Benefits of Developing a Marketing Plan
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In this lecture, for my MKTG 3722 class at University of Missouri UMSL, we discuss the ways that a marketing plan can be built to serve business interests, and how it may benefit an organization. -Blogging for Business -Finding a Purpose -Defining Goals & Measurements -Creating a 1-Year Plan -Setting Expectations -Social Media Strategy For more on social and digital marketing, check out Blank Page Consulting, my company, a St. Louis marketing agency at www.BlankPageSTL.com.
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Benefits of Developing a Marketing Plan
- 1. Benefits of a Marketing Plan
- 2. Blogging For Your Business
- 3. FINDING A PURPOSE • Define clear goals for your blog • But just like with business itself, if the blog doesn't have clear goals it'll be left flailing with no clear focus or intent.
- 4. SET COMPANY GOALS • THE CORE PURPOSE OF THE BUSINESS • A clear statement of intent • NOT a mission statement or corporate tagline
- 5. SET TARGETS • Set targets for everyone who works with the blog • Use these targets to measure your success
- 6. DEFINING GOALS • Always ensure that the goals of the blog line up with the business purpose of the company
- 7. BRAINSTORM • How to communicate your core purpose? • What can a blog visitor learn from us? • What do they want to learn? • What can WE learn from our customers? • How can we contribute to the bait in our field • How can we establish ourselves as thought leaders?
- 8. CREATING A 1-YEAR PLAN • Create a 1-year plan with milestones • Everyone knows what they are working towards • Everyone knows how to measure success
- 9. SET REALISTIC EXPECTATIONS • You must invest time and money into your blog • Building immediate interests • Newsletter mention • Industry publications • Launch party • Search-friendly content • Customer testimonials • Answer common questions
- 10. • Boost visits through social media • Evaluation and Analysis • Determine what brings people to your blog • Increase that type of content • Experiment • Triple direct search hits and shares • Revisit and Reset
- 11. STRATEGY
- 12. WHERE DOES THE BLOG LIVE? • Where does your blog live in relation to your other online assets? • Address early in the planning process • Will impact how you handle other online assets
- 13. MAP OUT YOUR ONLINE ASSETS • Make a sketch, use cutouts, etc. • Identify EACH asset • Twitter • Facebook • Intranet • Customer Portal • Main Website
- 14. WHO OWNS THE BLOG? • A blog is like a newspaper or magazine • New Content • Multiple Authors • Contributors • Editorial Hierarchy
- 15. EDITORIAL HIERARCHY • Editor-in-Chief, the de facto owner • Content Manager • Content Editor • Contributor
- 16. CREATING EDITORIAL GUIDELINES• Two Key Components: • List of Editorial Staff • The Principals of Publishing
- 17. LIST OF EDITORIAL STAFF • Clearly indicates key roles and responsibilities • Will need updating whenever there is a change in editorial staff
- 18. THE PRINCIPLES OF PUBLISHING • Adherence to a strict code of ethics is vitally important • Be open about affiliations • Be factual • Correct your errors • Set guidelines for type of content • Images • Links • External Content
- 19. CONTENT CREATION
- 20. CREATING A CONTENT STRATEGY • Finding Your Niche • Researching Your Competition • Re-Define Your Niche if Necessary
- 21. FIND YOUR NICHE • Define key topics • Assign these topics to content managers and contributors
- 22. RESEARCH YOUR COMPETITION • Do they have a blog or social media presence? • What are they talking about? • What are they not talking about? • KEYWORD SPY - FREE TOOL*
- 23. RE-DEFINE YOUR NICHE • If there is a lot of information out there you may need to re-define • Google ad words tools • Shows frequently searched keywords and phrases
- 24. CONTENT FORMATS AND TYPES • Determining Content Formats and Types now will make planning and setup easier down the road • Text, Video, Audio? • Use Images Strategically
- 25. VIDEO • Quickly becoming as important as text • Hard to index • Consider transcribing content for better indexing
- 26. AUDIO • Recent resurgence • Podcasts can be beneficial to some businesses • Consider transcribing content for better indexing
- 27. TEXT CONTENT • News Item • Q&A Posts • Tips and Tricks • Tutorials • Discussions
- 28. RECRUITING CONTRIBUTORS• Create Ownership and Engagement • Contributors can identify • Allow staffers to share expert knowledge • Leverage their skills and include them in the planning process • Identify key contributors • Profile these contributors on your blog • Bio Pages • Encourage contributors to share content
