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Content Marketing: What You Need to Know (June 2022)

Content marketing is one of the most important roles in any organization driving growth through inbound marketing strategies.

Content marketing is one of the most critical roles in any organization driving growth through inbound marketing strategies. This team often provides materials for sales, customer success, and other groups to enable different forms of selling, including outbound and via channel partners.

This article will walk through the organization’s role, guiding how to develop an effective marketing strategy while executing to achieve results.

What is content marketing?

Content marketing creates high-quality content to support the stated revenue goals of their business.

This content generally supports all facets of the go-to-market motion, but prioritization is often placed on generating inbound leads.

What are the primary job roles in a content marketing organization?

The Content Marketing Manager is responsible for developing an effective content marketing strategy to meet the business goals and is responsible for creating all assets, whether developed in-house or by consultants.

While the make-up of the team will vary across businesses, a group typically has the following roles:

  • Project managers or similar who keep the trains running on time.
  • Editors, sometimes.
  • Copywriters
  • Video producer
  • Web developers
  • SEO specialists
  • Social media expert.

Your organization may have only a subset of these roles, or all of them, again, depending on your go-to-market motion, industry, and business size.

How do you develop your content marketing strategy?

Keep your strategy simple, but ensure you define it in writing.

What goes into your content marketing strategy?

Define your WHY.

Yes, we always start with this.

Why does the content marketing team exist, and what business goals are you seeking to support?

What parts of the journey are we supporting?

You may better ask this question this way – what portions of the buying and customer journies will be incredible at developing in-house vs. what is it okay for us to be good enough and use third-party resources?

  • Are you only creating valuable content to support inbound lead generation?
  • Are you creating engaging content for the sales team to use with prospects during the buying process?
  • Are you creating quality content for existing customers, delivered via your Customer Success or similar organization?

In most companies, most, you will not have enough budget or resources to cover everything to the level you want.

Understanding where you want to build your expertise is critical for maximizing the ROI of your content marketing program.

What types of content will your team create?
  • PDF
  • Powerpoint
  • HTML5 web content
  • Blog posts
  • Videos
  • Social media posts
  • Photos

The content marketing team will develop a content mix that will allow you to achieve your goals.

As noted above, the best teams build internal expertise in 2-3 areas and often outsource the other types of content to specialists.

How will you measure success against goals?

You defined your why up-front; how will you measure if you achieved these goals?

Please read our article on maximizing content marketing ROI.

What content marketing processes will you need?

At a minimum, you will want to define your content lifecycle. This process will discuss:

  • How is content work prioritized?
  • How is work assigned?
  • How do you determine what format to use for the assigned content?
  • What is the review process as content is developed and finalized?
  • Who is responsible for publishing content, and what are the agreed-upon SLAs?

Consider using a formal process, something like this example workflow you can get from Lucid.

A content marketing workflow

Disclosure: We are reader-supported. If you click on a link and purchase items linked to below, we may make a small commission at no extra cost to you. Learn more.

Also, we created this with Lucidchart, and we are happy to share the project with you directly; reach out to us, and we will share the project with you if that is of value.

Essential Content Marketing Tactics for Lead Generation

Get smart – steal ideas from your competitors.

You need SEO (search engine optimization) expertise in your team.

Using tools like ahrefs and BuzzSumo, you can analyze your competitor’s websites to understand what topics they are writing that generate traffic to their website.

For example, you may manufacture and sell a particular type of widget and have 2-3 competitors.

Using SEO analysis tools, review what their top pages are.

Have you created helpful content covering these same topics from your perspective?

Are you educating your buyers and customers to the same degree, or are they going to your competitor’s websites to find information?

If they find information on your competitor’s websites, they will probably also consider buying from them.

With digital marketing approaches, ensuring search engines favor your website is key.  This is true for both organic search and paid advertising.

Our favorite color – evergreen
What is evergreen content?

Evergreen content remains as relevant to readers months later as it did when you first published it.

This type of content is timeless.

Why do you want to use evergreen content?

A business has a finite amount of money to invest in content marketing, and you must maximize the value of what you create.

If you spend 40 hours writing a fantastic blog post that is only relevant for a week, its value to the business is limited to that week.

And that may be okay, of course, if it creates sufficient revenue.

Your goal is to ensure that every piece of content has a clear ROI (return on investment) based on its purpose.

In other words.

If you are writing a blog post to generate leads for your product. Your goal for the article may be X number of MQLs or $Y of revenue generated.

As you prioritize the work from your content backlog, consider the ROI of each piece in this prioritization process.

If that content piece that lives for a week generates 100 MQLs while the evergreen piece that lives for two years only generates 10 MQLs, then the trade-off should be clear.

More often than not, however, the evergreen piece will outperform other pieces in terms of ROI.

