How to Build a Better Content Marketing Strategy

By MICHELE LINN published OCTOBER 10, 2014

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I would argue that a lot of marketers don’t understand what [a content marketing strategy] means. They think culling together a bunch of tactics is actually a strategy, but it’s not.—Ardath Albee

Unless you have a focus on what it is you are trying to achieve with your content or your digital marketing in general, you will get distracted.
—Nick Panayi

These quotes are just two key points made in a recent roundtable discussion CMI developed around our B2B content marketing research. This series of conversations explores the “whys” behind our findings and provides expert advice on ways that content marketers can make their efforts more efficient and successful.

A big thanks to Ardath Albee, CEO and Marketing Strategist at Marketing Interactions; Carla Johnson, Principal at Type A Communications and Vice President-Thought Leadership at the Business Marketing Association; Nick Panayi, Head of Global Brand and Digital Marketing at CSC; Gary Van Prooyen, Senior Director, North America Demand Center, at Motorola; and Steve Rotter, Vice President, Digital Marketing Solutions at Brightcove for participating in this conversation.

The first topic the team discussed was the importance of a content marketing strategy. As Joe Pulizzi recently asserted, documenting your content marketing strategy and following it closely are the two things that separate great content marketers from their less effective peers.

The 16-page guide Content Marketing Institute published on documenting your strategy can certainly help you get started. But, once you’ve gone through the initial documentation process, you’ll need to know how to implement that strategy — and keep it updated on an ongoing basis.

While you will want to follow your strategy closely in order to keep your content marketing focused on your organization’s goals, it should also be flexible enough to account for new insights and information you receive as time goes on. There is no specific template you can use to build a strategy; but below, we share some guidelines you can use to determine what elements should stay consistent and what will likely evolve:

Your goals and mission should be sticky

The first two things you need to identify when building your strategy are the goals and mission of your content marketing program. Coincidentally, these are the same two that should change very little.

In case you aren’t as familiar with these two concepts as you would like to be, here are some high-level details:

Goals: It’s never a good idea to create content just for the sake of having content. Rather, you need to understand what business outcome you want to impact through your content creation. For instance:

• Do you need to raise awareness for your brand?
• Do you need to build your email list?
• Do you need to nurture prospects along their buyer’s journey?
• Do you need to convert your audience to paying customers?
• Do you need to retain customers and/or increase their purchases (up-sell/ cross-sell)?
• Do you need to convert customers to evangelists?

We have to be able to tie content to business objectives. What is it we’re really trying to do for the companies we’ve worked for and [want to] move forward? I think it’s the biggest thing that marketers miss. —Carla Johnson

Mission: This addresses key considerations like who you are aiming to help, what you will deliver to them, and how your audience will benefit. The more specific you can be, the better. (I always cringe when I hear marketers tell me that their product/service can help anyone— it’s best to focus on serving the audience that can benefit the most, and then figure out what content they truly need.)

[Use your content marketing strategy] to decide what the purpose is of each piece of content that you are doing. ‘How does it fit into the bigger picture of what we are trying to do?’ Without that strategy, you don’t have purpose-driven content. —Carla Johnson

Your goals and missions should be so core to what you do that you think aboutthem every single day. In fact, they should be the lens through which you evaluateevery piece of content you are creating. For instance, at CMI, we consider every piece of content with these two things in mind:

1. Will this help us advance the practice of content marketing for enterprise brand marketers?
2. Will it help us generate more email subscribers or help our audiences engage with us in more ways.

Other aspects of your strategy should be revisited (and possibly revised) regularly

While it’s useful to hold fast to your “editorial lens,” there are other aspects of your content marketing strategy that will benefit from being reviewed periodically to make sure they are still on target. While the contents of your strategy may vary, here are some examples.

Your channel plan

Your channel plan covers which channels you should create content for and what, specifically, you will share/ do in each of those channels. (It hopefully goes without saying that you need a different strategy for each channel.) The more you learn about what type of content does well in each channel, the more effective your strategy will be.

When to revisit this: While the general type of content you have in each channel may be relatively set (e.g., Facebook works best for interest-based content, whereas LinkedIn users prefer topics that are career-based), there is a lot of room for flexibility in the way you share this information. In addition, if you are using any type of sponsored or paid promotions in your social channels, it’s especially critical to revisit this section of your plan on a frequent basis to make sure you are staying on top of consumer and social media trends.