- 29. CREATING CONTENT • Write What You Know! • Answer Questions! • Issue Statements on Hot Topics • Quote Other Sources
- 30. USING IMAGES • What images can you use on your blog? • How to use images
- 31. WHAT IMAGES CAN YOU USE? • Your Own Images • Taken by staff • Taken by professional photographers • Images that are licensed for use • Stock images • Photo Sharing • Creative Commons • **LEGAL DISCLAIMER
- 32. HOW TO USE IMAGES • Add an Image Title • Add an Image Description • Add Photographer Caption when Necessary
- 33. USING VIDEO • If you have the resources and talent, videos can easily become an important asset
- 34. VIDEO SERVICES • YouTube • Vimeo • Paid Video Hosting • VideoPress • Viddler • BrightCove
- 35. 6 TYPES OF CONTENT
- 36. GROUP PROJECTS • ROLES • Editor-in-Chief, the de facto owner • Content Manager • Content Editor • Contributor 36
- 37. GOALS & TARGETS • What are the goals of UMSL Digital Mindshare? • Who is the audience? • Talking points • Content ideas • Measurements • Technology/Methods • Competition Profile 37
Hinweis der Redaktion
- And now for my final tool recommendation – The Message Placemat. You’re pro
- And now for my final tool recommendation – The Message Placemat. You’re pro
- The first and most important step in creating a business blog, is to define clear goals for the blog. This also happens to be the most overlooked component of the planning process, and for good reason. Defining goals for something that just looks like random updates about business related items, seems unneccessary. But just like with business itself, if the blog doesn't have clear goals it'll be left flailing with no clear focus or intent. Defining clear goals for your blog will help in two ways.
- This is where you need to tunnel into the structure of your business and find its core. The best place to start this process is by talking to the people at the center of it all at the top of the pyramid. Owners and executives and also the marketing department. What you're looking for here, is a clear statement of intent, The Core Purpose of the Business. This is often confused with a mission statement or corporate tagline. But these are usually far too vague and aspirational. What you want is the raw purpose of the business. What is its essence? Clearly defining and spelling out the business purpose, the prime objective or goal for a business, has benefits that reach far beyond the planning of a blog. It also provides a new and welcome perspective on the business itself. Simply put, stating out loud while you actually do will help you do it better.
- First, you'll set targets for everyone who works with the blog. Second, you can use those goals to measure your success. How do you define goals for a blog? Well, first you have to establish the goal, or goals, for the business. The blog is there to support the business, so their goals should be in line with each other. So, let's take one step back and look at the goals for the business itself, to find out how the blog can help get the business closer to its goals.
- With the business purpose clearly established you're ready to start defining specific and attainable goals for the blog. The key in this stage is to always ensure the goals of the blog line up with the business purpose of the company.
- To get this process started, brainstorm topics about how you want to communicate what the business does to the web using public. Here, it's important to remember what a blog is, a sharing and communication platform. Therefore, questions to start the brainstorming sessions should point towards active and participatory elements. What can a blog visitor learn from us? What do they want to learn from us? What can we learn from our customers? How can we contribute to the bait in our field? How do we establish ourselves as thought leaders? These goals will help focus the content of your blog and insure that what is published is in line with the overall business purpose of your company. The goals you end up defining will be as unique as your business.
- While conceptual goals, like the ones we've established, are important, it's equally important to set specific goals around increasing readership, traffic, and engagement. I recommend creating a one year plan with milestones, so everyone working on the blog will know what they're working towards, and how to measure success as they move forward.
