7S T E P S TO LAUNCHING YOUR BEST CONTENT A guide to creating an effective content marketing strategy FIRST EDITION
Table of Contents 1 Introduction 3 6 9 16 18 Remind yourself of WHY you exist What do you want to achieve Who do you want to reach Consistent look Choosing your vehicles 20 Choosing your podium 24 Creating a posting schedule 29 This is only the beginning
INTRODUCTION C O N T E N T I S N O W Look at you, sitting there all awesome and about to turn the world upside down! You have products that will solve people s problems. You have an organization that will empower communities. You have a message that is FIRE and the world needs to hear it. Wait though, why are you are holding this workbook in your hands? Did you download this book because you felt something was missing in your marketing efforts? Do you feel like you are not being heard? Where is all the foot traffic that you hoped would be walking through your business doors? Are you not getting the traction you hoped for on Facebook? Are you not seeing the traffic to your website that you hoped for? Is that donor list just not building as fast as you thought it would? Spinning wheels? If you said yes to any of these questions, then downloading this workbook will help you move up and forward in the right direction. 1
Over the next number of pages, we will be set on a course to launching your content marketing plan and campaign. We will work step by step from the ground up. When finished, you will have an established direction and focus for your content marketing plan. You might be asking, what is Content Marketing? I m so glad you asked! Content marketing is creating and distributing content that is relevant, provides value, and works with the intent to attract and keep a clearly defined audience. The content that is strategically created is consistent, with the end goal being to drive customer action. For years (and still common), traditional marketing and advertising worked on the premise that companies showed you a product a bunch of times and then hoped that you would go buy. We, as consumers, with the help of technology, can skip media ads, ignore sales calls, look past the waving banner, shop from our iphones instead of walking into a store. Traditional marketing is just not effective anymore. Content marketing has been put into action and is now used from small businesses to large corporations and brands such as Microsoft, Taco Bell, and Old Spice. The reason? Because it works. Well, are you ready to dig in? Are you ready to be heard? Are you ready change lives? Are you ready to grow your brand? Awesome! Let s get to work! 2
WHY R E M I N D Y O U R S E L F O F W H Y Y O U E X I S T. What is your WHY? This is an essential question, and some say the most essential. Why do you do what you do? Why do you exist? Reminding yourself of your WHY keeps the through line of your brand or organization in front of you. As you start to build your content, your WHY helps the message of your content be consistent and true. Sometimes we get a hairball idea and it's maybe the greatest idea ever, but if it doesn't agree with your WHY, then we should shelve it. 3
WHY Why do you do what you do and how does that make you remarkable? 4
WHY What value to you provide? What products and services do you sell and provide? 5
GOALS WHAT DO YOU WANT TO ACHIEVE Whether you are a non profit, small business, or flying solo, one of the first steps we want to do is to pen your goals. If we are a nonprofit, do we want to "build our donor base by 20% in the U.S. over the next 4 months" or as a business, do we want to "open 10 accounts in three Southern California cities in the next 60 days." When we write down our goals it gives us a destination to work towards. It also helps refine and direct our content that we want to produce, so we can achieve our goals. In general, we want to avoid letting tactics (social media platforms, email list etc.) dictate our goals. For example, instead of a goal of "we want to gain 10,000 YouTube subscribers next month." - it would be far more effective if our goal was "we want 10,000 net customers acquired through YouTube." Here are some examples of goal types that may work for you or give you a starting point. 1. Build donor base 2. Increase speaking engagments 3. Expand business to business market 4. Increase participation in cause 5. Eliminate customer dissatisfaction 6. Increase product sales 6
GOALS What are your goals? Goal One Goal Two Goal Three 7
GOALS What are your goals? Goal Four Goal Five Goal Six 8
WHO WHO YOU WANT TO REACH In this section we want to build persona profiles. We want to define who we want to hear our message or utililize our services or buy our products. By creating very specific persona profiles, we are able to create content that is laser sharp and pointed directly for people we know will benefit the most. Time to dig in, investigate and understand who your target audience is going to be. At a minimum, zero in on the top three identifiers: Sex, Age, and Location. I suggest you build at least three persona profiles, the first one is your absolute top target audience. The next few pages are provided so you can build and save your persona profiles. For each persona you develop give it a name, for example: "Julie, stay at home mom". Feel free to add elements that may not be listed. Remember, we want to be detailed, and you can never have too much detail. 9
Profile One Profile Name: 1. Gender (can be both) 2. Age range 3. What are their problems? 4. How do they consume media? (Phone, tablet, computer, TV) 5. What do they read? (Fiction, Religious, Newspaper, Buisness etc?) 10
Profile One 6. What social media platforms do they frequent? (Top 3) 7. What is their average household income? 8. What are their buying habits? 9. Marital Status? Family? How big of family? 10. Conclude with a summary paragraph describing this persona profile. 11
Profile Two Profile Name: 1. Gender (can be both) 2. Age range 3. What are their problems? 4. How do they consume media? (Phone, tablet, computer, TV) 5. What do they read? (Fiction, Religious, Newspaper, Buisness etc?) 12
Profile Two 6. What social media platforms do they frequent? (Top 3) 7. What is their average household income? 8. What are their buying habits? 9. Marital Status? Family? How big of family? 10. Conclude with a summary paragraph describing this persona profile. 13
Profile Three Profile Name: 1. Gender (can be both) 2. Age range 3. What are their problems? 4. How do they consume media? (Phone, tablet, computer, TV) 5. What do they read? (Fiction, Religious, Newspaper, Buisness etc?) 14
Profile Three 6. What social media platforms do they frequent? (Top 3) 7. What is their average household income? 8. What are their buying habits? 9. Marital Status? Family? How big of family? 10. Conclude with a summary paragraph describing this persona profile. 15
