Creating a content development strategy is one of the easiest ways to get the most out of your content marketing efforts, but it’s also one of the most easily overlooked. When you’re focused on getting the next thing done on your to-do list, taking the time to evaluate what you’re doing and why isn’t at the top of your priorities. Whether you’re blogging to support your sales team, or you’re building a brand from the ground up, these seven tricks will help you create a content development strategy flexible enough to grow with your objectives.

Align Your Goals

Seems simple, right? But nailing down both your departmental goals as well as your overall business objectives is huge. Sometimes lead generation isn’t the answer; sometimes you need greater awareness or reduced customer attrition. Knowing both what you need to focus on and what’s keeping your boss’s boss up at night is the key to create a strategic content marketing program.

Understanding business objectives is one of the first things we focus on with our clients. It’s one of the reasons why our proposals include a large discovery section and only an idea of the work we might do together. Until you know where you need to go, it’s tough to find a way to get there. I can give you best practices until the cows come home and then leave again, but the best strategy is going to be rooted in your goals.

Find Your Hidden Resources

This was always one of my favorite stupid human tricks when I worked client side. I used to worm my way into the hearts of IT and make friends with my sales team. I’d badger my product managers and stalk my account leads. I’d bake for my customer reps and push my way into meetings of kinds. I was That Marketer.

When you remove all of the business gibberish, we tell stories. It doesn’t matter if you’re in marketing, PR, or HR. We’re all here telling a story about the organization for whom we work. Those stories can come from surprising places. Think about who talks to your clients, customers, or prospects daily. Who knows their pain points? Who answers questions day-in and day-out? Find those people and pick their brains (gently). Save their words, learn their language, and connect that to your strategy. Infuse the data-driven side of your content strategy with the very human side of those stories.

Set Your Pace

Think about the last big project that you never finished. Maybe it’s the deck in your backyard you meant to update or that sewing project you started a year ago but never quite got to. You were so motivated when you first started, but life took over, and it fell to the bottom of your list. It happens. And that project stares at you like a lost puppy, just begging to be completed.

Content development strategies are big projects that live on the fringes of our daily work. My to-do list is primary evidence of this. What’s the one thing that just never gets finished? Content. Blogs, social media, downloadables, case studies… all of it cycles through my email until it’s completed, and I need to start the next one. On our agile board, those post-its are the matriarchs of my time: they sit there, staring at me, daring me to ever move them to complete. And unlike most significant projects, they don’t have an endpoint. Wouldn’t it be great if they did? Write two blogs this week, done for life! SEO completed. Take that content marketing! 

The worst part is that you may feel like you’re failing if you don’t set a giant goal driven by 72 statistics and a pace that would set the world on fire. It would be utterly fantastic if we all had time in the day to match that kind of speed- or if we had a large team and a budget to rival that big sports stadium downtown. If we had leadership that understands the six-month lead time between content production and results, O’Keeffe would probably be out of business if that were the case. Content production farms – it’s the future!

The reality is that the best pace for your content development is the one you can stick to. Maybe you’ll be able to post five days a week in the future and maybe you won’t. Perhaps you can only really do one blog per month, but that blog is going to be well-researched and aligned with your goals. That’s okay. Quality is so much better than quantity, and a consistent pace matters more than bursts of content with a sad desert in between.

The real answer is that something is better than nothing- and a regular, well-done something is the best of all.

Get Inspired

I’ll admit it: sometimes I stare at my keyword research and my eyes glaze over. Blah blah, SEO, blah blah, gated content, blah, blah lead gen. Research the keywords, write the content, post the content, optimize the content, track the content, share the content. It’s kind of sad, eh? We find this amazing thing, this content marketing thing, and somehow us former English kids who were told we’d end up living in a box proselytizing about poetry, are somehow paid for writing for a living, and we get annoyed with it.

We get paid to write. Isn’t that the most fantastic thing? I remember the first time someone offered me a job as a copywriter (shout out to Chris for plucking me out of project management). It blew my mind. And we’re all like that here at O’Keeffe. We all have these stories of finding our way in communications and realizing that this was the thing we wanted to do with our lives. Book nerds, media nerds, hunting down the most exciting tales and finding a way to get paid for it.

You have to find the truth of what you’re writing. Go beyond your audience, beyond your research, beyond best practices. Whom are you writing for and what do they care about? Why does it matter?

Write It Down

I know what I’m doing, you say. I’ve got a spreadsheet, and I’ve sent emails. In the business world, that’s about the same as a blood contract. And yet documenting your content development strategy matters. There’s a massive difference between thinking you know your plan and working out the details in ink. Outline who your brand is, whom you want to talk to, and what they care about. Detail why it matters. Create a nice little one-pager (or three-pager, we don’t judge here) and save it.