- When you create your one year plan, it's important to set realistic expectations. And to do so, we first have to understand how the blog will function in the larger context of the online web presence of the company. The web is overflowing with blogs, so merely publishing a blog and expecting it to start bringing in readers is not realistic. To get eyes on the blog, you have to invest time and money in marketing and engagement. And here, as in most things in life, the return on investment is proportionate to the investment itself. Build immediate interests. That could mean getting the blog mentioned in a newsletter, or an industry publication, or even host a launch party. Search engines like blogs because they're continuously updated. And because their content is more organically based. Search engines also rank blogs based on how well they ask and answer questions, and whether people find them trust worthy. An easy way to bolster this is to publish customer testimonials and stories or offer up best practice examples to answer common questions or challenges customers may face.. As an example, it could be published five customer stories or publish eight answers to common questions. A blog is an organic part of the overall marketing and branding strategy for a business. This means the positive influence of the blog does not come solely in the form of direct visits to the blog. It also comes from how the blog content is shared on the web, and how people start seeing that content and the company it came from, as a valued resource.
- Evaluation and Analysis: Once your blog is starting to get traction, and searched and on social media, it's important to hone in on the type of content people are searching for and sharing. And increasing production and publication of that type of content. It often turns out that the type of content you think people want, and the type of content people actually want are wildly different things. For example, identify the three most found and shared articles on the blog to be used as content templates for future posts. The next step is a direct follow up using the data gathered from your evaluation to run experiments on targeted content production. Triple direct search hits and shares for poles based on content templates. Then after the first year- revisit and reset. It takes time for a blog to establish itself on the web, and this time can be used to gather metrics about visitor behavior and interaction, as well as experimentation with different publishing models. At the one year mark, you can look at all the data you've collected and identify what works, what doesn't work, and what can be improved upon. With this in mind you can go back to the first stage and go through the entire process again. From goals, all the way to implementation, and revisit every decision to see if it needs to be revised. A blog, like the web, has to be a moving target. And by making a yearly revisit of every aspect of the planning process, you create an agile process that allows the blog to evolve with the times.
- The question, where does the blog live, might seem a little silly. Well, it lives on the web, on a server, most likely on your server. But that's not what I mean when I ask the question. What I mean is, where does the blog live in relation to your other online assets? This is an important question to answer early in the planning process. Depending on what type of business you are working for, and how that business uses the web, the positioning of the blog will vary greatly. The reason you want to think this through and make a decision about the positioning of the blog. Is that it will impact how you handle your online assets in the future. And it will also impact how the consumers and customers interact with the same assets. The best way to get a handle on your online assets and how they interact is to place them on a map and draw arrows between them.
- This can be done on a sketch, or on a white board, or even using individual cutout pieces for each asset. What you want to do is identify each asset. So your main website, the intranet, the customer portal, your Twitter account and Facebook page, and any other online asset run by the company. Once you have all your assets on the board, start drawing arrows between them to show their current relationship with each other. If your main website has Twitter link on it, use an arrow from the site to Twitter. If your website has a YouTube video on it, use an arrow pointing from YouTube to your website, you get the idea. Now, add the blog into the mix. Either, with a different color, or on a different drawing. Think about where the blog is positioned. Either inside the website, or outside. And how the blog changes the linking between elements. Unlike the main website, which usually is the one way communication stream from the company to the people. The blog can be build around a loser information philosophy incorporating elements like social media, like tweets and Facebook updates. And embedding YouTube videos etcetera. The blog can also be used to point the visitor directly at key assets on the main website. While at the same time adding more information to the discussion or it can be used as the gateway between the business and social media in general.
- If you think about it, a blog is a lot of like a newspaper or a magazine. You constantly publish new content, and you have multiple authors and contributors who create this content. And just like a newspaper or a magazine, you need to have an editorial hierarchy, with clearly defined roles, so everyone working on the blog knows who they answer to. And so, that the editorial decisions are consistent and in line with overall company policies.
