Content marketing is one of the most powerful commercial activities which focuses on leveraging content production (text, audio, video, or other formats) to attract a targeted audience. Content marketing focuses on building a strong brand, but also to convert part of that targeted audience into potential customers.
Authority marketing is a term that has been around since at least the early part of this decade. The strategy revolves around establishing yourself (or your business) as the ‘go-to’ authority for topics related to your industry. In doing so, your brand becomes the face of the industry and, thus, a leader in your space.
Public speaking, webinars, and event marketing are some examples of authority marketing that predate the term and have existed for several decades. More recently, content marketing emerged as a ‘poor man’s’ version of authority marketing but has quickly risen to become the most popular and effective strategies.
An excellent example of this is the help desk startup, Groove. The company grew from basically nothing to over $5 million in revenues solely on the back of content marketing. Today, both Groove and its founder Alex Turnbull are considered authorities in the industry.
What Groove did was to use their blog to provide a ‘behind the scenes’ account of their own growth story. This allowed them to offer a unique perspective that was hitherto unavailable. As Groove grew, their content established them as an authority that other entrepreneurs (who are part of their target audience) looked up to.
While Groove’s strategy might have worked for them, that is not necessarily the only way to establish authority in your space.
Understanding your unique offering
Content marketing is commonly done, with great success, with recycled or repurposed content. While this may work for content geared towards SEO or lead generation, authority marketing hinges on originality of thought. Creating a unique hook or angle to your content is vital.
Being a thought leader
It is not easy to adopt this hook. To be a successful thought leader, you must be an exceptional observer of the trends and patterns in your industry. Many a time, you should be among the first in the industry to experiment with and write about these emerging trends.
A good example of authority marketers who adopted this technique is Brian Dean from the SEO blog, Backlinko. He identified a trend among SEO marketers who looked up existing pieces of content on a topic and produced an article that was exceptionally superior to the ones that already exist.
In doing so, these marketers were able to capture backlinks and citations that were otherwise pointing to these relatively outdated pieces. Brian named this technique the ‘Skyscraper technique’ which is today considered one of the core fundamentals of content marketing for SEO.
Dig into your own proprietary data
Perhaps one of the most effective ways to create a hook is by digging into your own proprietary data. Email marketing company Omnisend looked into the thousands of messages sent by their own customer to come up with an original research piece titled, “The best time to send emails”.
Using your organization’s proprietary data gives you insights that are not available with anybody else. Not surprisingly then, such content pieces help in establishing authority in your industry.
If you run a product where you do not own proprietary data, then you may rely on publicly available third-party data to produce unique insights about your industry. For instance, a travel website may apply regression analysis or other statistical models on publicly available information pertaining to flight routes, timings, etc. to come up with unique insights like the best time of the year to fly on-time, or the routes that experience the most turbulence.
There are hundreds of such content topics one could come up with, and this will establish your authority in your industry.
Creating tools and metrics for your industry
Every industry is governed by metrics that is used to measure and segment the various stakeholders. The financial industry, for instance, uses credit scores to segment customers based on their creditworthiness.
In the automobile sector, cars are segmented based on the mileage they deliver, their safety rating, and so on.
A great way to build authority in your industry is by establishing the guidelines and creating tools that help industry watchers define the players. A popular example (albeit not from the content marketing space) is Michelin’s using of their star rating system to classify restaurants.
While Michelin is not really in the food business, they have successfully established their brand as an authority in the fine-dining space.
In the internet world, similar metrics have been designed by companies like Moz that developed an in-house metric called the ‘Domain Authority’ to measure a website’s online authority that defines their ability to rank on Google.
When Google stopped making their in-house metric ‘PageRank’ public, marketers moved on to alternatives like DA that have made Moz an authority in the SEO world.
From a content marketing perspective, perhaps the best example of this is LonelyPlanet’s annual listing of the top places to visit. By producing a scientific list based on emerging travel trends, LonelyPlanet’s lists have emerged as one of the top trusted destination guides in the travel industry.
After the guide featured Iceland in their list, tourism to the country surged, forcing the country to take dramatic steps to stop the small island nation from being overrun by tourists.
Devising an authority marketing strategy
While content marketing is a cheap and effective way to establish authority in your industry, your strategies are likely to be more effective if this is combined with other forms of authority marketing like webinars or events.
In a way, this is also an extension of content marketing since a lot of popular conferences and events are covered in mainstream media outlets. Your participating and speaking at these events provide these media outlets an opportunity to include your thoughts, and this is an effective strategy to enhance your industry authority.
FourWeekMBA Content Marketing Framework
The truth is no online database will replace your daily newspaper, no CD-ROM can take the place of a competent teacher and no computer network will change the way government works.
How far from today’s reality does this statement sound? Would you say that who stated the above was a fool?
Yet before judging and feeling smart about yourself, I want you to take a step back. We were in 1995, the internet is still a marginal phenomenon, which was growing incredibly fast, but less than 1% of the world population was connected to the web.
Of course, it easy to see what’s in front of us today. It is easy to assume where the web is going. According to Internet Live Stats, more than 3.5bln people are connected to the web. Which means that over 40% of the world population is on the web!
The growth of the web was so wide and wild that none could have predicted how it would have looked like. To have a feel about it take a look at the graph below from Internet Live Stats!
