Content Marketing is the new buzz word for marketing folk. This is due to the move away from businesses proactively seeking out customers as part of their new business strategy to prompting customers to find and engage with them. The marketing recruitment industry must be very happy at the deluge of new Content Marketing roles filling their coffers, but to me this need to create great content goes hand-in-hand with a company’s PR activities and the logical place for this function to fit is with us PR professionals.
As any good PR professional in the business to business tech sector will tell you the goal of most PR plans it to attain that much used and abused term of thought-leader. The focus of a well constructed PR campaign starts out by defining the key audiences that you are looking to reach and then examines the channels to reach those audiences by developing a consistent message adapted to the different channels; be they your website, the media, analysts, other bloggers or social networks. The key here is becoming the ‘go-to’ expert in your chosen subject matter. A common failure is in too broadly defining that subject matter and setting out to be an expert in ‘security’ for example, which is too wide a net to spread in such a mature market. What you should be aiming for is a more specific area such as “cyber-espionage”, or “mobile payments” but finding a niche that you can own that doesn’t already have a well defined thought leader is key here.
Once you’ve worked out the ‘what’ you want to be the expert in, then you need to work out the ‘who’ in terms of who are the spokespeople in your organisation that have the skill set, credibility and communications skills to be the mouth piece for your organisation. A common mistake here is to default to the CEO without evaluating all the options. Having an independent PR expert who can act as a sounding board and help determine the best spokesperson can help to overcome a politically sticky situation which may be difficult for an internal person to make.
Attracting an Audience:
Next step is figuring out the ‘where’and ‘how’, which is where having a campaign that delivers information that others will value based on a genuine deep understanding and experience of your industry is absolutely vital. Being generous with your knowledge, views and data is the key to attracting an audience for your content. What’s important here is that the campaign is one which is both topical and educational and doesn’t seek to sell the company but instead focuses on demonstrating the organisation’s knowledge and understanding of their market.
Any good content marketing strategy needs to ensure that the material is syndicated and shared across all of the organisation’s channels, tailored according to the medium itself. These channels include your website, social media sites and forums, via your sales people and customer service organisation as well as the media, analyst community and channel partners. Also ensuring that any key events such as exhibitions are also factored into the ‘channels’ of communication strategy is important which is why this approach needs a longer timeline to plan and coordinate properly – which of course bring us to the ‘when’ part of the plan. It’s vital that your content strategy is backed up by a clear calendar detailing the type of content that needs creating, the channels that it will be communicated through and the content creator.
Review your Assets:
In terms of building the most compelling content possible it’s also important to take a hard look at your ‘assets’ in this area i.e. what independent evidence do you have to support your opinion and what other ‘experts opinions’ can you leverage to reinforce your perspective. Another key asset that dovetails nicely with both your PR and content marketing strategy is that of customer or analyst endorsements. Rather than narrowly looking at customer references as a sales tool, consider hosting guest blogs or round tables or webinars that involve third party ambassadors - this is a great way of building engagement with your target audience.
Far too often it’s the syndication of content which is the part of the strategy which isn’t properly coordinated and organisations end up with silos of information which are not shared and leveraged across all channels of communication. Whilst a PR agency can take the lead here in terms of creating and polishing the content, the responsibility for ensuring that it is utilised across all the appropriate channels lies within the organisation itself and is often the weak link in the chain.
However, the single most important element in determining whether your content marketing strategy will work is in ensuring that you have buy-in to the strategy at board level. Only then will it be possible to ensure everyone in the organisation is singing from the same hymn book!
By Dianne Canham, Founder and Senior Consultant of éclat Marketing.
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