- At the top, you will have your editor in chief. This person is the de facto owner of the blog, and is the person who answers for its contents. The editor in chief has final say on what gets published. She is responsible for ensuring that all content is in line with company and blog policies and goals. Finally, she makes sure that the tone and presentation of the content is correct. The second tier is the Content Manager. Responsible for finding and commissioning content for all of or a sub group of topics. The Content Manager would answer to the Editor In Chief and serve as a filter for her. The third tier is the content editor, responsible for receiving and editing content before it reaches the content manager. The fourth tier is the Contributor. This is the tier in which the content itself is produced before being sent to the content editor. These tiers will differ depending on the size of your company. For a small company, one or two people can fulfill these roles, but for a large company it can be a good idea to distribute roles across many staffers. In a real life scenario, the structure would work something like this, the Editor-in-Chief could call for content. The Content Manager would find the right person in the company to produce this content. The Contributor would produce the content. The Content Editor would handle cleanups, revisions, and rewrites. The Content Manager would look over the content, ensuring it's in line with what was commissioned. And finally, the Editor-in-Chief receives the content, checks to make sure it's in line with goals and policies, and tells the Content Manager to publish it to the blog. The reason for this structure is to make sure there's over site at each stage in the process. By clearly defining roles, it will lessen the load on a single person by distributing responsibility across the different tiers. And yes, as you can see, this essentially means there will be a person in your company, whose main focus or sole job is to be the Editor-in-Chief or owner of the blog.
- Creating editorial guidelines for a business blog will help you set the framework for content production. It will also give both content creators and the visiting public a clear understanding of what can be expected from the blog. At the core of editorial guidelines lies two key components, the list of editorial staff and the principles of publishing.
- A list of editorial staff makes it clear to everyone who holds the key roles and responsibilities where publishing the blog and its content is concerned. This list will of course have to be updated whenever there's a change in editorial staff.
- The principals of publishing outline the overall principals the blog adheres to. Here, you should list the principals and philosophies of the company itself and also principals of editorial and journalistic affects. By publishing content, you're taking part in an age-old tradition of information sharing. And it's vitally important that you establish and adhere to a strict code of ethics when it comes to publishing this information. This includes being open and honest about your affiliations, being factual, and correcting your errors. Because you are publishing content online in a social media setting, there are also some other issues to consider. Set out guidelines for the type of content to be published and how specific elements are handled. Including images, links, and content from external sources. The editorial guidelines is in many ways a legal document. And it's important to include management, legal, and marketing in the approval process of the guidelines. Once the editorial guidelines have been completed and approved, provide them to everyone in the editorial staff. All the contributors and other asset holders, post it up in the office, and share it on the blog itself to ensure complete transparency.
- You've now reached the content creation stage. The first step in creating a content strategy is to define a niche for your blog. And from there, define key topics to cover, and assign those topics to content managers and contributors. Finding the niche for your blog can be a challenging task. But it can also be used as a tool to clearly define what sets your company and its expertise apart from the competition. To start the process, you need to define where you think your company's strengths lie in terms of expertise.
- The next step is to research your competition. Do they have a blog or social media presence? What are they talking about, are they providing valuable information about the industry? What are they not talking about? Now, you need to search the web to see who else is sharing information about the same niche.
- If there is lots of information out there already, you need to refine or re-define your niche and do new searches. In the end, you'll have a clearly defined area of expertise that you can excel at without having too much competition. With a niche defined, you can move on to define key topics. Here, I would urge you to pick no more than six topics or categories to be addressed. This will further define your content production and give structure to the blog. To refine these key topics you can use tools like the Google ad words keywords tool, which shows you what type of keywords or phrases people are searching for in Google.
- Before you start producing content it's important to consider, what content formats and what types of content you want to publish on the web. Let's look at formats first. Though the web is text based you can also publish images, videos, and audio on the web with great success. Making a decision about what formats you want to publish, both at launch, and also down the road, will make the planning and set up of the blog easier. And will also allow you to allocate the necessary funds to make each content format successful. The most basic content format is text and it's also the easiest format to produce. Because the web is text based all you have to do is publish the text and it will be found, indexed, shared, and spread throughout the web. Of course, you can tweak your text to be better indexed, more easily shared, and more compelling to the visitor. But the overall production of text is straightforward. Images have always been important on the web, and continue to be so. By using images strategically in your content, either on their own, in a gallery, or as illustration elements in your posts, you'll increase the value of your content. Just remember that when you publish images on the web, you have to have a license to publish them. And apply the correct title and alternate description tags to the images so they are indexed properly. We'll address images in more detail later in this course. Video is quickly becoming as important as text on the web and for good reason. Properly produced and informative video content is easier to digest than text in images.