Yet there is an even more staggering stat that any blogger should be aware of. If you launched a blog or website in 1995, you could potentially reach about 45million users (that was the world wide web population in that year).
“Cool,” you may think, “I am better off today!“
Yet you would be dead wrong!
Why? Even though you could only reach 45million internet users, there were only 23,500 existing websites. In short, in 1995 there were about 1,908 per website!
If you just said to yourself “Ok, not a big deal!” you have to keep reading!
As of 2015, the world-wide-web population has grown to over 3bln people.
Yet the number of websites/blogs has grown exponentially too.
In the same year, there were well over 800k websites.
This means that in 2015 each website had only 3.7 users!
Is blogging dead? Let’s see…
By looking at those stats it easy to conclude that blogging is dead.
But is that really the case?
I don’t think so!
Blogging is still a great tool to reach an audience.
Yet while a few years ago, blogging alone was enough, that is no longer the case.
In short, in order to make your online business successful, you must think it like an ecosystem, where blogging fits your overall business strategy.
In other words, if you want to succeed in online business you have to use your blog strategically.
The time of “I will blog and see what happens” is over!
Blogging entails that you set an editorial strategy.
I know it may sound too much, but if you stay with me for the length of this article you will comprehend why you need to treat blogging seriously.
Before we dive into it, let me give you a visual hook of how your online business ecosystem should look like,
Blogging is the trigger, from which your online business cascade will fall.
The process that I am going to show you is pretty simple.
First, set up an editorial calendar.
Second, build the social platform, which will work as an amplifier.
Third, test what works.
Fourth, upgrade the most successful blog posts/articles to create a series of info-products (ebooks, online courses, webinars, and videos) around what your audience deemed useful.
Fifth, organize your first meetup!
At the end of this process, you will rinse and repeat!
Step 1: Start with an editorial strategy!
Making content go viral is not an easy task. Yet we can optimize the process of content creation and improve our chances of having that content go viral.
How?
As Aristotle already found out in 350 B.C. you have to leverage on:
Ethos (ethical appeal)
Pathos (emotions)
Logos (appeal to our rational mind)
We can put Aristotle’s teachings in a framework that Jonah Berger built in his “Six STEPPS,”
Social Currency (would your article make people look smart by sharing it?)
Triggers (are you writing about something that is interesting?)
Emotion (will your content arouse your audience?)
Public (is it getting shared enough?)
Practical Value (is it useful?)
Stories (do you have a narrative attached to it?)
Although we are going to use this framework as a reference throughout this guide, our objective isn’t necessarily to go viral.
Rather we want to make sure the content we are creating will have three main features:
Usefulness (is there a niche market for it?)
Upgradability (can we create other content around it?)
Non-perishability (what is its shelf-life?)
Practically speaking this framework translates in a few simple steps.
Usefulness
How do we determine whether what we are going to write will be useful?
The concept of usefulness needs to be extremely targeted. We are not trying to be celebrities. We don’t want unneeded visibility. We are building a business!
Therefore, we are going to find a problem and a group of people with that problem.
To find a problem, we have to find a pain point that a group of people has (your niche).
Therefore, problem + small group of individuals = potential niche
Upgradability
The greatest lie ever told about content is to think of it as a fixed, never changing asset. Yet content itself can be reused and repurposed in several ways.
In other words, once you have picked a topic that is relevant to a small group of people, that content one day could become an e-book, a YouTube video, or a short webinar.
The question is, will the content you are creating have the potential to become an info-product?
This question can also be answered by looking at the last but not least important aspect,
Non-perishability
Usually, when we think about content, we tend to think of it as we do with biological organisms. In other words, we look at two articles, and we tend to read the most recent.
Yet that is a huge mistake. Why? Because of the Lindy Effect!
In short, when it comes to content, the opposite is true. Take the Iliad. It was written two thousand years ago. Yet we can expect it (probabilistically speaking) to be relevant for at least another two thousand years!
There is a caveat though. Each time you are facing your laptop, and about to write content keep in mind only one question:
am I about to write something that has the potential to outlive me?
If yes, you are ready!
Step 2: Be social but don’t overdo it
There is no need to say the numbers and stats of users of each society to understand the importance of integrating them into your digital strategy.
It is important to keep a presence across all these platforms.
Yet, it is crucial to understand where your niche hangs out and put most of your effort on that channel!
Step 3: The online world is your laboratory
So far we managed to decide what content to create. Also, we saw how to amplify it. We are ready to test what works and what does not. The next step will be to repurpose the most successful articles to convert them to other content formats. How?
Only look at your stats!
What posts had more success? Who are your marketing personas? Which article converted more regarding interactions (like and share) with your audience?
Step 4: Your content is like software. It needs continuous updates and releases
Web content isn’t static. It’s dynamic, and if you want to compete in today’s crowded webspace, you need to treat your content as if you were developing software.
When the first version of a software is ready it gets released. And as it gets used it continuously evolves.
It has become so easy to interact with people through the web that we forget about the real world.
Often times we neglect our family to chat through the phones with individuals we never saw, neither met in real life.
Yet there is nothing stronger than meeting people. We can use all the senses to have others see who we are.
Also, there is no better way to build a loyal, trusted audience!
Start very small. Organize a meetup with no more than 10/15 people. Teach them what you have been writing about. Have them share their experience with you. That’s all!
Rinse and Repeat
Running an online business is not rocket science. Yet it takes time and dedication. Once you set up your process, it is time to rinse and repeat!
