What to Do in Month One of a Content Marketing Engagement
Most companies rush into creating content. They want leads now, and spending the time and money to lay a strategic foundation sounds like a nice-to-have, not a must-have. But if you speak to anyone who’s been in the content game long enough to see dozens of successes and failures, they’ll tell you that it’s far easier to generate pipeline with content if you spend a month thinking through how to do that before rushing to write an article or white paper.
A good strategy is worth far more than the equivalent amount of content you’re likely to create in that first month. And if you don’t take the time to set up a strategy, you’re likely to find yourself with six months of content but unsure what impact it has produced and how to justify the expense. Then, your content team gets cut, and you’re back at square one. (As a veteran content marketer, I speak from experience.)
The good news is that creating a content marketing strategy doesn’t need to be a baroque affair with 10 MBA-caliber slide decks and a 10,000-word strategy doc that no one on your team will read. It can be done in a month of interviews and crystallized in a document as short as 2,000 words.
Putting together a content marketing strategy
Here are the five questions you need to answer to put together a content marketing strategy that leads to results within a three-month timeframe.
1. Who are your customers?
2. How does your expertise align with their needs?
3. Where will you reach your customers?
4. What do you want to achieve?
5. What actions will you take to achieve your goals, having gathered all the intelligence required to answer questions one through four? And how will you implement those actions over the next two to five months?
The trick to answering these questions accurately is not to rely on mere intuition. To answer questions one, two, and three, you’ll need to interview a representative sample of your customers. You’ll also likely need to involve company leaders to understand how your expertise aligns with customer needs and what you want to achieve with your content marketing program.
Question four brings up the need for data. To understand what you want to achieve with content marketing, you’ll want to get a picture of your overall marketing and content marketing results. How many leads did you generate the past two to four quarters? How many sales qualified leads did you generate? How many of these sales opportunities led to customers? And what are your marketing and sales targets for the next two to four quarters?
By answering these questions, you can develop data-driven targets for your content marketing program. For example, let’s say your data from the past two quarters looks like this:
This company is growing by three customers per quarter (five sales minus two cancellations), and its conversion rate from discovery call to sale is 33%. Accordingly, the company might hypothesize that if it boosts discovery calls, or MQLs, from 15 to 24, it will make eight sales per quarter and double its growth rate from 3 customers per quarter to six.
Of course, the reality will be more complex. But by calculating these figures, the company can begin to determine how much content marketing-driven pipeline can affect its business and how much pipeline a content marketing program needs to generate to have a meaningful impact on revenue.
Transitioning from intelligence gathering to action
Once you’ve conducted customer and leader interviews and answered the first four questions, you’re ready to start laying out an action plan for the following months. The actions you take to reach your goals will depend on a few key factors:
The desired KPI (e.g. pipeline or audience growth)
The talent at your disposal, in-house or via agencies and freelancers
Budget
Timeframe to hit KPIs
The types of content with which your audience is likely to engage
Often, marketers are curious or even bullish about content marketing but need to generate clear pipeline to prove to company leaders that content is worth the investment. To convince stakeholders and set the stage for a long-term investment that will drive leads for years, I recommend developing a strategic action plan that will prove the efficacy of content investments in as short as a three-month timeframe.
For example, in months two and three, you might create the following assets:
1. White paper
2. Landing page
3. Post-download email sequence
4. Current customer pre-download email sequence
5. Current prospect pre-download email sequence
6. LinkedIn promotional posts
7. Ad copy
A white paper isn’t your only option, and you shouldn’t limit your content marketing output to gated assets. But by focusing your first three months of content marketing on a meaty asset that will make your customers demonstrably better at their jobs, you can provide enough value to earn your customers’ contact information and turn them into hand raisers who are eager to speak to your sales team.
The pipeline from an initial downloadable asset such as a white paper will justify an investment that you can then expand into a full-funnel content marketing strategy, which may include some combination of podcasts, blog content, thought leadership bylines, case studies, event follow-up emails, and social posts.
The action plan you put together at the end of month one can include months 4-6 during which, after proving content marketing’s potential with a white paper-focused strategy, you launch a full-funnel plan to boost awareness (top of funnel), show your customers you’re an expert on the solutions they require (middle of funnel), and demonstrate that you’re the best company for the job (bottom of funnel).
But before you think about months 4-6 — or even the white paper and supporting assets you’ll deliver in months 2 and 3 — you’ll need to understand the five core strategic content marketing questions to lay out the ideal action plan. So, don’t skip that critical first step. Taking it puts you on the path to the leads you crave today.