- And requires less work on the part of the viewer. The downside to video is that it's hard to index, because the Web doesn't really understand the content in a video file. If you want to make videos part of your content strategy, you need to allocate funds for proper video production, including proper audio equipment and editing. And you also need to consider transcribing all your videos into text to be published alongside your videos for better indexing. We'll address videos in more detail later in this course.
- Audio has been around on the web for a long time. And it's having a resurgence today thanks to the new sharing platforms. Depending on the type of business your company is in, launching a podcast, essentially a downloadable radio show on the web can be beneficial. However, like video, audio files require production funds and transcription to be the most effective. So I would only prioritize this content format if it is directly related to your product.
- Let's look at some common content types. The most common content type on a business blog is the news item. Which just like the name suggests, is communication about news and events in the company. While this may be interesting for stakeholders and customers waiting from your products. The news content type has little social and interactive value. To get your customers and the general public engaged, other types of content can have more of an impact. Q and A posts, tips and tricks, tutorials, and discussion pieces tend to get shared more, and also generate discussion and contribution. And if you really want to start a discussion and position yourself in a debate. Opinion pieces can be effective as long as the opinions are in line with the company goals and philosophy. My recommendation is to start with news items and one or two of the active types, tips and tricks, tutorials or discussion. This way you'll be able to share news about the company and also provide content the visitor will want to interact with and will find useful and sharable. Check off the content types you want to focus on, on the content card. Once these types are well established and the blog has some traction. You can allocate resources to start publishing more content formats and more content types.
- Depending on the content strategy and how the business blog will be structured, you need to have one or more people actively creating content for the blog. These people are referred to as contributors. One common challenge in running a business blog is to find the right people to be contributors and also get them to actively contribute. The key to creating contributors is ownership and engagements. Make the contributors take ownership of their content on the blog and feel like their contributions are part of the work identity. You should also engage with the contributors to encourage further contributions. In your company there will be staffers who are experts in their field and who love to share their expertise. These staffers are prime contributor material and they are usually easy to convince to become contributors. Leverage their skills and talents and involve them in the planning process of the blog in particular in outlining the niche and key topics. And ask for their input on what they think would be good content to be shared on the blog. By making them part of the team and giving them a say in what content they should produce, they'll be more invested in the end product. They can tell the public about what they do and also educate the public and the rest of the company. Identify a small group of key contributes distributed across the company and profile them in a big way on the bog. Give them bio pages and columns so they can drag people to their own content and encourage contributors to share their content with co workers and friends and business contacts. Once these key contributors are in place and actively contributing, encourage them to enlist other members of the staff to contribute as well. The key contributors can take on the role of mentors to the rest of the staff guiding them through the process of sharing their know how in an easily digestible way. That way you get more staff interaction and avoid a situation where staffers feel left out.
- A common question when people launch a new blog is what do I write about? The answer to that question is write about what you know. Answer question, all businesses get questions from customers both existing and perspective. Ask questions. Reach out to existing and perspective customers and ask them what they want to know more about. This is a great way to establish a list of possible future blog posts and it also gives you a great indication of what the company needs to put out more information about. Write tips, tricks and tutorials if your business sells a product or service that the customer will use and need training on. Publish tips, tricks and tutorials on how to use the products. If there's a hot topic on the news or in social media that relates to your company or its products or services jump on it immediately. Issue statements, opinions, perspective and facts that contribute to the conversation while at the same time subtlety pointing to the company expertise in the field. Quote others and contribute your own view. Quoting other blogs and online sources with proper attribution and links and then commenting on their information can be both simple and effective.. The originator of the content will also become aware of your presence and be encouraged to interact with your blog. You can also leave comments on the original blog post or source to show you're actively taking part in the conversation and not simply hijacking it. By using these seeds of inspiration, you should be able to produce a wealth of future blog posts and other content without getting frustrated that there's nothing to write about.
