You know that you need to execute a plan for distributing all the great content you’re hoping to create in 2020. However, without a plan in place, it’s just a dream. And a dream doesn’t move the sales needle.
In this 5-part series, we take a closer look at the five key steps required to plan, measure, and distribute new content for your customers and prospects to use to educate themselves about the solutions you provide.
Part 1: Set Goals & Determine Metrics
When setting goals and metrics, it’s important to be as specific as possible. Having a clear mission will help keep you on track when it comes to every aspect of your content marketing strategy. Some ideas include:
- - Increase brand awareness
- - Improve reputation
- - Create a perception of expertise
- - Increase website visits
- - Attract strategic partners
- - Influence specific vertical markets
- - Influence specific target accounts
- - Increase sales appointments
It’s important not to select too many goals. Having more than six may send you in too many directions. This can cost a significant amount of time and money and can easily distract your team and cause them to miss the bullseye.
Once the focus goals are determined, setting metrics for performance is the next step. The challenge here is to determine if the best metrics are numbers-based (e.g. website traffic and conversions) or if the metrics are geared toward the quality and quantity of the team’s content production. The challenge when measuring content marketing success by traffic and conversions is that it’s often difficult to attribute online marketing to specific sales events. Imagine asking the corner deli to determine how many sandwiches they sold as a result of the billboard on the side of the road. It may not be as clear and easy to determine as you initially thought.
For example, if measuring by traffic and conversion numbers, you may select one or more of the following metrics:
- - Website traffic increase over prior year
- - Increase in social media channel followers
- - Recurring revenue enrollments
- New strategic partnerships
If your evaluation is based on productivity, consider setting a goal for the number of pieces of content produced and promoted such as:
- - Blog posts per week
- - Case studies per month
- - Social channel posts per week
- - Response time to online comments
- - Number of likes, views, watches
- - Number of videos produced per month
- - Number of long-term campaigns launched per quarter
By focusing on quality and quantity of content, you may be more successful than you ever imagined, and the traffic and conversion numbers will likely follow. One strategy is to use production as the primary metric while using traffic and conversion to fine-tune the content and distribution strategy.
Focusing on a handful of specific campaigns will often result in production of a variety of types of high-quality content. These pieces of content will support the over-arching campaigns and will provide consistency in messaging that’s aligned with the sales team’s efforts. Plus, it will allow the team to develop a variety of types and versions of content, some of which may resonate better than others with your customers.
For example, if a systems integrator is focused on increasing the recurring revenue program for cloud-based managed access control for an entire year, the marketing efforts can focus on that topic and can include video production, how-to guides, blog posts, social media posts, case studies, diagrams, accounting examples, and other content specifically with the goal of increasing RMR. With that much effort focused on one topic, your message is going to be clearly heard.
Enable Your Sales Team
Now is the time to act. The year has just started and there’s time to implement the 5 steps necessary to launch your marketing strategy and impact your sales for 2020.
Get started today by contacting our team for advice.
