7 Fundamentals to Build a Content Marketing Competency

This post appeared first as a contribution to Kapost’s Marketter blog – http://marketeer.kapost.com/content-marketing-competency/  

For most marketers, content marketing is a priority. If you are in this camp, perhaps you have been thinking about how to build a content marketing machine.

It is not easy. Most marketing teams fail at it. Either because they cannot produce the content they need or because the content they create is not effective. You can only build effective content repeatedly and consistently if you build a competency.

That’s the topic of this presentation, which was presented at the Austin Digital Marketing Summit last week. In it, I make 7 key points that might help you build a content marketing competency:

  1. Get the basics right first. Defining who is your customer, building personas and mapping the buyer’s journey is critical, but not a function of content marketing. They are at the core of marketing strategy and should be developed with agreed upon by the entire marketing team.
  2. Good marketing is educational. The buying process is a series of questions customers have as they research and evaluate. Identifying these questions will point to the opportunities to be helpful and useful.
  3. Engagement is overrated. It is easy to measure, but it is not always a good indicator: you may see customers doubling engagement with your site and content, only because the content they find is not useful and customers continue to search for the answers to their questions.
  4. Connect to revenue. Content marketing is useless unless it makes the cash register ring. It’s not about followers, views, or engagement. The only metric that counts is getting customers closer to buying from you.
  5. Build thought leadership. Find a point of view in the intersection between your expertise, what customers need and what will predispose them to buy from you.
  6. Marketers Write. The value marketing teams bring to an organization is their knowledge of customers, their environment (including your competitive landscape) and how their needs map to your products. Therefore, marketers are better equipped than anyone else to write. If your marketers are not writing, get them to write. It must be part of their job and their skill development plan.
  7. Customers attention looks like an inverse funnel. As you re-purpose your content and build a content plan, it is important to map it to how much customers are willing to listen to you and how interested they are in what you have to say. Just like when you read a newspaper you start with the headline, then the sub-head to decide if you want to read an article, customers want short pieces of content that ‘sell them’ into reading longer forms of content.

Read the full presentation here: