“The Role of Content and Storytelling in Today’s Integrated B2C”
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Content Marketing World 2011 “The Role of Content and Storytelling in Today’s Integrated B2C” Michael Weiss, Managing Director, Figure 18 How do the leading consumer brands structure their storytelling within the myriad of choices: print, online, mobile, social, tablets and more? In this exclusive roundtable discussion, we’ll hear what Lexus, Sherwin Williams, Best Buy and other leading brands are doing to set up content marketing for success, giving practical advice all along the way.
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“The Role of Content and Storytelling in Today’s Integrated B2C”
- 1. Content Marketing A Strategy For The Social Web Afternoon Workshop September 6, 2011
- 31. Before we continue… OR...
- 33. Triage
- 34. Last year was a Web 2.0 Induced Haze…. 2010 / 2011 has to be different.... It’s time to bring order to the chaos...
- 40. The People Versus Chick-Fil-A
- 41. PETA Versus DKNY Who’s At The End Of Your Business Leash?
- 45. THE SOCIAL WEB FISHBOWL..... INTERACTIVE EXERCISE #1
- 46. BRAND JAM INTERACTIVE EXERCISE #1
- 47. Goal Was To Strike A Chord How Do We Make This Real In Our Strategy? What is OUR plan? SYNTHESIZE LET’S MAKE IT REAL FOR YOU
- 48. A. Listening… The most important first step in any conversation B. Objective/Goal (Awareness? Loyalty? SEO?) - this is what we’ve just learned.. C. Understand Your Customer (Social Graphics – where are they?) D . Intentions: Your Internal Structure – (Distributed, Central, Coordinated) - There’s a Reason this is CENTRAL E. Define Your Process (who listens, who speaks) F. Define Your Roles (social process, community manager) G. Then…. Tools…. H. Rollout…. Measure… Iterate…. 3 MONTHS TO A SUCCESSFUL BRAND MANAGEMENT PROGRAM
- 49. 1st Step Is To Plan... This builds our case for the business Marketing, CRM, Both or Other Then... Then To Seal The Deal Disaster Mitigation HOW TO SELL THIS UPWARD
- 50. When We Come Back..... BREAK
- 51. - You Should be ashamed.. - I hate your airline - Give him his job back.... - I knew this would happen What WOULD YOU have done?
- 52. INDIVIDUAL CASE STUDY WORKING GROUPS GROUP CASE STUDY WORK
- 53. Make this real in your organization. Download the planning tool and use these exercises Put the plan in place - and use the questionnaire to develop your own social media intentions Revisit the plan often - it’s a process measure its success by what does and, maybe more importantly, what DOESN’T happen WRAP UP
- 54. Robert Rose @Robert_Rose About.me/RobertRose Michael Weiss @MikePWeiss About.me/michaelweiss THANK YOU
Notas del editor
- So, what should you expect to learn by the end of this course… My goal is that by the end of this course – you’ll understand how to create buyer personas, match them up with your sales funnel, and will not only be empowered to create your own content segmentation plan – but you’ll start working with it to generate improved results for your organization…. What’s this going to give you? A much more effective way to report on the efficacy of your content marketing. You’ll be able to show which content is working best for which personas at what stage of the buying cycle. Much greater insight into which content is resonating with your taget audiences – this is THE most effective way to determine what your editorial calendar should look like – and a way to give feedback to your content producers A real metric to give your finance team to build business cases for more spend on content marketing And yet another way to look at your Web traffic, your sales funnel and your overall creative marketing strategy… Okay…. So let’s get started…
- So, let’s start off by asking Why a content segmentation plan at all? We’ve got content – we’ve got web analytics – we kinda know what’s working because we can see what’s the most popular downloads… We can see which blog posts are tweeted more than others… We can see if our case studies are being used – because the sales guys tell us… Right? Well… right… But if you’re a marketer – and you work hand in hand with a sales team – you’ve no doubt hear things like this: “yeah, we’re getting leads from all that content you guys in marketing are writing – but they’re all tire kickers”…. Or, one of my favorites from the sales team is “we don’t need MORE leads… we need BETTER leads….” Or, if you don’t work with a sales team - your boss may ask you…. Why aren’t we attracting more of THIS kind of buyer… Or… Is our MESSAGING wrong… or… who IS our target audience? Or, if you’re preparing a business case to your CFO for more marketing spend – and especially content marketing spend – you better have great answers for why you need more $$$. One of the biggest challenges in putting together a successful content marketing plan is, of course, determining what content to produce. Or, even more challenging – determining which content is driving the best leads. When you have to go and convince someone that content marketing is a good investment – you’re going to need to be armed with how this process is going to affect real business results. You’re going to need specific answers. But sadly – because we most often just throw content up on the Web site and hope for the best, we often don’t have the answers to these important questions.
