We've all heard that content is king, but it's how you mangage, create and share that content that will help you stand out against your competitors. 

We spoke to Kathryn McMann, Digital Marketing, Communications & Innovations Specialist, ahead of her Digital Marketing Show Workshop, "Content Marketing Strategy: Stand out from the Noise", about how to develop a great content marketing strategy. 

1. What is your number 1 tip for businesses looking to create a great content strategy?

Be practical with your audiences actual needs (not what you want your audience to want), and the time it takes to create the content. Great ideas fall flat if executed clumsily.

2. What common mistakes do you see businesses making when it comes to designing their content strategy?

There's two - 1) either it only satisfies the company, not their audience and 2) they get over excited with the creativity and concept and forget the practical elements of timing and budget, often leaving them with compromised and diluted message.

3. According to a recent article, 70 percent of B2B marketers are creating more content than they did one year ago (Content Marketing Institute) but "60-70 percent of content produced by B2B companies goes unused" (SiriusDecisions). How can brands ensure they are, firstly, creating content that they can use and, secondly, how can they ensure that they actually utilise it effectively?

These are two excellent questions and ones that don't sit alone.

A - Creating content that they will use - When creating the content they need to build in how it will be repurposed across multiple mediums as they go along, and tweak the message for each medium that reflects a key value of the brand itself. And 2. Build in the time to execute and then fast repurpose so as not to lose team momentum.

B - Using the content effectively - If content marketing is an important element to their overall marketing/comms strategy, they need to create a space for a content project manager who will keep the steam in the communications. The content project manager role should connect across the entirety of a company to utilise the whole companies resources to feed back to support marketing activity. This could be as simple as case studies, fast creation of blog posts or documented events, highlighting internal talent and company focus.

4. How can businesses decide how they should be targeting their content when creating it?

The reason for doing content marketing is to produce content for either loyal customers (for customer retention) or to reach new customers. Part of the content marketing audience funnel are seeders (engaged content users who share, like, follow, comment) who push the content up and through the many channels, reaching the latter group.

So firstly companies need to focus on understanding and identifying who these multiple consumer groups are and where they are. This can take the form of profiling, trends and feeding data back into the strategy to update these as they implement. (This should be built into the strategy at the start). Secondly, they need to drill down to what message needs to be conveyed and weigh it up against cost + time + team (resources) + the customer's needs.

5. How important a role does content play in creating an effective omni-channel experience for customers?

It's crucial. Content, like social, can work across all customer-touch-points as it can come in all communication mediums. Content marketing is part of PR (press releases, events, videos, photography) , SEO (keyword and message relevance), social (reach and resonance), sales (materials) etc.

Take food as an example. We can break it down into cuisines, times in the day, cultural habits etc, but essentially it has one need - fuel. Content works in much the same way. It can be created for any category, genre, means, need but essentially it fuels the extended reach and communication to all other channels, supporting both push marketing (going out and getting people - PPC, video adverts, search results, affiliates, trade shows) and pull (social media, PR, experiential campaigns, community engagement, SEO). Digital's tentacle's touches all corners of communication across the board, making single-focused, linear activity redundant.

If you would like to hear more from Kathryn and join her at the upcoming Digital Marketing Show Workshop, book now and use the limited Digital Marketing Magazine offer code 'INTERVIEW' to save 40% off your ticket. 

 

By Hannah Durham, Editor of the Digital Marketing Magazine. 

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