Understand Our Strategy

Time to drop the philosophizing and get to real work. To grasp what each part of this book will present, we’ll first introduce our new content marketing strategy. The strategy is flexible but has a few core tenets that should remain enforced regardless of how we approach content creation. The strategy is called Good Content.

The Good Content strategy resembles a customer funnel, but one that never drops leads^? (oh what wishful thinking). Our strategy acquires customers by attracting them with content related to our business (business-adjacent) that they find valuable—top-funnel content fills this portion at #1. Top-funnel content directs customers to our middle-funnel content: pieces that directly market our products and services while keeping focus on the customer and their needs (#2).

Middle-funnel content directs to other middle-funnel content and ultimately, conversions. Upon conversion, the strategy places customers into the post-funnel content loop (#3). The pieces in this loop nurture existing customers to keep our brand on their mind, grow their relationship with us, and inspire their repeat business. That is the book’s proposed strategy, the Good Content strategy, our strategy.

As we continue, we will find examples that help us generate content ideas at each point of the funnel. On occasion, the strategy seems like an overwhelming amount of work. However, a sole-proprietor can implement everything this strategy requires because it scales organically: fewer resources means fewer pieces of content, and vice-versa. But more content is not always more better; it’s best to produce the right content, not the right amount.

In Practice

Let’s assume we run a local business, a coffee shop for example (I’m a sucker for any place that puts hipsters to work). As the owners of this coffee shop, our goals are to bring customers into the store. If we’re located in a major metropolitan area, Chicago for example, we begin by analyzing the search habits of local coffee shop-goers.

We stumble upon a popular search query, top coffee shops chicago. Looks promising. We place this Keyword^? into our content queue. Soon we publish a piece comparing 5 of the trendiest coffee shops in Chicago. Toward the bottom, we congratulate our competition for making the list and mention how tempted we were to throw our hat in the ring (but we held back, of course).

Searchers looking for top coffee shops, would-be coffee shop goers, and even the competition stumbles across our list. The unbiased and occasionally flattering piece inspires readers to check our shop out, too (they’re already on our website after all). The post leads them to a beautiful gallery of interior photographs, a menu of coffee and small-food items, and other middle-funnel content pieces.

Surprised and impressed by our honesty, the reader bookmarks our business and soon ends up at our door. At checkout, our rewards program collects their email and sends them directly to our post-funnel content loop. We take that opportunity to get feedback about our shop, coffee, and other aspects of our business to continue building a relationship with our new customer.

This is one implementation of the Good Content strategy, each business requires a tailored approach. But we can see the skeletal structure of the strategy in play: help potential customers by providing them with a value, inform them of our offering in a helpful and attractive way, then enhance their experience with our brand using post-conversion content. The last element of the strategy requires evaluating content pieces to optimize for performance. We use web analytics and customer feedback tools to determine the value of each effort. Poor performing content demands modification, and sometimes, deletion.

Is This A Lot Of Work?

If we have the capacity to release valuable pieces twice a day and evaluate our entire library’s performance on a weekly basis, then more power to us. But the rule of thumb is this, if we’re not a publication, don’t act like one Blogs, magazines, newspapers, the New York Times, these organizations are publications and with that label comes an expectation of frequency from the consumer.

However, our consumer has no such expectation of us; they expect us to deliver a service or a product, not a periodical. It is this book’s opinion that our media presence should not and cannot compete with organizations dedicated to content production—that is an uphill battle easy to lose and impossible to win.

I’ve bared witness to billion-dollar organizations that attempted to turn their marketing teams into publishing machines. They wanted to print multiple posts a day, big stories each week, video series each month, white papers each quarter, and on until their fingernails bled. Their strategy’s core focus was quantity, not quality. They fell into a trap that lures many marketers: the 7+ exposures theory.

The exposure theory purports that a prospect requires a minimum of 7 exposures to the product (‘touches’) before making a purchase. Frequent touches can contribute to a brand’s mindshare, but the right content for the right person should generate a conversion on the first exposure, not the 87th. When we race toward high-frequency publishing goals, we sacrifice quality for quantity and we generate unnecessary and often poor content.

This strategy recommends we narrow our focus and choose our targets wisely. We formulate top-funnel content plans that readers in our target audience will enjoy. We create middle-funnel pieces that fulfill burning questions our leads need answered. And we produce post-funnel content that builds customer relationships, not media conglomerates.