- Wouldn’t it be nice to be armed with this kind of information What kind of leads is Google PPC (or any tactic I’m tracking) delivering? Are they early tire kickers or last-minute shoppers? At what stage in the buying cycle are most of my content marketing leads dropping in? Which content is resonating best with what part of the funnel? For example, is my “How-To Guide” being used more at the beginning of the buying cycle – or rather to justify putting our company on the short list? And with this information – when that sales guy tells us that we’re only giving him tirekickers – we have two answers for him… We can say Yes, that’s true… And here’s the way to nurture that lead with more content and move them to the next steage. And.. You can also say… But here are the other leads that we’re bringing in later in the buying cycle – and so you might want to jump on these with more gusto… And, finally… when we go to our CFO and ask for more budget for content marketing – we can give her a chart that shows exactly how many leads each content marketing piece is giving us – and where they’re coming into our buying cycle… Is content marketing giving us good leads? We’ll know. So, how to we get to this place… the answer is we map our content to our buyer personas by sales stages… Let’s take a look at what success looks like…
- So… Not to give away the end of our story, but I know one of the things that’s difficult in an online course is to watch each piece as it’s built and then understand the whole all the way at the end… It’s a little like watching a cooking show where they have all the bowls of ingredients and then they mix and pluck and pour into the pan… and then cut to commercial and when they come back there’s a finished dish.. So, before we start building – let’s briefly take a look at the finished product…. So….. We’ll take a look – and I’d also like to introduce a Ficticious company that we’ll use for all our examples today… It’s called WIMPY Tech…. As you can see from their logo they provide Tech Tuesday for Money today… And their product is the windows Integrated Management Program… Or Wimp…. So, we’re going to use them in all our examples…. So, okay… let’s actually take a look at what success looks like…
- Here’s where we’re going with a content map – aligned with our buying cycles and personas…. This is an Excel spreadsheet that we’ll be using throughout today’s course… I’ve created it to show a very simple Content Marketing Segmentation Matrix for our Friends at Wimpy Tech…. Now, we’re certainly going to get into get into much more detail here – but what you’re seeing here is down the left hand side I have my Personas that I’m targeting… Notice they have names and descriptions that immediately tell me who they are…. Then, across the top I have the buying cycle for my product or service… This is from my customer’s perspective and how I’ve learned that they buy the type of solution I offer… And, then you’ll see I’ve also mapped my Sales Funnel created by my VP Of Sales above that so that I can also have a view into where my content maps against that… And finally, you’ll see that I’ve mapped my content marketing into this grid…. And of course there are holes in it where I need to spend time…. Okay… Then, the other piece of this is not only the Content Segmentation matrix – but what kind of learning am I going to get out of that…. Let’s look at a couple of examples of that…
- So… this is just a quick dashboard that I created – again with our Wimpy Tech friends… So, across the bottom what I’ve done is listed out all the content marketing pieces that the WIMPY solution is using…. And you can see that far and away in both the 1 st quarter and 2 nd quarter we get the most leads from our IT Directed whitepaper - Which WIMP is Right For You… This is interesting insight because it tells us a lot of things…. On the left you see for the most part content segmented by our IT Directory… And on the right content segmented into our CFO… this visually tells us something right away – which is we’re defintiely NOT attracting CFO’s… Except for a few with our CFO Publication A content marketing…. So, we should probably look at that more closely and see why it’s resonating so well…. So, again, a simple dashboard…But you can see how it starts to give you insight.. Now one more…
