If you’ve ever tried to create and implement an effective content marketing strategy you’ve quickly realized there’s a great deal of skill involved. The skill involved is often very hard for most companies to find because although they have the industry knowledge, they often lack the insight into best practices and strategy that an experienced content marketing agency possesses.
RECOGNIZING THE MANAGEMENT ISSUE
The biggest hinderance to implementing an effective content marketing strategy is the absence of a point person. Without a team-member designated to wrangling internal thought leaders, managing internal approvals, and ensuring the messaging ties back to the company’s overall business strategy, content marketing programs can quickly get off-track.
Maybe it’s simply the misconception that content doesn’t have to be project managed. Or, it could be a lack of both financial and human resources.
Whatever the case may be it’s important to realize that an effective content strategy MUST be proactively project managed in order to be effective.
ESTABLISHING COMPETITIVE VALUE
Once you have a designated point-person to manage your content strategy you need to focus on articulating your competitive value in the marketplace. It’s important to look at the problem from a messaging perspective first. What is helping to position your product or service in the market? This is a key component to establishing strong brand messaging and one you’ll definitely want a skilled content marketer to help you with.
A great way to approach this step is to put yourself in a sales context and ask a few questions. What areas of your industry and offering are you continuously educating your clients about? What are the things that clients frequently ask? And, is there a correlation there thats helping you establish a competitive advantage? Centering your mindset around a sales perspective will ensure that your messaging is geared towards your client in a way that is advantageous not only to them but to your company too.
THINK LIKE A PUBLISHER
Probably the hardest thing for most of our clients to do is put themselves into a publisher’s mindset. This is a crucial step in gaining the most traction with your content marketing strategy mainly because it really drives home the need for effective project management. Can you imaging a major publication not having an editorial calendar? It would be chaos! It’s easy to see how if you’re strategy is following the industry best practice of blogging once per week how this could easily become overwhelming without both a point-person and content calendar to aide you.
When you’re developing your calendar focus on topics that your clients would want to read about. Ask yourself, what’snewsworthy about our firm, market, and offering? This is a great opportunity to get things in front of your clients that creates interest, educates them, or is related industry news.
WHAT DRIVES RESULTS
The answer to what drives results for an effective content marketing strategy is simply a well executed project management capability. Partnering with an experienced agency gives you necessary management capabilities, along with the expertise to help you develop messaging around your value, and the experience to help you “think like a publisher.”
Partnering with a skilled integrated marketing team like Marketing Refresh gives you the capability of implementing best practices and strategy into an industry context in a much more impactful way.
