How to build content marketing strategy in support of marketing objectives

Trust and credibility in the ability of the organization to deliver high quality products and services are essential for the customer purchase decision and the authenticity of the brand promise. In turn, the trust in the brand is driven by the perception that it has the knowledge and the resulting competence to deliver on its promise.

To establish trust that we are competent in delivering quality products and services surpassing in value the competition’s offering, we need to demonstrate that we are knowledgeable in the different aspects of professional and subject matter areas that are fundamental for the delivery of our products and services. Engineers, for instance, must be trusted to construct infrastructure or systems that perform according to the planned specifications. And business consultants must be trusted to be experts with in-depth understanding of the functional area of the organization they advise in.

To demonstrate expertise, knowledge, and competence the organizations deploy a set of communications approaches, summarily called thought leadership.

In the narrow meaning of the term, thought leadership is a set of communications tactics that together position the organization and its employees as experts in an important for the business mission of the organization subject areas. Thought leadership is an important part of the CEO and C-level positioning, and uses integrated communications tactics like content marketing, PR, meetings, and events that not only amplify the messages of knowledge and competence, but also differentiates the corporate brand from the competition.

As personal meetings are difficult to execute on a global level and PR relies on earned media with limited level of control over message and delivery, content marketing becomes critical to establishing consistent thought leadership. Owned channels and content allow for complete control over format and message. The great number of available content formats can communicate any topic and complexity and as a result, content is the primary conveyor of thought leadership and one cannot demonstrate expertise without content.

According to the recent Edelman-LinkedIn Thought Leadership Impact Study, 88% of the respondents who have engaged with thought leadership content say that it has enhanced their perceptions of the organization through higher respect and trust, and increased perception of the organization’s abilities. Around 50% of the decision-makers say that thought leadership content has affected their purchase decisions by inviting companies to bid for business or increased their purchases. And, higher quality thought leadership content has contributed to higher brand awareness, reputation, and trust, relative to organizations with limited or low quality content.

But according to the same research report, although content and thought leadership give access to decision makers at the highest level, companies are finding it difficult to use content for brand positioning and reputation management by creating enough quantity of high-quality, relevant content.

As content marketing is critical for the lead generation, thought leadership, management’s positioning and corporate reputation, the organizations must deploy a robust strategic planning to their content marketing.

The well-positioned corporate brand is what could be the difference between successful and unsuccessful deal. The members of the purchasing committee, and customers in general, will feel safer with known and established in the industry brand.

Content strategy development starts with clear understanding of marketing objectives that will be supported with content, the most important for the marketing objective stakeholders and their pain points, the topics that will communicate the desired marketing messages, the most appropriate format to reach the stakeholders and communicate the topics, and the media frequency that will greatly affect the required organizational resources.

The first question we need to address is why we plan to create content, what would be the marketing objective we need it to support.

In the two extremes, content can be in support of the brand positioning or in support of performance. Or, we could distinguish between strategic and tactical in nature objectives.

Examples of strategic objectives could be brand positioning or repositioning, corporate reputation programs, or thought leadership.

Tactical objectives could be SEO (Seach Engine Optimization), CRO (Conversion Rate Optimization), lead generation, or content as part of a marketing campaign, including landing pages, emails, short blogs, press releases, or videos.

On the basis of the above considerations, we divide content in two major groups: strategic and tactical. Strategic content is part of the strategic marketing plan and adresses most important and fundamental topics that require greater effort and space to articulate complex messages. This type of content requires longer formats, more resources, including financial, to produce. As a result it is with low frequnecy of publication. This type of content is mostly related to the corporate brand and is directly related to the strategic marketing goals of the organization. Examples are research reports, eBooks, and op-eds, which in the case of a technology company could adress the fundamental transformation of a particular industry, resulting from a major technology.

Tactical content, on the other hand, can adress less significant topics like specific products and services, as well as business performance and customer success. This type of content is with higher publication frequency, easier and less expensive to produce. It adresses tactical objectives like lead generation and sales.

The content marketing stakeholders matrix can be quite complicated but for the purposes of our discussion a general list of decision makers and influencers for a typical ICT services company includes: IT director, finance, other senior management from HR, operations or other departments, multiple influencers along these departments and many end users.

We can imagine how the needs for different types of content, topics and format of all of the above. And these needs basically determine what I call the content marketing matrix of the organization.