FACADE CONSISTENT LOOK Before you start producing incredible content to change the world, we need to discover and decide what your content will look, sound, and feel like. What is the wrapping paper around the message you will be delivering? When you decide what the overall tone and appearance of your content is going to be, it will be your barometer for consistency. Consistency is key. It provides your target audience, viewers, and subscribers, a level of trust and known expectations. When you eat at your favorite restaurant chain, you know that you will get the same level and type of food from one city to the next. The same is with your content- how will people perceive you and what will they expect from you time and time again? 16
Facade 1. What is your look? Professional? Casual? Black and white? Artsy? 2. What do you sound like? What is the style of language you use? What type words do you use? 3. What is your style? Serious? Comedic? Documentary? 17
MEDIUM CHOOSING YOUR VEHICLES An artist has many mediums to choose from to create art. Oil, charcoal, clay, screen print, and much more. We also have a number of options of mediums for how we want to create our message. Videos, podcasts, blogs (a blog can quickly become a social platform mentioned later, ebooks, photos, and more. We want to decide what will be our top three mediums, number one being the one we will put the most energy into. Remember the persona profiles we built? Those should be great starting points on figuring out which mediums to use. How does your targeted audience consume information? Do they read, do they watch, do they listen? I'm going to make a strong suggestion. I suggest that you utilize video as one of your top three mediums. As a whole in general, this is how the majority of people access information and with technology, it has never been easier to create, edit, and share video. 18
1. Medium Below, list what top three mediums you will use and why. (ahem, "video" hint, hint) 2. 3. 19
PLATFORMS CHOOSING YOUR PODIUM Now that you have decided on your mediums, we need to zero in on how and where you are going to share your content. Yes, we are going to use social media as our distribution channel and funnel. You may already have a number of platforms that you currently use such as Facebook, Twitter, or even Snapchat. Great! You are already ahead of the game. With these platforms we are going use them to help us achieve the goals we that we have established above. We will use the content we create and share on these platforms, to ultimately get our targeted audience to our website. 20
Platform Time to figure out what top three social platforms you will use. Is there ever a lot to choose from. Oh man! You can choose as many as you want, but let's start with three. Three that we know we can be consistent with. FACEBOOK SNAPCHAT YOUTUBE TWITTER INSTAGRAM LINKEDIN These are just a few of the big social media giants. Again, you want to refer back to your persona profiles and discover where the majority of your audience is, and where do they spend their social media time. You should also keep in mind what platforms will be best suited for your message to not only reach your target group but also retain them. 21
Platform One of your end goals with using various social platforms is to get traffic to your website. Think of them as feeders. Your Website 22
Platform List your top three social platforms that you want to use for content distribution, engagement with users, and brand recognition. And WHY? 1. 2. 3. 23
POSTING CREATING A POSTING SCHEDULE How frequently do you want to post? How realistically can you post? This is a balance that needs to be found. While the idea here is to be frequent with your content and engagement, consistency is key. Set up a tangible posting plan. Maybe you create and post three to four Facebook posts per week. Maybe start off with two blog posts per month. Remember, once you are in the habit and flow of creating content you can always create more frequently, which usually becomes the case. A point to emphasize with content strategy is that you want to provide value to your viewer/subscriber. The last thing you want to do is create Facebook posts that only showcase products you sell. Remember, its about producing content that provides value to the viewer, build that trust, then from time to time you can slip in a product post. Be consistent with your posting. Be consistent with your message that encases your mission. 24
Posting Note: I'm not sponored by the companies below. There are a TON of apps and services you can use to schedule your social media posts. There are freebies and paid tools. You can go digital or pen and paper. It's totally up to you, the key is to just create a posting schedule. It also doesn't hurt to experiment with a few different options to see which works best for you. Below are few tools that are excellent and will get the job done. All but CoSchedule are free. I added CoShedule because they have some really nice features that are very specific for marketing and social media posting calendars. If money isn't much of a concern to you and you have a team that you are collaborating with to post, it's worth checking out. I personally think Google Calendar is the best option when it comes to digital task management. You can add anyone to join in and colloborate, it provides task and deadline reminders, and of course it has the calendar view. Oh yeah, and IT'S FREE! To be frank though, I still prefer the old school methods of pen and paper. I have tried a few planners and the one that works best for me is the Spark Notebook. LOVE IT! www.thesparknotebook.com 25
Posting Whatever method you choose, it is best to write down and organize your ideas and tasks prior to filling up your calendar. ACTIVITIES ON PLATFORMS Write out your three chosen social platforms and under each one list all the general activity you are going to do. For example: Facebook Live Video Blog article Product promo Video Promo Quotes Post Related articles TASKS TO ACHIEVE ACTIVITIES Once you have the general activities listed out, it's time to get specfic with tasks for each platform. For example if you wanted to fulfil your Live Video activity, you might write it out as such: Facebook Task: 1. Decide topic and create talking points. 2. Promote future live event on such and such date 3. Launch Live Video event Your activities help you keep on track with the type of content distribution you will be doing and the tasks are giving defintion to the various activies you plan to execute. 26
CONCLUSION THIS IS ONLY THE BEGINNING OF GOOD THINGS TO COME Content marketing is a big task, but when executed it has amazing results. This book's intent is to get you started with your content marketing strategy, whether it is a short-term campaign for a brand or a long term plan for your organization as a whole. Remember, plan, set goals, create, execute, and repeat. Be persistent and consistent. You got this! Now is your time. Go turn the world upside down! 29
SALUTATION THANK YOU! I want to sincerely thank you for downloading this workbook and I appreciate you taking the time to read and work though it. I would love your questions and feedback. Please feel free to write me at: brandon@ @theadventagency @bmascarenas143 30