Why documenting content marketing strategy is important

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Content Marketing Documentation

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.

Doing content marketing without content writing

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In my previous blog post I talked about various types of content that you can use to carry out your content marketing strategy. Most of the suggestions in that blog post involve some sort of writing. Whether you write a blog post, an article, an e-book, a case study or an email campaign, writing is involved. What if you are not the writing type and your audience is not much into reading?

This blog post talks about 6 ways to build an audience without indulging in content writing.

Although for many years I have been providing content writing services since businesses these days are looking for turnkey content marketing solutions I’m also collaborating with other content producers that can help you generate non-writing content material such as

  • Infographics
  • Visual data representations and charts
  • Videos
  • Slideshows
  • Podcasts
  • Webinars

Another good way of generating content (that sometimes I do on my own content writing and content marketing blog) is content curation.

It is not necessary that every time you need to come up with original content (although more than 60% content on your website should be original). There is lots of interesting and great stuff being published on the Internet all the time. You can curate those links using your own blog as well as your social media timelines. A good thing about curation is that you can automate some of the publishing tasks by using the right syndication feeds.

Content marketing is all about eking out a presence for yourself and it can be anything as long as it gets the message across and people appreciate your content.

Wondering what type of content you should publish on your website?

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There is no dearth of content publishing ideas once you decide to use content marketing to promote your business, whether you want to publish content on your own website/blog or on third-party websites to gain more exposure (and high-quality incoming links).

As I have repeatedly mentioned on this blog, anything that manifests on the Internet can be termed as content. It’s another issue whether it is solving some purpose or not. An image, a link, a blog post, an articles, a social media update, a mindmap representation, your menubar, a video, a screen cast, a product description page, an FAQs page, everything that comes in front of you is content. So whenever you’re publishing something, you’re publishing content.

Many businesses desiring to use content marketing to promote themselves think that content marketing merely means publishing blog posts and articles and then submitting them to various directories (old world) and social networking websites (new world). Publishing blog posts and articles and submitting them everywhere is certainly one of the main parts of content marketing, it isn’t just blog posts and articles that make up your content. This Entrepreneur blog post lists 101 different types of web content that you can use to build your website.

Dos and don’ts of content marketing from The Guardian

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Content marketing works for some and doesn’t work for some. The reason lies in particular dos and don’ts that some companies follow and some companies don’t. On the surface level, in terms of the attitude of most of the businesses desiring to use content marketing to promote themselves, there is not much difference between content marketing and email marketing. Spam has been the undoing of email marketing. Lack of analysis and strategy is often the undoing of content marketing. According to a live Q&A conducted by The Guardian here are a few things you should take care of while working on your content marketing strategy. You can use these suggestions as a template or a framework and just like you do with a template or a framework, you need to create something unique that specifically works for your business and your audience.

  • Define your target audience/market
  • Create content that helps you stand out from the crowd
  • Create content that establishes trust
  • Create content around topics that are highly relevant, targeted and useful
  • Create a content marketing strategy that helps you compete with big businesses

Let us quickly go through these individual points.

Define your target audience/market

When you are creating and disseminating content, for whom are you doing it? Who are the people who should react to your content publishing and content marketing? Who is your target audience? This is very important to know. If you seriously want to pursue content marketing then it is going to cost you lots of money and you’re going to have to put lots of effort. It’s a full-fledged activity. The result-oriented content marketing isn’t something that you do in your free time. If you apply this logic, your content marketing is never going to work. So take it seriously and when you take it seriously, you need to know who you’re talking to – the sole purpose of publishing content is to strike a dialogue with the people who will someday become your paying customers and clients (or your followers, or your readers, or your listeners). So it is very important to know who those people are.

Create content that helps you stand out from the crowd

The entire Internet is made up of content. Everything you see on your screen is basically content. You are viewing images, you are reading text, you are watching videos, you are browsing Facebook or Twitter timelines, you are going through your WhatsApp messages – whatever you are doing, you are consuming content. With so much content how do people differentiate you? How do they recognise you? This is why you need to stand out. You need to publish content that sets you apart. It is not as difficult as it may seem initially. You just need to develop your voice, your true style, and then stick to it. Think why people would pay attention to your content. What would make your content irresistible? How does it solve people’s problems? How does it deliver what people really want? In order to understand this, understand your target audience (the 1st point) and understand your own business (seriously, there are many entrepreneurs who don’t understand their own business).

Create content that establishes trust

After all it is trust that prompts people to do business with you. If people don’t trust you, how are they going to give you their money or their support? How are they going to support and promote your brand if they don’t have faith in what you say? Remember that even if they are not your paying customers and clients, people in general are going to play a very crucial role in the promotion of your brand in this socially connected world. So whether you intend to sell to them directly or not, gaining their trust is vital for your business. How do you create content that establishes trust?