I can’t tell you how many times we’ve created a content marketing strategy for a client and then six months later, some yahoo from accounting is confused about why we’re spending so much time blogging. This is why, my dear yahoo. Because these are our goals, this is our strategy, and this is why it matters.

Here’s our favorite template: Content Marketing Strategy Template

Determine KPIs

Ah, those famous key performance indicators, drivers of some of the most inane business conversations that I have had the displeasure of having. But we need them. They’re the bumpers to our terrible bowling, the speeding tickets to our lead foot, and the fences to our furry squirrel hunters. When you can go anywhere and do anything, you don’t have a sense of where you need to be. (Didn’t think I could get all esoteric on KPIs, did you?)

KPIs are the corn starch to your sauce: they hold it all together. And laddering your KPIs into your business strategy is the best way to understand how your glorious content development strategy is performing. You need a dash of common sense and some patience to make this work because the fact is that you can track anything and you might end up tracking everything. 

Cut through the noise and figure out what matters to your bottom line.

Analyze and Test

So you went through all of this, and you’ve got a strategy, and it’s full of KPIs, and you’re making that sweet, sweet content happen. You’re done, right? Incorrect, my amigo. Now is the fun part! It’s time to start playing with your strategy and testing what works better. Generally speaking, you’re going to stick to that A/B test (in other words, change one thing and see if said change makes things better or worse- “things” being KPIs) because multivariate testing always makes me want to call my old stats professor from grad school. If you’re very enthusiastic about this part, you can even test for statistical significance if your sample size if hard enough. And if you’re frowning right about now, you can squint at your results of less than 100 and say very sagely, “this isn’t large enough to be statistically significant, but that’s an interesting result.”

What’s Next

So that’s all I’ve got — your seven tricks to creating the best content development strategy. If you’d like a free analysis of your current strategy, let us know. We enjoy answering questions, and we know sometimes your budget isn’t quite there to hire an agency yet.

Are you speaking to your audience?

As marketers, we survive and thrive on what we’re able to help our organizations sell. Thus, for many of us throughout our careers, our sales counterparts…and sometimes we…are schooled in one sales technique after another.

Solution selling, for instance, is one popular methodology, which is driven by the idea that sales’ job is to help solve problems we believe are plaguing our consumers. Another method is Target Account Selling, which is focused primarily on converting smaller customers into larger customers.

These and most of the myriad other sales techniques can be effective, and each has its place. However, none are foolproof and often rely on both Sales and Marketing, making educated assumptions about their prospective customers. Each methodology can benefit from incorporating one science-driven reality that many of us still neglect. “Consumers buy because they find a product or service appealing to them, and they believe the information they receive about that product or service.” This means that organizations trying to sell their wares must find consumers who are naturally inclined to want their products or services or who, due to some external circumstance, are currently looking for the product or service being offered.

The Learning Pathway

The concept is simple. Humans are hard-wired to buy, and our decision to buy is driven and exhibited by a necessary behavior. Psychology Today describes this behavior as the Learning Pathway, and breaks it down as follows:

“A customer must learn about a product or service and relate it to their specific situation. There are three learning domains—Cognitive, Constructivist, and Experiential—that guide our buying behavior. The buying journey begins with the Cognitive domain, which is the intake and assimilation of new information.”

In 21^st Century marketing terms, “new information” can be referred to as “content.” This is where marketers figure into the sales mix. We fill the role of researcher, compiler, translator, and distributor (or conveyor) of new information in the form of the content we create. This means we need to arm our salespeople with the most current information translated into the most compelling content delivered using the most innovative and measurable tools.

According to a 2016 Demand Gen Report, 47% of buyers viewed 3 to 5 pieces of content before engaging with a sales representative. Translation: nearly half of the consumers felt the need to research before buying. Moreover, where did they go for this content? In today’s world, their content channels could include blogs, traditional media, infographics, Twitter, videos, email, whitepapers, presentations… Shall I go on?

That same Demand Gen Report also noted that 96% of business-to-business (B2B) buyers want content with more input from industry leaders. Translation: buyers want to know what those they respect say about the products or services they’re considering purchasing.

Marketing automation leader HubSpot reported in a 2016 survey that 62% of consumers prefer to consult a search engine to learn more about a product rather than talk to a salesperson. Only 29% prefer a sales pitch.

Furthermore, a 2017 study conducted by the Content Marketing Institute found that content marketing gets three times more sales leads than paid search advertising. Translation: quality content published regularly motivates consumers to buy exponentially more often than traditional paid search campaigns. This statistic flies in the face of what we marketers have been taught for more than a decade of 21^st-century marketing.

Focus on the Message

So, what does all of this mean to you? Well, if you’re trying to sell something, you need to focus as much, if not more, attention on how you market your product or service as you do on how you sell. Also, while your core business might be the manufacture and sale of widgets, you also need to consider yourself a publisher of information about the widgets you sell. The more accurate and compelling information you can create (or repurpose from and attribute to other sources) and distribute, the more opportunity consumers will have to find your content and the more motivated they will be to buy from you.