Be consistent

In your content calendar, define your posting schedule.

If you can only post once a month, consistently post once a month.

If weekly, post every week.

You will have more success building an audience for your content if you remain consistent.

Amplify your efforts on social media

But be smart and identify where your readers spend most of their time.

You don’t need to be on every single social media platform — you only need to be where your readers, who are hopefully your buyers, spend their time.

Create video content

High quality video content is favored by both humans and the search engines.

Find ways to naturally include video as part of your marketing campaigns.

Product Marketing vs. Content Marketing

We have been discussing content marketing but want to quickly answer this question: What’s the difference – between product marketing vs. content marketing.

Product marketers also create content, but their focus is on marketing specific products. In contrast, content marketing focuses on building awareness of your product with prospects and customers, developing relationships, and ultimately leading to long-term, satisfied customers.

Content Marketing vs. Copywriting

Content marketing focuses on developing relationships with customers while copywriting focuses on persuading customers to buy products or services.

Content Marketing vs. SEO

Content marketing focuses on developing relationships with customers, while SEO focuses on optimizing a website to appear higher on search engine results pages.

Learn from SEO Trends
Write Content Buyers are Searching For with BuzzSumo

BuzzSumo Logo

Brand Journalism vs. Content Marketing

Brand journalism is creating and publishing original content to help build a company’s brand, while content marketing focuses on developing relationships with customers.

Content Marketing Goal – Increasing Content Velocity

What is content velocity?

Content velocity measures how quickly your content marketing team creates content for your organization.

For content marketing teams, increasing velocity is critical.

How do you increase content velocity?

There are many things you can do to speed up your content production, but here are three essential tips:

  • Create an intake process that allows you to prioritize your work.
  • Publish a content calendar, and use it to communicate with stakeholders.
  • Creating content via an assembly line. Have internal and external resources capable of building out individual components and assembling them as they come together.
  • Develop a library of reusable assets (images, video content, audio assets).

Content Tools To Use

Here are the content tools we find crucial to our jobs on Trust Enablement.

Content Marketing ToolsWhy do we use it?G2 RatingsProsConsPricingTry Now
ahrefsIn-depth SEO Research4.6/5.0
(386 Reviews)
Hands down the best overall SEO tool on the market.Pricing ranges from $99/month to $999/month.Try Now to Win the SEO Wars
BuzzSumoWe use the FREE version to complement our use of ahrefs — we do a lot of research4.5/5.0
(92 Reviews)
Powerful tool with a slick interface to evaluate trending and popular content.The FREE version is not sufficient if you use this as your only SEO tool. That’s why we use ahrefs and the FREE version of BuzzSumo.Prices range from FREE through $299/user/monthTry Now to Research Your Content Needs
CanvaWe create the majority of our graphics in Canva.4.7/5.0
(3391 Reviews)
We are not designers and with Canva, you don’t have to be design-savvy.Canva has a FREE version.

Pricing for up to 5 people is $119/year.

Pricing above this is $30/user/month and a minimum of 25 user accounts.
Try Now to Create Stunning Graphics
GrammarlyWe spell and grammar check everything.4.6/5.0
(1116 Reviews)
Easy to use and fits into our workflow. We use the browser extensions to spell check within our blogging platform.Grammarly has a FREE version.

Pricing ranges up to $12.50/user/month.
Try Now to Eliminate Copywriting Errors
LucidFor creating workflow diagrams.4.6/5.0
(1565 Reviews)
Easy to use with hundreds of templates included.Lucid has a FREE option and several pricing options for each of its products.Try Now to Create Amazing Workflows
monday.comFor managing our content projects and overall program.4.7/5.0
(5574 Reviews)
Extremely flexible yet easy to use for managing projects of any size.Pricey but truly top of the line.monday.com has a FREE option.

Paid plans range from $6/user/month through $22/user/month and at the top level is an Enterprise plan that does not list pricing.
Try Now to Manage Projects Successfully

What about AI Writers?

Evaluate: AI-based content writers to scale your efforts

Here is a simple walkthrough of me using Jasper to write an article about Picrew, an anime avatar generator.  Created with Loom.

What is the Content Marketing Institute?

CMI is a content marketing resource, founded in 2007 by Joe Pulizzi.

CMI helps companies to attract and retain customers through creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content.

What is the Marketing Insider Group (MIG)?

MIG is a content marketing resource, founded in 2014 by Doug Kessler.

MIG helps companies to attract and retain customers by creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content.

What is the Content Marketing Association (CMA)?

CMA is a content marketing resource, founded in 2014 by Robert Rose.

CMA helps companies to attract and retain customers by creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content.

What questions did we leave unanswered?

Let us know, and we will come back with the answer.

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