- And this is where we go aaaaah haaa……. Because let’s look at this dashboard for our WIMPY solutions…. This is my Customer Conversion rate by Persona… I’m tracking this by tracking the title of the person we have initial contact with… So, this is the person, or decision maker that we have our first conversations with… Whether that’s in sales or content marketing.. As you can see when we’re obviously talking very well with both – but we’re converting A LOT more of the CFO’s…. But remember we’re not attracting them in with our CONTENT MARKETING Segmentation… So, what’s that telling us… CFO’s aren’t interested? CFO’s aren’t looking? If we focused more on CFO’s we’d get more sales? These are all questions that I’m NOT going to answer today – but this is the KIND of insight and questions that will empower you to make decisions for your own business… As you might expect – there’s much more analysis that we could do with these numbers – but for the sake of time we’ll stop there… That’s a quick look at our finished dish… So, let’s now dive right in and deconstruct all this and start building our content segmentation strategy step by step…. First thing we’re going to do is develop our buyer personas…
- So… developing our Buyer Personas…. Now, before we get started here just know that there’s not just one way to skin this cat… There are a number of great methodologies out there for developing buyer or target personas… I’m going to show you one quick way to do this today – but there are others out there as well…. Just find what works for you… So, let’s start by understanding that You need one persona for every group you are marketing to. For instance, and just to keep this simple… Let’s stay with our WIMPY Technology solution…. We’re the marketing manager in charge of marketing for a technology company – oh and by the way our WIMPY solution stands for Widget-Integration-Management-Program (or WIMP)…. That acronym was there when you joined the company…. So… okay the Solution is marketed to the Director of IT and the CFO at financial service companies, you would have two WIMP buyer personas: a Director of IT at a Regional Bank, and the CFO at that bank. Of course as I’ve said, if you have multiple products or more personas you would identify them separately…. To keep things simple for this lesson we’ll keep it to one product with two buyer personas…
- We have Two Buyer personas here – our Director of IT and The CFO at Financial Services companies… We want to really understand these people… Let’s draw a bit of a personality profile… You can do this by interviewing customers… Or, by interviewing sales people, or talking with prospective customers – or usually some combination of all of that…. So, through that process we might determine that: Our Director of IT – his name is Jeremy – and he’s young (mid 30’s) and he works at an Insurance company. He comes in every day and supports the organization through desktop support – working on their computers and he’s the typical geeky IT guy… Responds well to Email, but not so much on the phone… He’s frustrated because he can’t tie all his office computers together into one dashboard… With his company growing so quickly – he seems to continually be chasing his tail and behind in fixing computers… So, he could see BEFORE a computer crashes that it’s going to crash… That’s where your WIMP solution comes in…. If he could just have that – he’d know BEFORE there were problems and could fix or replace broken computers… So, what’s the GAP with Jeremy – well he doesn’t really know how to build a business case for this. He’s not a business guy – and while he’s seen the Web site for the WIMP solution – he doesn’t really know much about it. So, the USP (or our Unique Selling Proposition) to Jeremy is that our WIMP solution will uniquely enable him to save more than 10 hours per week in saved calls, repair time and waiting for replacement parts. That means we can make Jeremy look like a rock star (his personal win) to his colleagues while we enable him to be 25% more effective at his job…
- Okay, that’s quick – but you get the idea… What we’re identifying in building a Persona is the following… And the way I do it is to remember my old Journalism rules of Who What where When and WHY WHO is the persona – let’s get emotionally attached by giving him a name and making him real. WHAT does he do. What does his day look like – W hat is his normal routine WHERE is his Insight Gap – in other word where’s the gap with our target with and without our solution. How would our solution close that gap WHEN does he he need to close this gap… Is this immediate or is this not a critical piece to what he needs to live his life…. WHY does he care… This is the USP to this target. What can we uniquely to help this person out.
