In this lesson, you will get a better understanding of best practices for creating content. Following the below criteria will help you achieve success!
1. Build Your Content Team
Here are some questions to ask yourself to get started:
Do you have a content manager?
Do you have any existing content you can use?
Do you have a content agency?
What’s your content budget?
Do you have experts internally or should you outsource?
2. Get Perspective: Gather a Content Committee
The biggest mistake most enterprises make when it comes to content strategy is to leave it all up to Marketing. A good content strategy will break down the silos - recruit representation from all of your departments to be a part of a content committee and ask these representatives what goals they care about. This can be over a lunch-and-learn or just casual conversations with each of these leaders.
3. Align Feedback with Business Goals (KPIs)
After gathering goals from all of your department representatives, determine what will be a measurement of success for each of those goals. For example:
Brand mentions and impressions
SEO Rankings and backlinks
Web traffic
Meetings booked
Sales leads
4. Set Goals for Content Creation
Here are some questions to get you started:
How much new content will you be creating?
How much content can you repurpose?
Who will approve content for publishing?
What devices will employees and customers, prospects and recruits use to consume the content?
Will there be multimedia content?
Who does the content research? What tools will you use?
5. Map the Content Journey
Don’t make the mistake of creating content you “think” will interest the reader - find a way to “know” how people are thinking and what they’ll find most useful. Ask questions and look for friction points in the customer’s journey. This data likely already exists in your CRM or customer support system. Each challenge, concern, or question can become great content.
6. Content Should Always Serve a Purpose and Provide Value
Building on the content goals you determined earlier, select which content type would be best for your brand. Here are some different content types you can create:
Blog posts
Downloadable Guides
Video/webinars
Photos
Memes
7. Brainstorm Some Content Ideas:
Building on the content strategy you’ve put together, brainstorm some content pieces. Some of the best content pieces our customers share are around:
Company culture - pictures of employees' work in the office, events outside of the office, employee features, etc.
Industry influencers & media - target specific influencers in your industry and curate their content
Articles - share blog posts
White papers and downloads from your website
Jobs and career opportunities
Industry research - any research or data that’s relevant to your industry helps your employees build thought leadership in the industry
Media coverage - media mentions or coverage are great ways to help build brand awareness and recognize third party validation