  • Post important news that can help people
  • Create content that can improve people’s lives
  • Continuously talk to people through your content
  • Create content according to the feedback that you get from your target audience
  • Respond to people’s queries
  • Curate content that people can use to solve their day-to-day problems
  • Be there when people need to hear from you
  • Become a part of their daily routine (they look forward to hearing from you)
  • Publish content in a friendly language

Create content around topics that are highly relevant, targeted and useful

Sometimes, in order to cover practically every keyword that caters to their niche, content marketers publish content relentlessly. They don’t mind if the content is utterly useless. As long as it is getting good search engine rankings and it is getting attention on social media, they’re fine with the content. Such content may get you lots of traffic and even attention from people, it won’t help you improve your ROI. It won’t get you new leads and it won’t get you new sales. In order to have a truly effective content marketing strategy in place, you have to pay attention to relevance, targeting and usefulness. As mentioned above, is your content actually solving a purpose? Now there is a reason I’m using the word “purpose” and not “problem” because not every piece of content needs to solve a problem. It needs to solve a purpose. The purpose can be making people laugh, making people sad (yes, sometimes that’s needed too), jolt them out of their inertia (environmental activism, for example) and yes, solve their problems. In some way, big or small, they should be a “before content” and “after content” manifestation. If your content doesn’t make a difference, it has no reason to exist.

Create a content marketing strategy that helps you compete with big businesses

That is, if you want. Not every small and mid-sized business wants to compete with big businesses – they are quite satisfied with their current disposition. But here what a mean to say is, with content marketing you can easily compete with big businesses even if you are a small business. This is because content marketing democratises the space; how much attention you get on the Internet doesn’t depend on how much content you can publish and distribute, but how much relevant content that actually touches people’s lives you can publish and distribute. The problem with big businesses is that they cannot be flexible quickly due to their bureaucratic structure. For example, if a blog post suddenly needs to be changed, it can be changed for a small business within a few minutes but for a big business, it may take hours if not days. Similarly, it will be easier for a small business owner to directly talk to his or her customers and clients (and audience) compared to a large business.  

More than 140 characters on Twitter; how is it going to impact content marketing?

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Content marketing on Twitter with more than 140 characters

Most people I have come across (especially on Twitter) flinch at the thought of people being able to write more than 140 characters on Twitter. In fact, many believe that a big reason why Twitter succeeds is because of its 140-character-limit. If people are allowed to type more than 140 characters, they declare, Twitter will become just another spam-filled platform where long streams of text will clog the timelines and most of this text will make no sense.

The inherent strength of Twitter is of course it’s short messages. The entire format has evolved around this state of brevity. Even in terms of usability, it is easier to quickly scroll through shorter spurts of text rather than long paragraphs. Yes, images and videos are there that often occupy lots of space, but you can disable them in almost every Twitter app that you use on your mobile phone or tablet.

Twitter would like more long form content published on its website just like Facebook and LinkedIn, according to this Re/Code update. The company is working on building a “product” that will allow people to use the social networking website to post more than 140 characters or long form text. It isn’t very clear whether it will be the users of the “product” who will be able to post long form content while the remaining Twitter users go on using 140 characters, or the facility will be available to everybody.

Longer content means people spending more time on the website and more time on the website means greater ad revenue, or at least this is how the conventional logic goes. Up till now, as you know, long form content is published elsewhere – your own website or your own blog, Medium, WordPress.com, Tumblr and even Facebook these days – and the URL with a small textual description is published on Twitter. So basically Twitter is constantly sending traffic away because the whole purpose of publishing your URL on Twitter is to send people to that URL and consequently, leave Twitter. People are not staying on Twitter longer unless they are engaging in some ongoing conversation. If they come across blog posts and articles on Twitter itself, they won’t have to leave the website.

What does an ability to post more than 140 characters on Twitter mean to content marketing?

In simple terms, there will be another platform at your disposal where you can publish content to promote your business. The true purpose of content marketing is to help people while letting people know from where the help is coming. Marketing messages don’t sell. Relevant, useful content does. So the same philosophy will apply on Twitter when you decide to use its ability to publish long form content for content marketing.

But isn’t it a big hassle to post content on different networks? You might already be publishing long form content on LinkedIn, Facebook and Medium? Of course, then there is also your own blog. After all how much content can you publish?

Personally, I wouldn’t suggest my clients to go for all platforms. For B2B marketing, yes, LinkedIn is important and it is worthwhile to invest in content marketing over there and publishing long form articles and blog posts specifically written for LinkedIn. But for Twitter? I’m not very sure. You may call me a power Twitter user but I mostly use it for political, social and cultural interactions, not for business purpose. For business purpose I use my own blog as well as LinkedIn and I believe the same applies to most of my clients.

Not much data is available regarding how much business Twitter exclusively generates for advertisers and marketers.

Also, I’m not saying that for content marketing you can totally disregard Twitter’s ability to publish long form content. It is hard to predict how everything will evolve. But as of now, even if you decide to post longer blog posts and articles exclusively on Twitter, keep in mind that the audience is used to quickly browsing through shorter updates. The sort of attention people pay to tweets might be totally different from the sort of attention they pay to posts on LinkedIn or even Facebook. So start experimenting with first, one paragraph, then a couple of paragraphs and then maybe a few more paragraphs.

I often suggest my clients to publish long form content on their own website and on LinkedIn and then use their other social media profiles to promote that content. You may do the same with Twitter.

It also depends on your audience. For example if you are an author promoting your books then Facebook would be a better platform and you can start building content over there along with on your own website. If you write business-related books then LinkedIn would be a better platform for you and you should focus on creating long form content on LinkedIn. If your experience of having interactions on Twitter tells you that you are going to get good response by publishing long form blog posts and articles on Twitter, then sure, go ahead.