Trying to implement a content marketing strategy meant to deliver results without documenting the various steps you take and the results that you get is like driving around without knowing where you want to go. Whereas it is fun to drive without knowing your destination you aren’t actually reaching somewhere. You are just burning fuel and if your time means anything to you then you are wasting precious time. The same goes with content marketing. If you don’t know what you’re doing, and still you are doing it, you’re wasting time and money and worse, you might also be harming your business by publishing content that you shouldn’t be publishing.
According to the latest B2B Content Marketing – 2016 Benchmarks, Budgets and Trends-North America report by Content Marketing Institute and MarketProfs the key factors that help businesses succeed at content marketing are
- They have a clear understanding of what successful content marketing looks like
- They have a well-documented content marketing strategy
- They have a clearly-defined editorial mission statement (and they stick to it)
- There is a smooth flow of communication between different content marketing team members
The focus of this particular blog post is documentation and I’m going to stick to that for the time being.
Why does content marketing documentation matter?
According to the report mentioned above, fewer B2B content marketers are documenting their content marketing compared to the previous year (32% vs 35%) despite the fact that 79% of respondents among the successful attribute their success to documentation.
A big reason for the decrease is that content marketing is going mainstream and when a particular trend goes mainstream, even people with, let us say, less expertise, start using it either because of herd mentality (it is working for them so it should also work for me) or they have an idea what they are doing but they have no idea how they are doing it and hence, documenting their steps seems either cryptic or waste of time.
Content marketing is still taken as a publishing activity (strategically placed marketing is missing big time). Keep publishing blog posts and articles that should be “search engine optimized” and then keep posting them on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Google +. This is the basic approach that more than 90% B2B content marketers follow. There is no content marketing editorial calendar. They just have a rough outline of what they should publish in order to cover their keywords.
Is it bad?
It is not as bad as not pursuing content marketing but yes, a lot more can be achieved with little bit of documentation.
What is documentation? Preferably, it is real-time recording (noting down) of events and actions that are happening, how they are happening, what results are being obtained, and what are the changes being implemented based on the results.
Documentation helps you keep track of what needs to be done, how it should be done and what should be done in case the results are not what you expect. Without documentation you lose track of what you’re doing and exactly what you’re trying to achieve.
Is content marketing documentation important only for big businesses?
In order to understand this, you need to first understand what exactly is documentation vis-à-vis your business. Even if you create a small note in Google Keep to schedule your weekly postings and content marketing success metrics that you can observe, it is documentation. It doesn’t necessarily have to be an elaborate document consisting of scores of pages and notes. The entire purpose of content marketing documentation is to help you reach from point A to point B without losing direction and objective. Documentation can be done in writing, by voice recording, by drawing, by taking photographs and by creating videos. The purpose is to help you.