Content marketing case study
Let’s look at a practical case study together.
Pick the perfect title
Journalists know that the title can make or break an article. It doesn’t matter how good it is what you wrote if none will open it none will read it! For how trivial that might sound, this is even truer for blog posts. With over a billion websites and over four million blog posts; the title is a great shortcut for our brain to make sense of the clutter.
To make your headline catchy, sticky but also good from the SEO perspective then there are a few factors to take into account. The main ones are,
Is your title emotional? For instance, invoking good or bad emotions can be a powerful way to have people read your stuff.
Is the title short? Too long would be bad for SEO. Plus none will know it. The right length would be around 55 characters.
What are the first and last three words? In fact, apparently, when people skim content they look the first and final part of the title.
Are there keywords in it? Those keywords are not only meant to make your content read by search engines but to capture the searchers’ intention
In other words, it has to be:
Emotional
Short but meaningful
Focused on first and last three words
Searchable
How to meet all those standards without hassling too much on it?
That is what I did to pick the title for this blog post. Therefore, if you did open it, it may be thanks to it!
For instance, I initially picked up a title,
As you can see my score wasn’t that bad; However, I wanted to make it a bit better because it was too long and not as catchy as I wanted it to be!
I tried several headlines, and my score got worse,
Until I got the title, I was looking for!
Can you do better?
Make your blog the fastest in town
With the staggering growth of content on the web, the demand for it seems to be growing at a slower pace compared to the offer. In other words, there is so much content out there that it becomes impossible to consume it all.
Therefore, when you do find what you were looking for you finally click on it, but the site is so slow that you eventually give up! That is even worse for mobile users.
For instance, on average if your website takes more than three seconds to load you might lose up to 40% of your users! That can make or break your business. Thus, there’s no surprise that site speed is one of the most important factors for optimizing your blog.
The good news is you can now improve the speed of your site up to 30/40% in a few minutes and with no costs. Go on and check your speed performance, as I did.
I went to check my PageSpeed with Google Developers Tools, and that is what I got,
As you can see my site didn’t pass the test; Although not that bad from the desktop, it was bad on mobile. I can’t imagine how much traffic I lost due to that. How could I solve that? Google gives you some suggestions to make your website lighter, therefore faster.
Yet I didn’t want to spend too much time on it. In short, I was looking for a quick and efficient way to improve the speed of my website right on. I figured that the most important factor affecting the speed of the website is your Media folder.
That’s right! How many times did you unconsciously upload very large images? Well, now those images are burdening your site speed. It is time to compress them.
No problem though, I got the solution!
So I figured I could solve this issue very quickly through a WordPress plugin. That is called WP Smush. I uploaded directly from my WP website, installed it and activated it,
Then into the Media folder, I clicked on check images and started to compress them
After a few minutes, the compression was completed, and I had just saved almost one-hundred sixty megabytes in pictures. That’s impressive!
I checked my site speed again. I was impressed. My desktop speed went from 83 to 88. Ok not bad. What about mobile speed?
As you can see with this tweak alone, my mobile speed increased by over 30%, from 60 to 80!
That is how my website went from Sloth to Swift in the blink of an eye.
Time to optimize your images
When you write a blog post you often use images, right? We know for a fact that our brain loves pictures.
They are a faster and more effective way to communicate a thought, emotion, and inspire action! Yet for how cool the image you picked for your blog post if search engines won’t understand it they won’t read it.
The consequence is that your content will be only in part read by search engines which are the intermediaries between your blog and your audience. How to solve this impasse? Use the alt attribute.
That attribute is crucial because it describes what the image is about in the context of your blog, or article. Now adding the alt attribute is not hard but time-consuming. For instance, if you add an image to your blog you will have to add the alt attribute manually as I did on this picture,
You can partially automate this process by installing a plugin called Format Media Titles.
If there’s a title for that image, the plugin will automatically save the alt attribute, which will make your image optimization faster and more efficient.
Target Google’s featured snippet
If you’re familiar with basic SEO, you know what a keyword is. In short, each time a user searches for something on the web it does so through a search engine’s box, like Google’s
Until not long ago when search engines scanned your page (in SEO lingo called crawling) most of what they saw was based on keywords. Therefore, the more keywords you stuffed into your page, the more you would show up in the search, which in the SEO world is called ranking.
Yet things changed dramatically when a few years ago Google updated its algorithm. The algorithm now looks more at context and the semantics behind the content you write rather than matching simple keywords.
Also, common wisdom in the past would tell you to rank for short keywords (for instance “blogging”). Those keywords while can bring you traffic won’t bring you conversions.
Therefore, if your objective is to bring more customers, you might want to change focus and look for long-tail keywords. A long-tail keyword is simply a very specific query of a user. An example? A question!
Also, addressing a specific question of a user a great way to convert that into a customer. Where do you find those long-tail keywords?
That is what I did. I digited “blog” and selected my target country, US:
I got 158 questions users to have about “blog.”
Those questions have organized in clusters. Now I can use them to optimize my content by focusing on the specific pain-points my target has.
With those questions, I can also target Google’s featured snippet,
If you want to know more about how to get your snippet to read the post I wrote on Search Engine People:
Use data to build effective CTAs
The adage says “Ask, and you shall receive.” This saying is true in life like in marketing. In fact, CTAs (call to actions) are a powerful tool to prompt your audience to take action. For instance, you can use them to inspire your audience to subscribe, purchase or just click through. How does a call to action look like?