- For the sake of time, I won’t go through the details of our other persona – the CFO – but her name is Cheryl – and our main value proposition is that we’re going to save the entire organizations hundreds of thousands of dollars through the implementation of the WIMP solution. This is a solution that pays for itself in less than 6 months. So, to sum up – what we’ll end up with is a profile of each buyer persona….. And really the key with developing buyer personas is detail…. The more emotionally attached and real you can make these people – the more value they will provide…. Beyond their buying process – understand what’s in it for them... I recommend naming them, personally, and finding a picture to even represent what they look like. This is a great exercise – it’s certainly a fun exercise and the profiles go way beyond just content marketing – they extend well into your other messaging programs as well… Okay… let’s move on now to Understanding our Buying cycle…
- Okay… So, Understanding the Buying Cycle… So, this is a process that you probably already know something about… But in terms of our process… this is two things - our customer’s buying cycle… a process of how your customers buy – and a sales funnel…. Which is how you measure conversion from first awareness all the way through purchase… In terms of how it plays with out content matrix – you have options for how you might structure it… So you can structure it… Just with your Sales Funnel (which is the easiest) Just the customer’s buying process (more accurate but maybe not quite as aligned with your sales team) A mix of how your customers buy your product or service – mixed in with your sales funnel (the most complex and most accurate) Let’s quickly looking at each in context of our WIMP Solution..
- So, we understand that our Sales Funnel – this is usually created by our Sales group – or if we’re looking at ecommerce or other types of online purchases – it’s how you think of moving people through your site… Basically this is how we attract how we get people.. And how we lose people in our sales and marketing process… So, coming back to our WIMPY solution for our target markets we have a fairly simple Sales Funnel process… We have… Contacts…. Which are people that we’ve contacted or have some level of introduction Leads – which are people we’ve identified that have an active interest in our solution Qualified Opportunities – which are leads we’ve qualified as having interest, budget and a purchase of some kind is imminent Finalist – which are qualified opportunities that have reduced us onto a shortlist of one or two options and we are competing Verbal/Contract – where we are the chosen solution and we are in the negotiation process Now your sales funnel may be more complex than that – or less complex than that – or completely different if you’re selling something online to a consumer… But regardless – there’s some level of stages… Maybe it’s Visitor / Consideration / Cart / Purchase / Upsell – there’s some kind of funnel…
- But now let’s look at the Buying Cycle – which is almost always more complex than the Sales funnel… And remember this is how our customers buy from us… What’s their process… For your product or service it might vary by product – or by Persona…. And we’ll talk about that in a minute… But here what you want to do is MAP out how your customers buy from you… And again just as an example and just to keep things simple, and again coming back to our WiMPY Widget company for an example… The customer’s buying cycle looks like this… I’ve represented here as a concentric venn diagram because it’s not necessarily linear – but their focus on what they want becomes more pronounced and what they’re looking at becomes more limited as they go through each phase… Awareness/Education - meaning they’re trying to just understand that there’s the existence of this thing… Information Search / Vendor Selection – Now they’re searching for information and finding solutions for this… this may be the first time you get a phone call RFI’s Pricing / Vendor Information – okay we’re identified – what makes us better… What is our pricing for this solution Purchase Decision – Now a purchase decision… See – in this case and this is a great lesson… Purchase decision making isn’t always the last step… Many times people will go through researchign a solution to their needs – and then decide to NOT make a purchase… But then once they have… they go BACK to vendors and do a Competitive / Alternative Searching – this usuallty ends up with a Short List – where the solutions are looked at very closely and then a contract for the sale… So – that’s our buying cycle mapped out…. Quickly I know – and I’m sure you can see how you could spend a lot of time on this… And how different buying cycles can exist with different products – or even different personas…. This will be up to you to know when to create separate maps for your content… But generally this is a great indicator… If you identify different buying cycles for yoru products – you can bet that you should have a different map to which to apply your content marketing… Okay… so, now let’s move on and talk about putting these things together…
- So… what does it look like…. Well… you might remember our spreadsheet from the beginning….. So, as you can see – we’ve mapped in the Sales Funnel – there in blue withi Contact’s turning into leads and then being qualified and going to finalist – or short list…. And then under that we’ve mapped the buying cycle… Awareness and Education and so forth…. You’ll notice there’s overlap there’s some overlap with our Sales Funnel and the Buying CYCLE… There’s actually a lot more conversion rates – or decision points - through the buying cycle than in our sales funnel… But this gives us a way to start to get a common vocabulary and a common way to map out our content marketing strategy… If we all start talkinga bout building more Webinars to address Qualified Leads who are looking at Alternatives… Now we know… Or If we want to know which content pieces are best suited for those that are still just starting their Information and Vendor search… We have it… And we can target those Leads in our pipeline… And, as I mentioned in the beginning, you don’t have to go to this extent. If you want to map to just the sales funnel – that’s valuable. Or, if you want to map to just the Buying Cycle – that’s the second best… And if you want to go to this extent – you certainly can….
