5 Steps to Starting Your Custom Content Marketing Program

By Erika Stutzman

Content marketing is the No. 1 trend to be following in 2016, but too many brands either don’t dedicate enough resources to it, or don’t have the proper strategy in place to leverage the resources they have.

A recent study by Smart Insights says embracing content marketing as a business trend blows away competing activities, ranking in importance more than twice the next practice to master: Big data. Rounding out the top five after big data: Marketing automation, mobile marketing and social media marketing.

Smart Insights writes that the competition for content marketing “will be tough, and the need to create a focused plan is paramount.”

Where to start? 1. Start with a point person. It may be an existing content director or a member of your executive team. You may want to start from scratch and hire someone to run the content marketing department, depending on your resources. Content creators can be staffers, freelancers, contractors or a mix of all three — but to do it right, you will want to have a dedicated point person that will own the content marketing channels.

2. Conduct an audit of your current content strategy. Every firm should go through content marketing to make a fair assessment of what’s working and what’s not working. Clear-eyed honesty here is critical! If a newsletter is sporadic or blog posts are feasts-then-famines, you should take account of that in order to move forward.

3. You would do well to consider training any team members who will be working on content marketing, either with internal experts, an outside training group like the Content Marketing Institute, or a combination of the two. (We’re big fans of CMI here at Room 214.) Even seasoned pros can benefit from a refresher course on best practices for content marketing.

4. Set a goal. What’s the goal for your content? Do you want to increase leads? Build a following on a new platform you’re using, such as Blab? Sell custom training content and videos? Launch a monthly ezine? Your goals may be unique to your firm and its mission, but defining it is an important step.

However: Achieving that goal will take time and you need to cultivate an audience first. Don’t attack that goal full-bore. Keep it in mind as you nurture your relationships with current and potential followers and subscribers.

CMI founder Joe Pulizzi puts it this way:

“We want to build an audience that knows, likes, and trusts us, and then we’re going to monetize that audience. What happens so often is we try to do a content marketing initiative, we get blogs out there, we’re focusing on lead generation, and we try to sell immediately, which is completely the wrong approach. If we try to pull value from that audience too quickly, they’re going to go away. They’re going to say, well, you’re trying to sell to me, I don’t want this relationship.”

5. You must test, test, and test your content marketing and how it meets your goals once it leaves your hands. Is it generating new leads? At what cost per lead? Is there an uptick in subscribers, or influencers who are sharing your original content far and wide? If something’s not working, evaluate if there are ways to improve it, or whether you should move on.

This is the first in a series of blog posts we will share on content marketing. Stay tuned! Feedback most welcome at estutzman@room214.com.