For example, senior management needs short formats with concrete and concise information, IT decision maker or influencer could need long form content on the products and technologies provided and end users need quickly searchable manuals as well as FAQs.

More on stakeholders analysis here.

The content topics are the most critical elements in the thought leadership strategy. They reflect the organization’s strategic priorities, marketing objectives, core brand messages, our understanding of the stakeholders’ pain points, and our pitch for their solutions.

The most common mistake in this process is neglecting the needs and pain points of our customers and focusing content on the products and services. Thought leadership content is most powerful when it is perceived as relevant and valuable by the target audience.

In turn, this audience consists of different stakeholders who, even if from the same organization, have different responsibilities and priorities. As a result, they are interested in different topics. For example, senior management are interested in business performance and organizational benefits, procurement are interested in value of products and services, IT are interested in project management and technology and other departments in applications, ease-of-use, products, and services features. The real-world decision-making matrix could be very complex as many different stakeholders need different information and content along their customer journey.

Importantly, content must support business, sales, and marketing communications strategies. This means that content topics must correspond with brand positioning and complementary strengthen the brand’s messaging. If, for example, a company needs to establish positive reputation through consistent community relations, major topics will be business performance and sustainability as well as community and societal challenges.

Here is an example of content topics for a software company. In this case these are business performance related, industry trends, customer success, technological innovations, societal and community issues, new products and services, major societal issues addressed by our solutions.

The business and industry structure determine the priority and dominance of certain topics over others. Every type of organization deploys multiple topics, but it has to prioritize by considering the strategic brand priorities, primary target stakeholders, organizational messages in support of corporate and product brands.

For example, if you need to demonstrate technological advancements, obviously tech innovation would be of primary importance. And on the contrary, if B2B sales is the major business goal, then business performance and customer success are more important topics.

Sometimes technological companies are wondering why we propose certain topics which are not the obvious technological, R&D or innovation ones. Well, very often business partners do not care about what you think about your technological advancement. Most of the technological companies are competing in industries where the companies are selling applications of set of technologies, not competing on fundamental innovations. So, for your partners and customers of primary importance is how you deliver, not the technology per se. And critical proof point for the delivery capabilities are business results, referrals, case studies. Content format which focus on the business and project side of the things, not the tech one.

Different professionals or managers are not only interested in different topics but also could have different media consumption habits. Also, different communications topics and related messages could be better communicated through different formats.

The choice of content format is directly related to the marketing objectives. Do you want to drive brand positioning and thought leadership or to attract website visitors, for example?

Importantly, these two types of content are deployed closely together. On the basis of a major piece of strategic content, usually a huge number of tactical content is produced. For example, using a research report we could produce blog article, press release, infographic, multiple social media posts, landing pages. The primary objective is to explore the strategic content as much as possible for greater return on investment.

Subseùently, the different format types have their own publication frequency. There is a reason why some brands call their content marketing “brand journalism” - in the end, when you are trying to publish huge volume of content, one needs to act like a publisher and be familiar with the scope of different publications and their frequency.

For example, if you want to coordinate business performace content on the corporate news web site with media relations, you need press release ot media piece which is up to two pages and with very different frequency. Some organizations are producing at least one per day, some one per month. But format is the same.

And on the other side of the spectrum, if one needs to adress major societal or technological or business issues, their company is tackling through technology or other services, we would need cornerstone conent article of at least 1 200 word or around 10 pages. And a white paper could be 20 pages.

Therefore, the marketing management need to consider carefully what kind of content strategy will pursue in the context of the required resources for implementing this strategy. The one and only most important resource in conducting a professional content strategy is the number of man hours available for content creation.

All of the above consideration result in a the content marketing strategy. It aligns the four elements of objectives, stakeholders, topics, format, and frequency of content. A type of stakeholder can be addressed with several types of content and with multiple topics.

The Content Management Matrix allows us to map the content formats according to relevant topics in order to consistently reach all organizational stakeholders. Stakeholders and topics determine formats and frequency of publications – very often in non-linear relationship. See the table below for example of a content strategy for a technology vendor.

This four-dimensional matrix often is with many-to-many relationships. A stakeholder can be interested in more than one topics and consuming different types of formats with different frequency.

Nevertheless, your Persona analysis should give you insights into the most preferred media channels, media formats, or pain paints.