content marketers we care a lot about time – namely, the time we don’t have to do the content marketing the way we want to do it.
Even big teams where everybody has well-defined tasks and resources struggle with time.
The biggest struggle happens in the ranks of smaller marketing teams and solopreneurs. It’s hard to find the time for effective content marketing, especially with so many choices. What kind of content should you create? How often should you create it? Is it blog posts, email messages, video, audio, presentations, LinkedIn articles, Facebook stories, all the above? When and how and where and what?
Find the Time
You can find the time to meet reasonable content marketing objectives with quality content that attracts the leads that you need.
The foundation is the simple content plan, a straightforward quarterly strategy based on an anchor piece. It works.
Set Your Marketing Objectives
First, start with the quarterly marketing plan. Set your marketing objectives for inbound: how many leads, traffic sources, company size and revenue, website activity and stickiness, social media shares and comments, and downloads.
Pick 1-2 Customer Pain Points
Once you set your objectives, understand your customers’ pain points. This is Marketing 101, but a lot of marketers surprisingly skip over this step. The customer pain points that matter the most are their priority needs that you can solve for them at a good price point. At the awareness stage you might have to spend some time educating the customer on what their priority needs are, but if you are successful the pain point becomes a felt need that drives the customer to look for a solution.
Create 2-3 Key Marketing Messages
Once you’ve identified 1-2 priority pain points in the quarter, use them to focus 2-3 key marketing messages. These are messages about your company and about your offerings that clearly offer a solution to customer pain points.
Create the Anchor Piece
Once you have the pain points and key marketing messages, now create your anchor piece: a 2,000-4,000-word blog post. Now for some of you this is not hard at all, though it can be a stretch to get the intensive time you need. But if you can write — or record yourself and transcribe — you’ve got this. Speak to the pain points and present the key marketing messages in your anchor piece. Then edit it and post on your blog.
Now get attention by tweeting it, putting it on status updates or articles in LinkedIn or Facebook, send the link to your email list; anywhere that your prospects hang out.
This next step is optional, but it gets you more attention and helps you build your email list. Add additional content to the blog post so it’s around 5000 words, and turn it into an e-book. (If you’re more of a business-traditional content marketer, call it a white paper.) Offer it as a download in CTAs on your site and in social media.
Do You Gate the Download?
There’s a fight going on between marketers with whether to gate a piece or not. Adherents are equally enthusiastic on both sides. My feeling on the matter is if you want to gate, then gate. If you have an attractive title and sales copy, and your eBook is helpful on its own, and if you’re not asking for too much contact information, this is fine way to build a list and start a relationship.
If you aren’t comfortable with gating the eBook, that’s fine too. But get the email address by offering an additional newsletter sign-up, or a link to more advanced information. And remember that you are not in business because you want to discourage people from paying you. You want to help; this is fundamental to good business. But if you have created resources that helps people do their business better, they should give you something in exchange.
Leverage the Heck Out of the Anchor Piece
Next, take the anchor piece or the eBook if you created one, and break it into multiple assets. For example, publish 1-2 600-word blogs a week for months two and three. Create a LinkedIn SlideShare presentation, a series of related videos, and regular podcasts. There are any number of smaller assets that you create from this one long post or eBook.
Track
Finally, track your marketing objectives and responses to your content marketing campaign. Next quarter, adjust, rinse, and repeat with another anchor piece, and a growing portfolio of evergreen content assets leveraged from that piece.
This systematic method only takes about 6 hours a week. Even better, your portfolio builds and grows quarter after quarter, creating an excellent reputation for you and an authority website with high traffic and high organic search results.
For more details, link to the original post: “When Time is the Enemy”.