Content Strategy

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Content marketing is driven by a single idea:  
If you produce and share great content you ultimately become an authority in a speciﬁc
ﬁeld. Depending on your content strategy this could mean, becoming a though leader,
build reputation or relationships that will result in activating customers, drive sales,
create loyalty and advocacy. Aka more customers and better customers, the ones who
remain customers, and send you more customers.
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Recent polls among Chief Marketing Officers show, that they believe in Content
Marketing as a key for growing a successful business in a global multi-connected
economy. Seth Godin, who said „Content Marketing is the only Marketing left.“ would
possibly be delighted by the pace companies are adapting this mindset lately. He might
also agree that there’s still a huge gap between the companies who want and the ones
who master it. Or as Contently puts it straight in its Beginners Guide to Blogging and
Content Strategy in 2011: „Most companies suck at content“.
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Reasons companies suck (from my own experience):
★ They are paralyzed, they just don’t know how-to and where to start
★ Consumers are connected, companies are not, most still think and act in silos
★ What they still care most about is getting their Brand Message through
★ They don’t invest in quality content
★ They don’t promote or optimize their content
★ They have the wrong team set-up and don’t hire specialists
★ They cannot adapt to an agile trial and error mindset
★ Content Marketing is treated like any other marketing instrument, not as its nucleus
★ Time to market is a big issue, working with traditional processes slows content  
creation down
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Michael Kurz / Director Planning
Content Strategy 
Enabling Success in Content Marketing
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I Introduction I

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By definition of one of the most popular experts on Content Marketing, Kristina
Halvorson „Content Strategy plans for the creation, delivery and governance of content“.
To cover all of these topics mentioned in detail, one document is rather ambitious.  
This would either fill the pages of a whole book or has to be condensed and simplified
leaving you with some buzzwords that wouldn't be of any help on the job. Therefore I
parted the overall approach to content strategy into three pieces, which are:
★ Basic Strategy
★ Process-Design for Content-Production
★ Distribution and Promotion
!!In this document I solely concentrate on the Basic Strategy, because a well-defined
basic strategy sets the overall direction and answers the central questions in order to
get things rolling:
!!Why?

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Defining Goals & Objectives
What?
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Identify Subjects of Interest
How?

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Get You Started
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Content Strategy 
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I Introduction I

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Before you embark on your content marketing journey, you need to figure out
where you’re going.
Imagine what success looks like, what do you hope to accomplish? Whatever your
organization’s goal is, state it clearly in your plan and outline the specific objectives that
will help your brand achieve it. Set and define content marketing goals and trace them
backwards to actionable steps.
Each of your goals and objectives should be SMART: Specific, Measurable, Actionable,
Realistic and Timed.
When goals and objectives are defined, determine which key performance indicators
(KPIs) you’ll use to measure success, and set a benchmark to start from.
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For Example:
Goals: To support our company’s overarching revenue goal, we must attract new
customers, foster stronger customer relationships, increase positive word of mouth, and
increase inbound leads by <date>.
Objectives: To accomplish our goals, we must increase social media engagement by
30%, and inbound website traffic by 50% by <date>. We’ll do this by creating a
comprehensive, customer-oriented online resource library. We will create and publish
three blog posts per week, publish one case study per month, host one webinar per
month, publish one ebook per quarter and share all of the above through social media
channels.
Metrics: Increase inbound visits by 3,000 per month, gain 20 inbound links per month,
increase positive brand sentiment 20% by <date> , generate 1,000 monthly social
shares of blog content, and increase ebook downloads to 100 per month.
Source: http://de.slideshare.net/marketingcloud/how-to-craft-a-successful-social-media-content-
marketing-plan-15937674
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Content Strategy 
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I Goals & Objectives I

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If you want to go one step further, map your content against the sales funnel
!Regardless of who your target audience is, it is going to be virtually impossible to create
successful content until you understand the context of that their situation. That means
that in addition to knowing who they are, you also need to understand what they care
about and what their journey to making a purchase looks like. You will also need to
understand which points throughout their buyer journey you need to influence in order
to drive conversions and move the target audience through the sales funnel.
!For the reason that people who just get aware of you have different needs and thus
require different content than people who already have purchase something from you.
Mapping the most appropriate content to each stage in the sales funnel will help you to
address individual needs of each stage and visualize which part of your contents pays
into the goals you just have defined earlier on.
Source: Marketo-Lean-Content_Marketing 
 
!Early Funnel Stage | Awareness | 
In the awareness stage, a person becomes aware of your product or service and realizes
a potential need (problem or opportunity).  
 
Your goal is to make sure that your prospects are aware that your company even exists.
These types of content are the best for generating interest. 

Mid Funnel Stage | Consideration | 
In the consideration stage, a person is aware that your product or service could fulfill
their need, and they are trying to determine whether you are the best fit. 
 
