Jazz is almost ready to implement her content marketing strategy. Just one more important step before she’s ready to go.
Step 6: Don’t forget documentation!
CMI and MarketingProfs’ “B2B Content Marketing: 2016 Benchmarks, Budgets, and Trends-North America” found that among the most effective B2B content marketers, 53% have a documented content marketing strategy; among the least effective, only 13% do. Only 32% of B2B and 37% of B2C content marketers have a documented strategy, though.
“Documentation is the thing I think gets overlooked more than anything else,” says Breanne Holmes, VP of digital for Chapman Cubine Adams + Hussey (CCAH) is a full-service direct marketing firm, with offices in Arlington, Va., and San Francisco, serving global nonprofit organizations. In addition, she notes, there is often a great deal of confusion about terminology: the difference between strategies and tactics, for instance, or what it takes to make an objective SMART. “I think that academia and researchers and publishers have very specific definitions for all of those terms, but when you’re in the real world and implementing, there’s a lot of gray area and a lot more overlap.”
Commit your plan to writing, including the inputs you used to make your decisions. These will prove useful as you move forward to review and modify your plan based on the results you attain.
You’ll notice we didn’t say anything about where you are going to find content, what social media channels you will use, creating an editorial calendar, and how many times you should post each week, etc. Why? Because that’s not strategy. These are tactics, and they’re very important, but they need to follow your strategy-and should really not be considered until you’ve gone through the previously mentioned steps.
How will your content marketing strategy help you get from here to there?
Read the Entire Series
6 Steps and 6 Days to an Effective Content Strategy
(This piece originally appeared in EContent.)
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