- So, let’s just quickly review…. We first built up our Sales Funnel – either from what we knew or gathering from the processes we use to move people through our marketing and sales process. We documented this funnel and identified all the stages for the various funnel conversions… from first awareness and contact to opportunity to sale… And we identified that this can be applied to any marketing and sales process… Then, we looked at the buying cycle…. Now we understand the buying cycle of our customers… A key here is remembering to identify it by product or by persona and make a determination if we need to separate it into separate maps… Remember, your sales process or funnel – might be the same across ALL of your products and services… But the buying process may not be…. So ask yourself if you need to make separate content segmentation maps for this… So, okay… Now we have our Personas… And we have our Buying Cycle and Sales funnel stages… We have both our X and Y Axes finished… but before we build our content grid… Let’s take a quick look at how we build our content marketing inventory…
- GROUP EXERCISE
- So…. Before I jump into talking about content marketing inventory – just know that this (just like developing content personas) is one of those things that can become a lifelong pursuit…. There are a number of different methodologies used here – and much of this will depend on your appetite for how MUCH you want to know about your content… For example – if you’ve got a big appetite – this may be something you only want to do ONCE – and therefore you’re going to do it right and capture all the information about that content…. A colleague of mine used to say when talking about content inventories that “we have more information about the information than the information itself”… And this can be true…. Take ten pieces of content – add in what we’re adding in – including buying stage, sales stage and persona tags – and then also add in, type (ie is it a PDF of word doc or Webinar) and then add in product tags, date tags, expiration tags, other tags that let people know how it can be reused – you get the idea – and you can wind up with a HUGE spreadsheet… Generally though – the idea here for our purposes… is to identify all of the content marketing pieces that we have available.. And remember Good enough can often mean good enough… But that means everything from Whitepapers, to case studies, to success stories, to webinars, to product information sheets, to blogs, our Twitter Accounts, our CEO’s article in that online magazine – all of the original content that we’re publishing… Then, matching that with enough tags that we can use it to repurpose or re-package that content at a glance…. Let’s take a look at that…
- So, this is a simple content inventory – and I’ve kept it simple on purpose… What you see there on the left is just the number to give us a count – then the title of the piece – and then the author – and then a Category (in this case it’s basically Corporate or Product or Marketing oriented – and then whether it’s a technical piece or not – and then what type it is… This is whether it’s a Whitepaper or a webinar or the blog or social media… This inventory gives me some flexibility for repackaging and means I don’t’ always have to remember…. Because if I’m only looking for marketing white papers authored by Jane – it should be pretty easy to just sort on those…. Now, your categories again may be much more complex and robust than this – or even much more simple… The key here is to get enough information so that it’s useful – but not SOOO much that this becomes an unending chore…. This can also be improved over time… And it’s about to get a whole lot more useful as I apply it to my Content Marketing segmentation strategy….