As you can see a call to action makes it easier for the users to go toward a particular objective that you set beforehand. Yet the most effective way to use CTAs is to A/B test them. In short, you will have two versions of a CTA (for instance, one button is blue, the other red) and see what converts more. There are several free tools to A/B test your CTAs. For this blog, I use Hello Bar.
For instance, my goal is to get more subscribers. I’m A/B testing my CTA,
As you can see in the first CTA, there’s “join us!” in the second “subscribe.” Therefore, when landing on my homepage, some users will see the first version, while some others will see the second. It’s still too early to say what’s best. I will wait for at least a thousand view on each to say what’s best. For now, the latter version is performing better.
All it takes is to register there for free, create an account and follow the instructions. In a few minutes, you’ll have your A/B test ready!
Key steps for the first part
Growing a blog requires a lot of hard work. Yet there are a few tweaks you can implement to grow it fast and effectively. I showed you how:
pick the best titles
make your site fast
optimize your images
convert users into customers
and A/B test your call to actions
Advanced content syndication
In this section, I want to show you how to make sure to reach a large audience each time you write a piece of content. So that the time invested in producing it, won’t be wasted!
You wrote an excellent article. Strangely each time you put together a piece of content, it feels like that is the most incredible creative work you’ve done in your entire life. Therefore, high expectations arise.
You look forward to the moment when you will hit the publish button and see that content go through the blogosphere, go viral and get featured on Forbes or Inc. Magazine.
Yet that is all a dream. In fact, as soon as you hit the publish button you barely get your dearest friends to read it. Why?
Usually, who writes for passion believes that writing alone is enough to be read. Instead, when you start doing it professionally, you realize how deceived you were. In fact, creating great content is only part of the job.
The rest is about making sure it gets found, read, and shared. That is why as a content writer you need to have a framework in place to make sure each time you write a piece of content you reach at least a few thousand people that are ready to engage with it.
Also, today many believe that posting their content around the web still gives them control over what happens to it. Ownership is only part of the equation. Indexing is as relevant if not more than ownership of content.
Therefore, you want to make sure your content gets indexed on a platform you control before syndicating it anywhere else.
How Social Networks Hooked Us
In one of my previous articles, I talk about the Hook Model. I explain what it is and how to use it ethically to transform your product or service into a habit for the user.
Yet one of the most powerful weapons social networks use to grow their user base is the feed.
The feed is the most addicting feature social media has. Not surprisingly we spend countless hours scrolling that feeds in the hope of keeping our excitement level high for as long as possible.
Almost like drug-addicted millions of people use the feed as the main source to get the information they look for.
In other words, the average person spends five years and four months of his/her life on social media.
That is why if you want your content to reach a larger audience you must learn how to use social media feed to feed your blog’s traffic.
However, if you’re tempted to stop creating content on your blog and start disseminating only through social media, there is something you’re missing out.
Indexing vs. Ownership of Content
In the past all you needed was copyright. In short, once published a literary work that copyright did allow you to have control over it. Thus, you “owned” that piece of content.
Nowadays this is only in part true. In fact, the concept of ownership of content has changed. With the advent of the web and how search engines crawl it, ownership lost relevance in favor of indexing.
Indeed, each time you write a piece of content. You hit the publish button. That is how you’re claiming authorship on that.
You want to make sure to have ownership on the publishing media outlet where your blog was posted. That is why your blog is the answer.
Start with your blog
In short, what matters is not who wrote the piece of content but where it was first indexed. For instance, let’s assume you wrote an article and published it on Medium.
It doesn’t matter where you’ll post that content next. Since the article got first released on Medium, Google indexed it there. Creating an irreversible relationship between your story and a platform you don’t control!
Therefore, each time you publish on Medium, Quora, LinkedIn, or any other publishing outlet it is almost like you’re giving up part of the “web ownership” over that content. Unless you use the following framework…
Content Amplification Framework
That is a framework in three steps with one objective:
GIVE YOU TOTAL CONTROL OVER YOUR CONTENT!
How? In three steps. First, indexing; second, spreading; third, experimenting.
Step One: Indexing
The first step is all about letting Google’s crawlers index your page so that your content is tied to your blog. Once drafted the coolest article in the blogosphere all you have to do is to hit the publish button!
As soon as you do so, billions of crawlers that are indexing the web will also walk on your page and understand where it belongs to. Time to take the second step.
Step Two: Spreading
Beyond the traditional sharing, you must do (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest to mention the main ones). You want to syndicate your content on four major publishing outlets: Quora, LinkedIn Publishing, Medium, and beBee.
How to use Quora for Content Amplification
Quora is a social network where people post questions, and other people answer them. While Facebook is mainly about scrolling the feed passively, Quora is about actively engaging with a community of people that for the most part are interested in reading in-depth content.
Back in March 2016 Quora had already over 100 million users, and it is the perfect place to start to build a following and amplify your content strategy.
As soon as done go back and create your blog there.
Go on the icon on the top right corner, click on it, and then go to “Blogs.”
On the top right corner click on “Create A New Blog.”
Once done, repost your article there! Why? A few reasons:
First, Quora will give you the visibility that otherwise you wouldn’t have.
Second, by having links that point back to your blog, you will drive traffic back to it.
