How do you unburden your marketing staff by creating an effective content marketing strategy?

Content takes work, expertise and good writing. A lot of companies outsource that kind of thing. Having created videos and written ebooks and whitepapers for about a dozen companies now, I can tell you that it's not cheap, but there are no shortcuts. Well, there's one- you can ask a whole bunch of experts a question and throw it together into an ebook using a free hubspot template. But if you want something that looks great, fits your company and moves your potential customers closer to buying from you, you may have to outsource.

I remember sitting in the Business of Software conference in Boston in 2011, listening to Dharmesh Shah speaking about Content and Inbound marketing, and thinking.. wow.. this guy is giving me a whole new vocabulary to explain things that we have been doing in our startup for the last 2 years. We had been doing content marketing to reach our audience, because that was the natural way to build relationships and customers online - without knowing the jargon. Only later did we start implementing content marketing strategy. Content Strategy is an organized 5 step process that covers the following elements. If you successfully plan these elements - then your team can focus on executing and improving them incrementally, and you will use your resources more effectively. Here we go: 1) Goal setting and deciding which metrics best track the effectiveness of your content marketing program. An example of goal setting is covered here: http://www.revenify.com/best-practices-how-to-build-a-content-marketing-strategy-inbound-strategy-for-product-or-saas-startups/ 2) Choosing and clearly describing the target audiences that you will create content for. I like to use the exercise of creating personas for different types of buyers, users, and influencers (analysts, media, etc). It really answers the question: Who will we build all this content for? http://www.revenify.com/best-practices-how-to-build-personas-for-your-content-marketing-strategy/ 3) When you understand your goals and your audiences, you start to think about conversion. Let's use the example of converting a non-identified, non-visitor into a visitor, an identified visitor (marketing qualified lead), an engaged visitor (sales qualified lead), and finally a customer. This person is going through their buying process, and there are 3 stages to that process, sometimes called the Buyers' Journey. Your strategy will describe the needs of your buyer at each stage of that journey. What content will help turn our visitors into customers? http://www.revenify.com/best-practices-how-to-build-an-inbound-marketing-plan-using-the-buyers-journey-concept/ 4) Now you start thinking about your team. What team structure can we afford, and what roles are involved in a team? How do other major players organize their marketing departments, and where does content marketing fit? http://www.revenify.com/decide-structure-content-marketing-team-marketing-organization/ * For this post, I interviewed the Chief Strategist of the Content Marketing Institute (), and the CMO of HubSpot () 5) Design your framework (create a style guide, plan your content conversion flow, choose your content mix, decide where you should post content to best achieve your goals - based on your target audience personas and their buyers' journies, and decide on how you'll organize the whole process of ideating, creating, posting, sharing, and interacting). * Blog post in progress :) Coming soon! * If you have examples of a framework that works for your organization - please share with me at !

One key to reducing stress and overwhelm for content marketing is to create an editorial calendar - a visual guide to what needs to be done. Here is a recent post I wrote about this, with an image of a sample calendar.  http://www.newincite.com/marketing-strategy/discipline-and-a-plan-are-keys-for-success-in-content-marketing/ I recommend making the content editorial calendar a "no brainer" by determining that every  Monday is the product tip blog post, every Wednesday is the customer  case study or testimonial, every Friday a post about your industry or  company, etc. Color code the topics. Then, on any given day everyone knows what is due, and, eventually, your subscribers will know what to expect.

You know to have a calendar for all editorial creation and distribution. You must also have a set of marketing automation and analytics technologies in place to reduce the time and energy needed to arrange for campaign activities, as well as track the performance and report on conversions. Marketing automation and analytics provide you with the necessary data in real time to adjust campaigns effectively. The technologies also tie together disparate marketing channels and initiatives to illustrate a larger, clearer picture of marketing spend and ROI.