- Okay…. It’s time to build your content segmentation grid. This is the meat of the exercize and really what we’re trying to accomplish…. So, we’ve learned We’re going to do this along two axes. The first axis is the personas, and the second is your sales funnel and buying cycle. So…. For the following example, we’re going back to our WIMPY solution and we’re going to assume that once a persona or prospective customer has given us Verbal – that we stop marketing to them… So, we’ll stop here at Verbal/Contract… But… We’ve got Jeremy and Cheryl our two personas listed here… And the sales stages across the top and the buying cycle under that… So, here’s our GRID… And what goes in the Cells? Well, that’s where you start identifying your inventory of content. So, going back to our WiMPY Widget company…. Let’s look at our current content marketing inventory…
- And with our content inventory let’s build our content segmentation grid. Along the left we have our content inventory and we’ll just apply it into the appropriate cells within the Content Segmentation Grid… Relatively straightforward – and bound for a few fun debates about where content should belong. The key here is consistency. As we pluck each piece from our inventory and place it into our Content Marketing Map…. Don’t worry about holes just yet. Just know that having holes is definitely okay – and you’ll also almost assuredly have LOTS of top funnel stuff and probably more for one or two personas rather than others…. The key is just be hontest with yourselves and apply the content into the grid consistently…. So…. Okay, we’re almost here now…. Now we know what we’re doing and we’re building our Content Mapping and Segmentation strategy…. Now our next step…. Is to See how we’re going to fill those holes….
- Fill in the Holes of Your Content Map Now of course, one of the conclusions you’ll have when you are starting (or continuing) to develop the wonderful content that will fill in the holes of your content marketing strategy is that you need to write more…. But in the mean time, don’t forget to leverage the content you already have. One of the things you’ll definitely notice is that some of your content produces LOTS of results – and some wont’ produce any.... And One of the benefits you have from doing the content inventory exercise is that you’ve got at least some idea of what you’ve got now… And you can re-package and re-use content in many cases for multiple purposes…. You’ll be surprised at how some poor performing content might really improve if it’s re-targeted to another persona or deeper in the funnel….
- So for example let’s go back to our good friends at the WIMPY technology company… Remember that one of the White Papers we keep talking about was one focused on Efficiency and saving money… Since it had to do with dollars and cents – we plugged it into Cheryl’s persona – and we made it top of the funnel – where a CFO looking for a solution will probably come in and want to educate themselves… But here’s the thing… Remember, Jeremy’s path through the same buying process is a little different…. At some point a little deeper in the funnel, he’s going to have to go get permission from Cheryl (or somebody like Cheryl) to spend this money…. Jeremy may need to also build a business case… And that may be something we want to test… So, let’s just look at that white paper – make sure that we’ve got the content in an appropriate tone for Jeremy – and let’s just retitle it so that A) we know it’s different… And B) so that it’s appropriate for that persona… and, we can then simply plug it into the top Middle of the Funnel – in the Information search part of the buying cycle… We’re helping Jeremy to ultimately facilitate a purchase decision… So… Okay…. We’ve now learned how to build our grid and start filling in the content holes…. Now we need to measure what’s resonating and show our success…. Let’s take a look at that…
- Analytics is a BIG topic – and modifying what you have I understand is not always the easiest thing to do…. But by developing a quick and easy way to understand what type of leads you’re attracting by which tactic, you can now see which content is resonating best with your target audiences. This is one of the biggest benefits of content segmentation. I don’t have time today to walk you through a complete Analytics demonstration – but whether you’re using Google analytics – or another system – there are keys and philosophies that you want to try and strive for… Let me explain a few of them…. First, measure engagement by content and by title… This is one of the easiest things you can do – because this is just looking at the popularity of your content. What content is most popular. But then of course – you want to undertstand what persona is reading which content…. To understand this first understand that there are known visitors and unknown visitors…. The VERY BASIC way to understand personas is to make some assumptions about the content and watch where that traffic is coming from…. In other words – if you see your WhitePaper on ROI being downloaded – and hyour making people register for that download – watch the TITLES – track the TITLEs and see if it’s attracting the right persona… But then begin to explore tools that track known visitors… There are now tools that allow you to track both known and unknown visitors after you assign them an attribute… An example might be a big BUTTON on your web site that says FOR FINANCIAL INFORMATION CLICK HERE…. Then, people clicking there are given the attribute of a financial persona….. Or, for example in an ecommerce site, you might be able to distinguish between MEN and WOMEN depending on which department they go to….. And, yes, there are inconsistencies with all of these strategies – because it’s the internet… Lastly start to explore tools that allow you to tagging your leads once you know something about them. At that point when they’ve told you something about themselves – either bvecause of registration form – or because you know something about them inherently – tag your leads. This will give you that first engagement metric….