Third, less intuitive you might also improve your rankings (still testing this strategy out). In fact, when Google notices that your content is getting found (the original piece of content got first published and indexed from your blog) it may traffic back to your site.
Another thing to do is to atomize your blog post and use it to answer specific questions people on Quora have.
After personalizing the answer, you can insert a link at the end of the question so that people that want to know more can go back to your blog and read the entire article.
How to use LinkedIn Publishing for Content Amplification
In 2017 LinkedIn, the most popular professional network in the world reached over 500 million users. Time to syndicate your content there.
If you don’t have an account yet follow these simple steps:
You can use LinkedIn for sharing your content and for writing posts with an extract from your articles.
Therefore the first step is to share a post as I did below,
Since Neil Patel had retweeted my post on Twitter, I used that to reshare it on LinkedIn and get some extra visibility which brought few dozens of visits back to the blog.
Also, I got an extract of the post and written an article on LinkedIn,
You could either repost the entire article if you wish or just an excerpt from it and then a link to bring traffic back to your blog.
Among the two, the former is the most successful to amplify your content as much as possible. For instance, each time I republish an article entirely on LinkedIn publishing I get way more traction compared to just an extract.
My assumption is the LinkedIn algorithm makes your story seen more in the feed the more in-depth the article is.
But at times it also depends on the time and day it got published. Also usually LinkedIn feed is like a diesel engine, a post or update you posted a few days before will be showed again to some of your LinkedIn contacts.
One more thing to do to optimize your profile for content amplification is to add your articles to your experience,
In this way, anyone that is browsing your profile on LinkedIn will check your articles,
Also, the audience on Medium is more selected, which makes a perfect place where to share your content.
Also, there’s an import feature that allows most to share your stories quickly. So why not to do it?
Time to the last step of this framework, experimentation.
Experimenting
Growing a blog is one of those things you do if you’re passionate about it. In fact, it takes a long time to build your audience, hone your writing skills and learn the marketing tactics to make your content found, read, and shared.
Yet it all starts with a mindset, which is about experimenting with everything that leads to growth. Eventually, you’ll consolidate the lessons learned, leave the tactics that don’t work, and compound your growth with what’s left. It takes a lot of tinkering.
For instance, when I first started to write on my blog, I used only to share my articles on social media without syndicating my content. Then I understood I had to change strategy. Now I use my content in multiple ways.
For instance, at times it makes sense to atomize an article and make it become many smaller posts on other media outlets like beBee, Medium or Quora. In this way, with the same level of effort, you’ll be able to get more leverage on what you wrote.
It is time for you to do some tinkering now!
Creating your content marketing workflow
Whether you run your own business or manage a specific sector in one, there is nothing more important than making sure that everything is being done on time. Managing different projects and trying to achieve various goals at once will require a lot of planning for everything to run smoothly.
Creating your content management workflow will seriously help you organize and prioritize specific tasks so that you don’t come across chaotic situations regarding your teams and their tasks. Here are some tips to help you achieve the perfect workflow management.
Starting anything with the proper organization is an essential step to succeeding in a project. A workflow is a summary of all the tasks that need to be organized and completed in a particular order so that the natural flow of events is established until a goal is reached. It is based on logical, pre-meditated steps which aim towards helping your company run in a more organized way.
You content management workflow will help you decide quite a few things, like the type of content you wish to create, the frequency you need to post, the different niches you want to cover and many other similar issues. Something important to also keep in mind through this process is the meaning of your content’s lifecycle.
The content lifecycle is a plan that you need to follow to make sure that you are creating and correctly sharing your content. The workflow in this process has many different steps which you can follow, and these are the following:
Coming up with the right strategy
For you to be able to start creating content consistently and for a long time, you will need to develop a strategy which will cover a variety of points. You will have to know precisely the reason why you are creating said content and the goals you wish to achieve through it.
Another thing that’s very important and will help you gain a clearer view of the goals you need to set for your content is your target audience. Apart from trying to come up with content that they will find interesting and enjoyable, you will also need to be thinking about the way through which you will reach out to them.
For example, if you’re targeting a younger audience, you will be able to reach out to them through various social media platforms like Twitter and Instagram. For the older generations, you might have to invest in a traditional email marketing campaign to spread the word about your new content.
Creating your content
After you have sorter those basic things out, it is time to start creating your content. For your workflow to be successful, you will need to make sure that every person working in this “production line” will know exactly what their part in this process is.
You will need to make sure that you are providing everyone with the right supplies, tools, and content that they will be able to have access to at any time. Your creative team will need supplies, but they will also need the right rules and guidance to excel.
Another important thing you should never forget is deadlines. To make sure that everyone is doing their part correctly, you will need to keep them working and active under strict deadlines. The pressure of needing to finish a task on time will help everyone in your team stay more focused and productive.
Checking your content’s quality
Even though you might have just finished with the creation process, you should make sure that you do not forget a critical step in this process. That step is reviewing your content.
You might think that there’s nothing wrong with the way your creative team wrote about a specific topic, but the truth is that there is always room for improvement. One of the most common errors that occur in content creation is grammar and spelling mistakes.
There is nothing that can make your content look less professional than simple mistakes which could have been avoided through a proofreading and editing check. Even if you haven’t thought of hiring such a professional for your team, the good news is that there are plenty of professional editors and writing services who work with independent companies and help them out with their editing and proofreading needs.