- Images and graphics can be used for everything from illustrations to eye candy in a blog. They can even be the main content of a post or be part of a gallery. When using images correctly, they can become an important part of your blog and a reason for people to visit your blog. Let's first take a step back and look at images on the web. If you look at the code of a web page, you'll see that images are actually just links that are replaced by images by the browser. That's why they're referred to as replaced elements. You place a link to an image in your code in the right way, and the browser will find the image and place it on the page. That means you can technically take any image from anywhere on the web and display it on your site. I say technically because, in real life, this is something you should never do.
- So, let's answer the main question first. What images can you use on your blog? The answer is you can use your own images. Ones you or your staff have taken, or ones taken by a photographer hired by your company. And you can use images you have a license to use. Any other image is off limits and should not be used. You can get licensed images from many locations. Stock image companies like Getty and iStock Photo sell image licenses for websites. Photo sharing sites such as Flickr have images released under varying creative commons licenses. Creative commons materials can be used only under the conditions of the specific variance of the creative commons license. For a business blog, the best practice scenario is to only use images either taken by or for the company.
- Once you have an image, you can add it into your blog in a variety of ways. We won't get into exactly where you should place your images in your content. Instead, we'll look at how to properly add them into your content and make sure they get indexed and shared. When you add an image to a blog post, you should always apply an image title, used mainly to keep track of the image within the blogging application. An alternate description describing the contents of the image for search engines and browsers that don't display images. And when necessary, a caption with photographer information, links and other valuable information. This ensures that image is indexed by search engines. And that the information in the image is communicated to the visitor even if the image is not displayed. The alternate description of an image should be applied following these standards. If the image contains information, the text should describe the image. If the image is a link, the text should describe the target of the link. And if the image is for decoration and has no informational value, the alt attribute should be left empty. The images and videos card has information about proper image mark up and how to use the alt tag for quick reference. You should also consider setting the most important or descriptive image as the featured image of the post. This image will be displayed along side the title and description of the post in search engine results, and when it's shared on social media networks. Using images in a blog post the right way can appear tedious at first. But once a system is put in place, it becomes easy and the impact of a great image is well worth the effort.
- Video is quickly becoming as important as text on the web and with good reason. Videos are easy to digest and take less effort to watch than reading an article. They can also be entertaining and informative in a way no written article can. On the downside, videos are expensive to produce, and it's challenging to make them appealing to the audience. But, if you have the resources and the talent to make videos work. They can easily become the most important marketing and communication asset in your overall strategy.
- Whether you want your videos to be public and shareable or private and restricted, there are services that will do that either for free or for a small fee. If you want to go the free route, and you're publishing videos mainly to reach as many as possible, YouTube is a great service. You get the widest reach and many younger people actually use YouTube as a search engine, so you get an added benefit that way. On the downside YouTube is littered with ads and links to other videos from other people. If share ability and viral distribution is what you want, YouTube is the place to be. But there are plenty of other, ad-free, complete-control options available. Worth mentioning is VideoPress, Viddler, and BrightCove. All these are for paid video hosting providers that give you complete control of the content. The downside is that these videos do not distribute as easily and are less likely to give you the potential for viral distribution. Regardless of the platform you use, when you publish a video online you have to keep a few things in mind. Always provide a descriptive video title to ensure people find the video when they're looking for content on the subject matter. Consider providing a full text transcript of each video in the video description, and also in the blog post you embed the video in. This will make it easier for search engines to find the videos. If you're using YouTube or Vimeo, add tags and proper descriptions to ensure people find your videos, and that they're indexed properly. Moderate comments, or turn them off altogether. You do not want the underbelly of YouTube to show up on any page with your company name on it. And finally, remember that as with images, you need to own or have a license to use any video, images or music featured in your videos. The images and videos card has a quick reference guide to how to get your videos indexed on search engines.
- FIRST ASSIGNMENT DUE NEXT WEEK - LIST OF ASSIGNMENT
- What are the goals of UMSL Digital Mindshare? TEAM 1 REPORTER Who is the audience? TEAM 2 REPORTER Talking points TEAM 3 REPORTER Content ideas TEAM 4 REPORTER Measurements TEAM 1 REPORTER Technology/Methods TEAM 2 REPORTER