Your goal is now to help prospects decide if making a purchase is the best option. Take
this opportunity in the funnel to help educate them, establish yourself as an industry
authority and illustrate why your product or service is the best in the business. 
 
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Content Strategy 
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I Goals & Objectives I

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Late Funnel Stage 3 | Decision |  
In the decision stage, a person has deﬁned their solution strategy, method, or approach. 
 
Your prospect arrives at the decision that your product or service is the right choice, you
can help usher them through the ﬁnal steps. These types of content will provide them
with a clear picture of the options available to them, such as special offers, packages,
prices as well as reassuring their decision. 
 
 
 
Hubspot names suitable content types for each funnel stage, which could from my point
of view vary from business to business.
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Source: http://blog.hubspot.com/blog/tabid/6307/bid/31406/How-to-Map-Lead-Nurturing-Content-to-
Each-Stage-in-the-Sales-Cycle.aspx
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Content Strategy 
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I Subjects of Interests I

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Q: What is great content?
A: Great content is a) right for your business and b) right for your audience.

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a) To identify content that is right for your business you simply need to embrace
your overall company/brand strategy.  
 
Content Strategy has to stay true to a companies mission. Take it as your guiding
principle. So before creating and publishing content always ask yourself one
question: Does it help us to achieve that mission?
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In the unlikely event that you can’t ﬁnd or use any guiding brand principles like a

brand/company mission & vision statement, core values, or brand identity you

can always establish your very own Content Marketing Mission Statement for the

exactly same reason.
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Joe Pulizzi author and one of the authorities in content marketing shows how it

works:

A Content Mission Statement consist of three parts:
★ Core target audience
★ What will be delivered
★ The outcome for the audience
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He also points out two examples that will help you to get the basic idea:
★ Enabling Women to Have More Quality Time with Their Families  
(B2C - Home Made Simple)
★ Help Engineers Answer the Most Challenging Industrial Solder Questions  
(B2B - Indium Corp.)
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Content Strategy 
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right  
for your
audience
right  
for your
business
Sweet
Spot

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!b) To identify the content that is right for your audience you need to do some  
research
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As good content is always user-centered start by…

1) Listening and Asking People
★ Your Audience Directly
★ Your Sales Team
★ Your Customer Service Reps
★ Listening and Following to Your Audience on Social Media

2) Learning form the Best
★ Joining Industry LinkedIn Groups
★ Following Industry News Sources
★ Monitor not just Competitor brands, but also Benchmarks
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3) Make more out of your Internal Data
★ Use On-Page Traffic Analytics to identify whats the good content on your  
platform. Which topics or categories are the sticky ones. Start by evaluating  
which ones drive visits, re-visits and engagement.
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4) Use External Data Sources
★ For Off-Page analytics, make friends with Google and use their tools for  
Discovering relevant Keywords and Topics 
 
Track and determine SEO keywords and phrases and keep your whole team
focused on their usage. Other than the obvious terms associated with your
brand pillars, Google AdWords Keyword Planner, Ubersuggest and Bing
Keyword Research Tool will help generate keywords. 
!!Use and build on the knowledge you have already gathered in the past.
And always ask yourself if there are topics you don’t need to pay attention on anymore,
because of weak performance or compliance regulations.
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Content Strategy 
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Try to understand your audience even better and help everybody within your company
to do the same by developing Target Audience Personas.
Start with one segment
Look for your best

Make your best 

customer in that segment

customer your target
This will help you to identify, focus and visualize your customers and prospects and
answer „Who“ they are, „What“ they want and even „Where“ the want it?
You might already have a customer and prospect segmentation strategy in place.  
In addition to informations such as demographics, lifestyles, interests, geographic
location(s), education levels and values, knowing where and how the target audiences
consume and share content is essential to developing a focused content strategy.  
 
When developing target audience personas, website analytics provide a rich source of
insight into your consumers. Combining demographic data with site behavior will help
to identify the core goals of your audiences.  
 
Answering questions about your audience Motivations, Actions and Environment will
help uncover what you need, to create compelling content:
★ How do they seek information?
★ How do they use social media? Which social networks do they favor?
★ What are their (job) responsibilities and what decisions can they make?
★ What challenges or problems (pain points) are they trying to solve?
★ What are they searching for on the brand’s site?
★ Which tasks are users succeeding at and which is the brand failing to support?
★ What are their “dealbreakers”?
★ How do they measure success?
★ What are they passionate about? What are they reading? Watching? Hearing?
 
These insights will also help you to define what types of content are needed and
your audience will respond to - visuals like infographics or images, video, long-
or short-form content. Once you have that understanding, you can develop a
framework to address the right content that actually helps drive sales. 
 