As we come to understand the buying behavior better, we must be willing to change our practices when it comes to selling and marketing. Fortunately, at no other time in history has it been more accessible, quicker, and more convenient to produce and distribute content. We can take advantage of today’s technology to disseminate information about our brands, products, and services. We can control where, when, and how we find our prospects and target our information. So we can take comfort in knowing one proven truth about behaviors: they can be trained.

Have you ever thought of a brand as not just representing a product, but an entire industry?

I grew up in the Midwest, where asking for a “coke” meant more than just a Coca-Cola. In Dayton, Ohio, a coke, at least in the 70s and 80s before the onslaught of alternative sodas, energy drinks and flavored waters, could have been any one of the half dozen soft drinks that existed in my sugared-water world. The Coca-Cola brand had risen far above its productized state. To my family, friends and me, it “was” soft drinks. When asked for a “coke,” the salesperson would ask, “Which do you want? We have Coke, Pepsi, 7-Up, Mountain Dew and Dr. Pepper.” That reality, for Coca-Cola at least, must have given new meaning to the tagline, “Have a Coke and a smile.”

Driven to Succeed

What brought this bit of nostalgia to mind for me was a recent article I read about The Michelin Man. The article explained how Michelin first came up with The Michelin Man in 1894. One of the Michelin brothers noticed that the pile of bicycle tires displayed on the Michelin stand at the Lyon Universal Exposition in France looked like a man made of tires. (By the way, tires then were a pale white color, prior to the black die being added to make them the color more familiar to us today.) The company adopted the likeness, and in 1898 featured The Michelin Man in his first poster. Over the years, The Michelin Man evolved as tastes changed, and of course became synonymous with automobile tires, rather than bicycles. Believe it or not, initially, The Michelin Man drank and smoked cigars—two traits that would never pass muster today. But that’s the thing about a strong brand…it’s not afraid of change, and it knows when and how to remain relevant. Thanks to that self-awareness, along with the company’s ability to expand into a global supplier of quality tires, Michelin largely defined the tire industry, and later the automotive industry. The proudly plump mascot even transcended automotive to represent travel, fine dining and all things top quality for consumers around the world. Michelin accomplished this by understanding their industry and their customers (“Hey! People like to get in their cars and go out for a nice dinner. So, let’s create a list of the world’s finest dining establishments. And we’ll call it the Michelin Guide!), which drove them to not only innovate, but to build a personality around a character that began as a simple pile of tires thrown together for an industry trade show.

The Search is Over

Of course, we can’t discuss brands that outshine their competitors without acknowledging the brightest bulb in the room—Google. When we need to find a product, need a quick answer to our Tuesday night trivia (while the other teams aren’t looking, of course) or just have to know what people are saying about us, we google it. We’ve become so used to using Google for our searches that we’ve turned the monstrous noun into a verb. My computer’s spell check feature doesn’t even bother to point out that I’m spelling “google” with a lower-case “g.” After all, when’s the last time you heard someone say, “I’m going to search on Yahoo!” or “I’ll Bing it?” Just doesn’t happen anymore. Did it ever, really?

More Than Just a Noun

Perhaps that’s the key…to defy the rules and norms of grammar. Choose a brand name that functions equally well as both noun and verb, and could even get by as an adjective on occasion. Then, within your content marketing strategy, position your brand name to fill in for a commonly used and more generic-sounding word or colloquialism. When’s the last time you sneezed, and someone said, “Here, have a Kleenex,” and handed you a box of tissues that could have been any one of a number of alternatively branded facial tissues?

If You’re Not First, You’re Last

Please excuse the Ricky Bobby quote, but it’s true. Or, at least, it used to be true. Those brands that were first to market in their industries, or at least made a better first impression within their markets, became the default generic brands for their industries. (Kimberly-Clark invented facial tissues in 1924 and brought them to market as Kleenex. But Ginger ale, Root beer, and Dr. Pepper all preceded Coca-Cola as soft drinks. And Charles Goodyear invented vulcanized rubber in 1839 but died 40 years before his name would be attached to the famous tire. It wasn’t until 1888 that John Boyd Dunlap became the “second” inventor of the pneumatic tire.)

Today, as marketers, we continually hear how times are different, and to succeed we must think differently, act more quickly, find new ways to attract and speak to our customers, and leverage technology to help us differentiate ourselves. That all is true, but it’s not so different from how our predecessors did it a century or more ago. They identified opportunities, and they embraced them. As times changed, their brands evolved with it, making sure to make all the relevant changes while retaining those key traits that continue to position them as leaders in their respective industry.

While luck always plays a role to some degree, we must keep our eyes and ears open for opportunity, and grasp that opportunity to define not just ourselves to our customers, but define ourselves as the brand in our market.