Making sure that your content is of the best quality and meets all the standards you have set to reach your target audience will help you move on to the very next step of this process.
Distributing your content
As it was mentioned previously, it is a good idea to know how you would like to distribute the content you have created in advance. This will truly help you speed up the whole process, as you will not have to start setting up a social media account or an email list at the very last minute.
You can use your current audience’s help to create hype on your social media pages, blog or website and have them share your content with their friends and peers as soon as it is published.
Collecting feedback and improving your strategy
Last but not least, it is also important to always leave room for improvement. No strategy will be perfect, but if you follow your content management workflow steps correctly, you will be able to fix any issues that might come up and improve the way you work.
Feedback is a very important part of this process and can help you see what you need to work harder to achieve your goals.
Making everything work like a clock
Having to work with many people as a part of a team and organize them all accordingly definitely isn’t an easy thing to do. All of these steps will become a big help in your content management workflow and will help you keep a consistent schedule of creating, sharing and improving your content without any long-term issues.
So, the next time you wish to create some fresh content, you might want to think in advance and plan everything from the beginning. Your workflow will become much more stable and effective, and you will finally start seeing the results you always wished for.
Key Highlights
Authority Marketing: Focuses on establishing yourself or your business as an expert in your industry, making your brand a leader in the space.
Content Marketing: An increasingly popular and effective strategy for building authority.
Groove’s Success: The help desk startup achieved authority status by using their blog to provide a unique perspective on their own growth story.
Thought Leadership: Being an exceptional observer of industry trends and experimenting with emerging topics helps establish authority.
Utilizing Data: Leveraging proprietary or third-party data to create unique insights that establish authority.
Creating Metrics and Tools: Building industry metrics and tools positions your brand as an authority and provides value to industry watchers.
Combining Strategies: The importance of combining content marketing with other authority marketing strategies to enhance industry authority.
Building a Strategic Ecosystem: Optimizing content, site speed, images, and CTAs helps reach a larger audience.
Leveraging Social Media Feeds: Using social media feeds to distribute content and retain control and ownership.
Syndication on Platforms: Expanding reach and visibility by syndicating content on platforms like Quora, LinkedIn Publishing, Medium, and beBee.
Well-Rounded Content Marketing: Emphasizing originality, data insights, and audience engagement to establish long-term industry authority.
The resources you need to get started with your business model:
Account-based marketing (ABM) is a strategy where the marketing and sales departments come together to create personalized buying experiences for high-value accounts. Account-based marketing is a business-to-business (B2B) approach in which marketing and sales teams work together to target high-value accounts and turn them into customers.
Ad Ops – also known as Digital Ad Operations – refers to systems and processes that support digital advertisements’ delivery and management. The concept describes any process that helps a marketing team manage, run, or optimize ad campaigns, making them an integrating part of the business operations.
Venture capitalist, Dave McClure, coined the acronym AARRR which is a simplified model that enables to understand what metrics and channels to look at, at each stage for the users’ path toward becoming customers and referrers of a brand.
Affinity marketing involves a partnership between two or more businesses to sell more products. Note that this is a mutually beneficial arrangement where one brand can extend its reach and enhance its credibility in association with the other.
As the name suggests, ambush marketing raises awareness for brands at events in a covert and unexpected fashion. Ambush marketing takes many forms, one common element, the brand advertising their products or services has not paid for the right to do so. Thus, the business doing the ambushing attempts to capitalize on the efforts made by the business sponsoring the event.
Affiliate marketing describes the process whereby an affiliate earns a commission for selling the products of another person or company. Here, the affiliate is simply an individual who is motivated to promote a particular product through incentivization. The business whose product is being promoted will gain in terms of sales and marketing from affiliates.
The bullseye framework is a simple method that enables you to prioritize the marketing channels that will make your company gain traction. The main logic of the bullseye framework is to find the marketing channels that work and prioritize them.
Brand building is the set of activities that help companies to build an identity that can be recognized by its audience. Thus, it works as a mechanism of identification through core values that signal trust and that help build long-term relationships between the brand and its key stakeholders.
According to inbound marketing platform HubSpot, brand dilution occurs “when a company’s brand equity diminishes due to an unsuccessful brand extension, which is a new product the company develops in an industry that they don’t have any market share in.” Brand dilution, therefore, occurs when a brand decreases in value after the company releases a product that does not align with its vision, mission, or skillset.
The brand essence wheel is a templated approach businesses can use to better understand their brand. The brand essence wheel has obvious implications for external brand strategy. However, it is equally important in simplifying brand strategy for employees without a strong marketing background. Although many variations of the brand essence wheel exist, a comprehensive wheel incorporates information from five categories: attributes, benefits, values, personality, brand essence.
The brand equity is the premium that a customer is willing to pay for a product that has all the objective characteristics of existing alternatives, thus, making it different in terms of perception. The premium on seemingly equal products and quality is attributable to its brand equity.
Brand positioning is about creating a mental real estate in the mind of the target market. If successful, brand positioning allows a business to gain a competitive advantage. And it also works as a switching cost in favor of the brand. Consumers recognizing a brand might be less prone to switch to another brand.
Business storytelling is a critical part of developing a business model. Indeed, the way you frame the story of your organization will influence its brand in the long-term. That’s because your brand story is tied to your brand identity, and it enables people to identify with a company.