- Here’s the key though…. The more you explore different analytics tools and apply it to your content the better… But All of the meaningful insight can be gathered separately… You don’t need a fancy analytics tools to look at your customers that you’re closing and determine which persona they fit in… Or talk to the sales people to determine what the customer’s buyign cycle was…. Understanding where your CUSTOMERS are coming from is what’s key… Also… and maybe most importantly… Segmenting the CONTENT.. And BUYING CYCLE… And then applying referral traffic to it to lay over your content mapping is what’s going to help direct your editorial efforts…. For example, you may find that you’re getting a TON of downloads for content directed at the top of the funnel, but none of the CFOs that you’re closing are finding any value lower in the funnel. Or, you may find that GOOGLE PPC ads are giving you a lead for someone who is much higher in the funnel (i.e. awareness), and organic search is giving you more “opportunities.” How does that insight for helping you direct media dollars? Or, you may find that ALL your Directors of IT are coming into the middle of the funnel, and all that time you’ve been spending on education and awareness would be better spent on developing more valuable deep funnel content like demos, free trials and samples. This is a good way to start to think of it…. Your Content Marketing BECOMES YOUR CAMPAIGNS – so you can start to set up separate ad campaigns, SEO efforts and PPC campaigns directed toward the titles of your content… This in turn tells you which one turns in the leads… Remember our chart from the beginning of the course…. We can generate this chart because we can track leads… And we can tag leads with what campaign (which we see as an attribute of that piece of content). And in this case we know that our IT DIRECTOR WHICH WIMP Solution… Generates a LARGE number of leads…
- Here are a few major takeaways that s of going through the content segmentation and mapping exercise: Develop Your Personas – but don’t belabor the personas…. Develop your persona profiles but get them done. Don’t worry about complete accuracy and every granular detail. If you skip though, make a commitment to improve them over time. So, either do the work up front or devote time every week/month to improve the accuracy. The buying cycle is very important – and understanding it from your consumer’s p.o.v. rather than what might be your sales stages is importanht. Bonus points for doing both, but understand this well. Getting this right will be hepful in both measurement – and improving your conversion rates. When you build out the content segmentation grid – resist the immediate temptation to throw your most valued piece of content marketing at every stage. Where does it REALLY belong. Better to have holes and know you have holes – rather than pretend you don’t. When filling those holes in your content map – the more you identify here the better. Everything goes in here including Educational content to case studies to your blog, to your email newsletters and your product pages on the Web site…. This process will also usually help identify a gaping hole in your Web site structure. Get ready to be surprised at the gaps in your content.
- While you don’t want to just throw content into segmentation holes, Don’t be afraid to reuse and repackage valuable content – simply retitle and repackage that content. It’s a fine way to address a unique buying cycle persona’s need. Because of all the different tools out there, Measuring may be the most difficult part to implement given your current setup. The exercise is still worth going through even if you can’t ultimately measure at the Content Piece level… But see if you can’t also segment your content with your Web analytics so that you can track from click to close for customers… And Withi Measurement Don’t forget about multiple attributions… Remember it’s not a onesize fits all… A customer may come in through yoru education piece – but be convinced to purchase by a sales person – or by some piece of content that appears much further down the funnel. Don’t just assume that it’s all because of the education pieces… understand the power of your sales team, your case studies and ALL of your lower funnel content. It’s often the most neglected areas…
- The critical thing here is not to get lost in the analysis . This process isn’t the end-all-be-all answer to your content marketing segmentation strategy. Recognize that your results may be slightly skewed by how you’ve repurposed the content, your titles and how you’re segmenting. But like all things – this is a process – the first time you do it – it can be quick and rough… And the second time it will be better. And the third time it will be… well charmed… I’ve seen this process work in as little as a couple of weeks – and trust me – it can have a huge impact and great results.