Tag Archives: Documentation

Content marketing should be fun, not stressful

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Content marketing is no longer fun, stressful

There is a reason why content marketing should be fun, not stressful. I will come back to this after briefly sharing with you what my Guruji often says (he is my vocal music teacher):

When you are performing, you are communicating an emotion. In order to communicate that emotion, it needs to exist within you – you need to transmit it to your audience. If you are not enjoying your singing, neither will your audience. So if you want your audience to enjoy your performance, enjoy your performance yourself.

Coming back to content marketing, after all, it is a communication. It is in expressing art. Whether you are writing as a content writer or creating a graphic as a visual artist or creating a video as a videographer, you are expressing, you are communicating a thought or an idea, and your attitude, your inner psychology, mostly unbeknownst to you, permeates your creation.

So if your content marketing is stressful, if it is becoming painful, if you are not enjoying it, your target audience too will not enjoy it.

This Forbes blog post opines that if content marketing for you isn’t fun, maybe you’re overthinking it. Maybe you don’t have a strategy that gives you focus and peace of mind (that comes with a sense of clarity and purpose). Maybe you’re not targeting properly. Whatever are the reasons, your content marketing is no longer fun, it is stressing you out and it shows in whatever you do.

So what should you do to make your content marketing more fun and less stressful?

Personally I would suggest, find a purpose. You will no longer feel stressful if you know what you’re doing, what you are trying to achieve and whom you want to help, and why. Have a documented content marketing strategy so that at every stage you know what you’re doing and what you are accomplishing and accordingly, what you should do.

Also, this I can say as a writer, develop a conversational style. A pedantic style would be boring and uninspiring and it will eventually stress you out. Have conversations with people you are writing for. Keep yourself loose (no, I don’t mean become uncouth). By the end of the day, it will only be effective if your content marketing is fun.

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.

What do you mean by documented content marketing strategy?

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Documented content marketing strategy

What is the difference between content marketing strategy with documentation and without documentation? How can it have an impact on your overall marketing effort? Small businesses that document their content marketing strategy

  • Experience greater success
  • Have a clear idea of exactly what they are trying to achieve
  • Have a well-thought-out plan
  • Rarely run out of content writing and content publishing ideas
  • Whether it is team effort or a single person everybody knows his or her responsibilities
  • Create and distribute content for well-defined personas
  • Have a strategy in place in case the campaign needs to be tweaked according to the attention it is getting or not getting
  • Experience greater ROI
  • Experience improve search engine rankings due to better targeting
  • Have a greater conversion rate both for the website as well as email marketing

Documented content marketing strategy means at every stage you know what you’re doing and where it is going to lead. With documentation comes vision and it also provides direction to those who join later on. Suppose from a small business you grow into a medium-sized business and from a medium-sized business, you grow into a bigger business and all along, you want to follow a consistent content marketing strategy. More people will come on board. How do they know what you have been doing so far and what sort of results you have been experiencing? If you have documentation, they can simply refer to it and come on the same page. They can know

  • What are your business goals vis-a-vis your content marketing strategy
  • What sort of brand story you have been building so far
  • What sort of audience you are trying to reach and how you engage that audience
  • What changes your fundamental content marketing has gone through
  • What content distribution channels you have been using so far and which other channels you’re planning to target
  • What workflows and processes your team is following
  • What strategic changes your content marketing team has carried out according to the web analytics tools you use
  • What sort of customer feedback you have received for your content marketing

Documented content marketing strategy of course takes time and investment because you are not only generating and distributing content, you are also documenting each and every step using a well-define system and if possible, even specialized tools.

60% businesses with a documented content marketing strategy consider themselves more effective compared to 32% who simply implement their strategy without maintaining written, step-by-step records (source).