Content marketing is one of the most powerful commercial activities which focuses on leveraging content production (text, audio, video, or other formats) to attract a targeted audience. Content marketing focuses on building a strong brand, but also to convert part of that targeted audience into potential customers.
One of the first mentions of customer lifetime value was in the 1988 book Database Marketing: Strategy and Implementation written by Robert Shaw and Merlin Stone. Customer lifetime value (CLV) represents the value of a customer to a company over a period of time. It represents a critical business metric, especially for SaaS or recurring revenue-based businesses.
Customer segmentation is a marketing method that divides the customers in sub-groups, that share similar characteristics. Thus, product, marketing and engineering teams can center the strategy from go-to-market to product development and communication around each sub-group. Customer segments can be broken down is several ways, such as demographics, geography, psychographics and more.
Developer marketing encompasses tactics designed to grow awareness and adopt software tools, solutions, and SaaS platforms. Developer marketing has become the standard among software companies with a platform component, where developers can build applications on top of the core software or open software. Therefore, engaging developer communities has become a key element of marketing for many digital businesses.
A digital channel is a marketing channel, part of a distribution strategy, helping an organization to reach its potential customers via electronic means. There are several digital marketing channels, usually divided into organic and paid channels. Some organic channels are SEO, SMO, email marketing. And some paid channels comprise SEM, SMM, and display advertising.
Field marketing is a general term that encompasses face-to-face marketing activities carried out in the field. These activities may include street promotions, conferences, sales, and various forms of experiential marketing. Field marketing, therefore, refers to any marketing activity that is performed in the field.
interaction with a brand until they become a paid customer and beyond.
Funnel marketing is modeled after the marketing funnel, a concept that tells the company how it should market to consumers based on their position in the funnel itself. The notion of a customer embarking on a journey when interacting with a brand was first proposed by Elias St. Elmo Lewis in 1898.
Funnel marketing typically considers three stages of a non-linear marketing funnel. These are top of the funnel (TOFU), middle of the funnel (MOFU), and bottom of the funnel (BOFU). Particular marketing strategies at each stage are adapted to the level of familiarity the consumer has with a brand.
A go-to-market strategy represents how companies market their new products to reach target customers in a scalable and repeatable way. It starts with how new products/services get developed to how these organizations target potential customers (via sales and marketing models) to enable their value proposition to be delivered to create a competitive advantage.
The term “greenwashing” was first coined by environmentalist Jay Westerveld in 1986 at a time when most consumers received their news from television, radio, and print media. Some companies took advantage of limited public access to information by portraying themselves as environmental stewards – even when their actions proved otherwise. Greenwashing is a deceptive marketing practice where a company makes unsubstantiated claims about an environmentally-friendly product or service.
Grassroots marketing involves a brand creating highly targeted content for a particular niche or audience. When an organization engages in grassroots marketing, it focuses on a small group of people with the hope that its marketing message is shared with a progressively larger audience.
Growth marketing is a process of rapid experimentation, which in a way has to be “scientific” by keeping in mind that it is used by startups to grow, quickly. Thus, the “scientific” here is not meant in the academic sense. Growth marketing is expected to unlock growth, quickly and with an often limited budget.
Guerrilla marketing is an advertising strategy that seeks to utilize low-cost and sometimes unconventional tactics that are high impact. First coined by Jay Conrad Levinson in his 1984 book of the same title, guerrilla marketing works best on existing customers who are familiar with a brand or product and its particular characteristics.
Hunger marketing is a marketing strategy focused on manipulating consumer emotions. By bringing products to market with an attractive price point and restricted supply, consumers have a stronger desire to make a purchase.
Integrated marketing communication (IMC) is an approach used by businesses to coordinate and brand their communication strategies. Integrated marketing communication takes separate marketing functions and combines them into one, interconnected approach with a core brand message that is consistent across various channels. These encompass owned, earned, and paid media. Integrated marketing communication has been used to great effect by companies such as Snapchat, Snickers, and Domino’s.
Inbound marketing is a marketing strategy designed to attract customers to a brand with content and experiences that they derive value from. Inbound marketing utilizes blogs, events, SEO, and social media to create brand awareness and attract targeted consumers. By attracting or “drawing in” a targeted audience, inbound marketing differs from outbound marketing which actively pushes a brand onto consumers who may have no interest in what is being offered.
Integrated marketing describes the process of delivering consistent and relevant content to a target audience across all marketing channels. It is a cohesive, unified, and immersive marketing strategy that is cost-effective and relies on brand identity and storytelling to amplify the brand to a wider and wider audience.
The marketing mix is a term to describe the multi-faceted approach to a complete and effective marketing plan. Traditionally, this plan included the four Ps of marketing: price, product, promotion, and place. But the exact makeup of a marketing mix has undergone various changes in response to new technologies and ways of thinking. Additions to the four Ps include physical evidence, people, process, and even politics.
Marketing myopia is the nearsighted focus on selling goods and services at the expense of consumer needs. Marketing myopia was coined by Harvard Business School professor Theodore Levitt in 1960. Originally, Levitt described the concept in the context of organizations in high-growth industries that become complacent in their belief that such industries never fail.
Marketing personas give businesses a general overview of key segments of their target audience and how these segments interact with their brand. Marketing personas are based on the data of an ideal, fictional customer whose characteristics, needs, and motivations are representative of a broader market segment.
