Bright Inbound was honoured to be featured alongside other thought leaders, such as Joe Pulizzi, Michael Brenner and Jay Baer in this year's 50 Content Marketing predictions for 2014 published by the Content Marketing Institute. Get your copy of the 2014 predictions here.
As I went through all these really great predictions there were 5 things that stood out for me if you're looking to effectively execute on your content marketing plan.
- Have a content strategy - it doesn't need to be War and Peace, but you do need to have an understanding of who you are speaking to, i.e. buyer personas and what types of content you need to be producing mapped to the buying journey. No more random acts of content creation.
- Marketing automation - To effectively scale, execute and measure a content marketing program you need to have marketing automation technology. As content marketers, we have to connect content production with lead generation and nurturing campaigns and with sales lead goals, for both improved content marketing and to demonstrate content success and ultimately ROI. We must measure the success or failure of each content asset to ensure that we can speak in the language that the c-suite understands. It's almost impossible to do this without marketing automation software.
- Write what you know - an authentic voice and transparency are becoming more important. In a world that is inundated with blogs that are mass-produced or generated for SEO purposes an authentic and consistent voice is something that can set your content program apart from all the other noise. The simplest way to do this is to write what you know and tap into the resources in your organisation to write what they know. I often interview sales staff and executives within organisations and use those interviews to create blog articles, or bundle up multiple interviews into an eBook.
- Align with sales - the sales team is the best source of content ideas. They are on the coal-face meeting prospects and customers every day. They know the questions that customers are asking and the objections that are raised. This is a rich source of content that can be continuously mined. The other benefit of creating content this way, is that it can be used in the sales process to establish the company as thought leaders "you wrote about that last year and I'm only hearing about it now?". This can help the sales teams to attain trusted advisor status.
- Get organised - Content marketing can swiftly turn into a hungry beast. Once you get started, there is a constant demand for more, more, more. You need to be organised to handle the demand and priortise effectively. Now I love a good spreadsheet probably more than I should, but managing editorial calendars with Excel can quickly become unwieldy, time-consuming and not much fun. At Bright we've just started using Trello to manage our content projects with clients. The dynamic drag and drop "card" nature of the solution is really easy and fun for people to use. It's become the cornerstone of our regular status meetings.
So are you ready to get moving on executing your content marketing plan? Or is it all too hard and time to go back to blowing-up balloons at tradeshows.