Target Audience Personas Profiles should be adapted to your specific needs,
therefore have a look at different sources, starting with: 
http://www.usability.gov/how-to-and-tools/methods/personas.html
Content Strategy 
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!!Content Audit  
Now that you know „What you want“ (Topics) and „What for“ (Objectives), lets have a
look what content assets you already have to work with.
I’ll promise you by doing a Content Audit and maintaining your content inventory list
you will save a lot of time, money and energy in the future. 
 
This is what a content inventory should consist of. A Google doc or simple spreadsheet
will work.
For each piece of content, an inventory generally lists a:
★ Unique ID (every document/images/video should have a unique identiﬁer)
★ Page Title (or the name of the document)
★ URL (or location if it’s not digital)
★ Format (standard text, video, PDF, etc.)
★ Content type (landing page, article, support page, contact page, etc.)
★ “Owner” (person responsible for upkeep)
★ Date (last updated)
★ Content relationships (usually the site hierarchy)
★ Notes (anything you might want anyone else reading the document to know)
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Other examples can be found here: 
http://maadmob.com.au/resources/content_inventory
Free web tools can help you to speed things up: 
http://contentauditor.com
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Content Strategy 
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I Get You Started I

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Editorial Calendar 
To answer what Content is still missing an editorial calendar will help you to plan ahead
and fill the gaps.
An Editorial Calendar serves you as a tool to manage the process of creating, publishing
and planning a comprehensive content strategy. Use it like a media plan, a clear
schedule that defines milestones, topics, holidays and other events that provide content
opportunities throughout the year. Map content to each event that is relevant to both,
your brand and its target audience.
 
Among many others, NewsCred provides examples: 
There are several fields, similar to the the ones you use for your content Audit such as
content type, title, assigned author, due date and publish date, and CTA, which are
consistent for all editorial calendars. The fields in your calendar should be customized
to fit your brand, resources, and business objectives.
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Source: NewsCreds-Guide-to-Editorial-Calendars
Content Strategy 
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I Get You Started I

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Gap Analysis 
The difference between the content you already have and the content you want to
distribute to your target audience is your gap analysis.
Put into a simple formula:  
Gap Analysis = Editorial Calendar - Content Inventory
Now there a plenty of ways how to ﬁll your content gap. The most common ways to
create new editorial content are:
★ Original Content  
(is unique content that has been created for you only)
★ Licensed Content  
(is legally distributed content from third-parties)
★ Curated Content  
(is the process of identifying content created by others that will be  
valuable for your audience and then publishing it on your own platform)
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No matter what way you choose, never start without Guidelines. A lot of people currently
refer to the fancy term playbook, which can either be a source of inspiration, like the
Content Marketing Institute playbook  
http://de.slideshare.net/CMI/2011-cmi-content-marketing-playbook that points out
different content types.
Another popular usage is brand factbook that collect guidelines for quality assurance
including the Brand Style-Guide, Tone of voice-Guide, Best-Practise-Cases, templates as
well as Do’s and Dont’s.

I recommend doing both, they will save you time and money, especially when you work
with freelancers and every time when it comes to client reviews and approvals.
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Content Strategy 
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I Get You Started I

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Content Strategy 
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I Recapitulation I
1. Deﬁne Goals & Objectives
★Set Content Marketing Goals that embrace your overall company/brand strategy
★Deﬁne SMART objectives and metrics and trace them backwards to actionable steps
★Map your content against the Sales Funnel
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2. Identify Subjects of Interest
★Take your companies mission statement as a guiding principle or alternatively  
develop your own content mission statement
★Continually listen, ask, learn and optimize
★Build target audience personas using internal and external data
!!3. Get You Started
★Start with a content audit (content inventory)
★Plan your content distribution ahead with an editorial calendar
★A gap analysis will tell you which content needs to be created

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!!Within content strategy, the practice of ongoing assessment and reﬁnement of content
is just beginning to blossom. The next few years are certain to bring us dozens of new
techniques and methods that will rapidly become standard practice.
!Event though, that the attempt to automate Content Marketing is a huge prediction for
the future. My personal conclusion is that many will try to cut corners and will fail if they
don’t appreciate the fact that automation can increase efficiency while decreasing labor
and cost, but it’s not always feasible for execution.
There are and will be more providers that connect the dots and provide integrated
systems for content planing, governance, sourcing, distributing and ampliﬁcation of
content as well as tracking results.
Anyhow, there is no way to avoid the amount of time and effort that goes into the
research and creation of quality content. Content Marketing derives its strength from its
personal effect and focus on consumer needs.
Any questions? 
Source: http://www.advantageccs.org/credit-counseling-what-questions-to-ask
!I’ll be happy to help.
!Just write me a message 
mr.michael.kurz@gmail.com
Content Strategy 
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I Outro I

Content Strategy

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