Meme marketing is any marketing strategy that uses memes to promote a brand. The term “meme” itself was popularized by author Richard Dawkins over 50 years later in his 1976 book The Selfish Gene. In the book, Dawkins described how ideas evolved and were shared across different cultures. The internet has enabled this exchange to occur at an exponential rate, with the first modern memes emerging in the late 1990s and early 2000s.
Microtargeting is a marketing strategy that utilizes consumer demographic data to identify the interests of a very specific group of individuals. Like most marketing strategies, the goal of microtargeting is to positively influence consumer behavior.
Multichannel marketing executes a marketing strategy across multiple platforms to reach as many consumers as possible. Here, a platform may refer to product packaging, word-of-mouth advertising, mobile apps, email, websites, or promotional events, and all the other channels that can help amplify the brand to reach as many consumers as possible.
Multi-level marketing (MLM), otherwise known as network or referral marketing, is a strategy in which businesses sell their products through person-to-person sales. When consumers join MLM programs, they act as distributors. Distributors make money by selling the product directly to other consumers. They earn a small percentage of sales from those that they recruit to do the same – often referred to as their “downline”.
The Net Promoter Score (NPS) is a measure of the ability of a product or service to attract word-of-mouth advertising. NPS is a crucial part of any marketing strategy since attracting and then retaining customers means they are more likely to recommend a business to others.
Neuromarketing information is collected by measuring brain activity related to specific brain functions using sophisticated and expensive technology such as MRI machines. Some businesses also choose to make inferences of neurological responses by analyzing biometric and heart-rate data.
Neuromarketing is the domain of large companies with similarly large budgets or subsidies. These include Frito-Lay, Google, and The Weather Channel.
Newsjacking as a marketing strategy was popularised by David Meerman Scott in his book Newsjacking: How to Inject Your Ideas into a Breaking News Story and Generate Tons of Media Coverage. Newsjacking describes the practice of aligning a brand with a current event to generate media attention and increase brand exposure.
A microniche is a subset of potential customers within a niche. In the era of dominating digital super-platforms, identifying a microniche can kick off the strategy of digital businesses to prevent competition against large platforms. As the microniche becomes a niche, then a market, scale becomes an option.
We can define pull and push marketing from the perspective of the target audience or customers. In push marketing, as the name suggests, you’re promoting a product so that consumers can see it. In a pull strategy, consumers might look for your product or service drawn by its brand.
Real-time marketing is as exactly as it sounds. It involves in-the-moment marketing to customers across any channel based on how that customer is interacting with the brand.
Relationship marketing involves businesses and their brands forming long-term relationships with customers. The focus of relationship marketing is to increase customer loyalty and engagement through high-quality products and services. It differs from short-term processes focused solely on customer acquisition and individual sales.
Reverse marketing describes any marketing strategy that encourages consumers to seek out a product or company on their own. This approach differs from a traditional marketing strategy where marketers seek out the consumer.
Remarketing involves the creation of personalized and targeted ads for consumers who have already visited a company’s website. The process works in this way: as users visit a brand’s website, they are tagged with cookies that follow the users, and as they land on advertising platforms where retargeting is an option (like social media platforms) they get served ads based on their navigation.
Sensory marketing describes any marketing campaign designed to appeal to the five human senses of touch, taste, smell, sight, and sound. Technologies such as artificial intelligence, virtual reality, and the Internet of Things (IoT) are enabling marketers to design fun, interactive, and immersive sensory marketing brand experiences. Long term, businesses must develop sensory marketing campaigns that are relevant and effective in eCommerce.
Services marketing originated as a separate field of study during the 1980s. Researchers realized that the unique characteristics of services required different marketing strategies to those used in the promotion of physical goods. Services marketing is a specialized branch of marketing that promotes the intangible benefits delivered by a company to create customer value.
Sustainable marketing describes how a business will invest in social and environmental initiatives as part of its marketing strategy. Also known as green marketing, it is often used to counteract public criticism around wastage, misleading advertising, and poor quality or unsafe products.
Word-of-mouth marketing is a marketing strategy skewed toward offering a great experience to existing customers and incentivizing them to share it with other potential customers. That is one of the most effective forms of marketing as it enables a company to gain traction based on existing customers’ referrals. When repeat customers become a key enabler for the brand this is one of the best organic and sustainable growth marketing strategies.
360 marketing is a marketing campaign that utilizes all available mediums, channels, and consumer touchpoints. 360 marketing requires the business to maintain a consistent presence across multiple online and offline channels. This ensures it does not miss potentially lucrative customer segments. By its very nature, 360 marketing describes any number of different marketing strategies. However, a broad and holistic marketing strategy should incorporate a website, SEO, PPC, email marketing, social media, public relations, in-store relations, and traditional forms of advertising such as television.
Content marketing is one of the most powerful commercial activities which focuses on leveraging content production (text, audio, video, or other formats) to attract a targeted audience. Content marketing focuses on building a strong brand, but also to convert part of that targeted audience into potential customers.
Gennaro is the creator of FourWeekMBA, which reached about four million business people, comprising C-level executives, investors, analysts, product managers, and aspiring digital entrepreneurs in 2022 alone | He is also Director of Sales for a high-tech scaleup in the AI Industry | In 2012, Gennaro earned an International MBA with emphasis on Corporate Finance and Business Strategy.