Topics

The key topics and themes you will cover should be a part of your content marketing strategy. Not only will they serve as “guardrails” for your editorial, but they are also helpful for organizing your content for easier findability (and they are key to your internal curation strategy). Additionally, it’s useful to periodically review all of the content you have created in a given topic to see if it’s still an area that is resonating with your audience (i.e., to make sure you are aware of what’s moving the needle when it comes to your content).

When to revisit this: If you are just starting out with content marketing, I would recommend doing a topic evaluation on a quarterly basis. This gives you time to get some traction on your content that you can use as a benchmark for future efforts. If your content marketing program is more established, I would suggest reviewing your topics every six months to one year.

Process

[If you were to ask] ‘Who owns content in this company?’ you would have a hundred hands raised, because all of [your teams] truly believe that they have some ownership of it. The reality is, they do — but it is not complete ownership, or it’s not the same level of ownership. To be able to articulate what the content roles are that people play is critical. Otherwise, you are going to see people bumping heads. — Gary Van Prooyen

It’s important for your strategy to document who should be responsible for the various aspects of your program. This could be as simple as outlining general roles (Joe’s post on the10 roles needed for content marketing to succeed is a good place to get insight on how to do this,) or it could be a more task-driven list. As Gary mentioned in our roundtable, the goal is to make sure everyone understands what he or she needs to do.

When to revisit this:  Of course, whenever the members of your team change, it’s a good idea to revisit your process. However, even if your team has not changed, I suggest reviewing your process at least twice a year to see where you might be able to gain efficiencies.

How to get the most from your content marketing strategy

In short, just like with most things, you need to find the balance between structure and flexibility:

• Review your strategy and identify what is a constant, and refer to that regularly. Post these things on your wall if you need to (or at least until you internalize them.)
• Identify which sections of your strategy can be improved over time, and make a note in your calendar to review these at set intervals — unless other needs arise that necessitate you reviewing them earlier.

I’d love to get your thoughts: how do you manage your content marketing strategy once it is developed?

Want more expert advice on addressing content marketing’s biggest challenges? Check out all the fantastic CMW sessions that are available through our Video on Demand portal.Cover image by Joe Kalinowski.

Designing Around the Whole Story with User Narratives

ARTICLE NO. 1295 AUGUST 25, 2014

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Marc Cajolet | Sarah Bloomer | Alexandra Stevens

User narratives are becoming more popular as a tool for experience design. User stories, those discrete morsels of information that give us personas and a sense of action and motivation, are nothing new to design practitioners. User stories are often the trees, however, and the big picture—the context and purpose of the story—is the forest that designers fail to see. Taken alone, it's difficult to see how the user stories fit into the overall experience.

User narratives link a set of activities together in a seamless flow. They describe specific activities within a work environment, presenting a “day in the life of…” view of the user experience; using a persona to give the experience life, but providing context and embedding experience goals into the story. This narrative is the first step in designing an experience, serving as a framework for creating the flow and the screens that support that flow. Throughout the process, the narrative surfaces requirements and keeps the focus on both the end user and the context of use.

Creating the Narrative

At Kronos Incorporated, an enterprise software company, we recently embarked on a major new initiative to accelerate into the cloud-based market, and the UX team was tasked with evaluating and evolving many of Kronos’s previously held assumptions about their products and users. Rather than using existing products and well-documented solutions as the starting point, the team wanted to start from scratch and encourage new thinking. We decided that a user narrative could encapsulate requirements, personas, use cases, and work context in one short document.

We had developed personas prior to starting the new initiative, and now the product manager and interaction designer focused on three primary users, fleshing out the stories to highlight each user’s goals and actions, and linking them together in a linear fashion.

The narratives focused on the day-to-day actions of the employees using our products, beginning with their time spent prior to their arrival at work. Moving through that arrival and into their experience on the job, we explored the ways they planned, monitored, and executed tasks throughout the day.

We actively removed any “how-to” descriptions, eliminating the solution-oriented language that has a tendency to creep into requirements, and concentrated, instead, on the why. Focusing on the intent and on the user’s motivation allowed us to create an extended user story that did not prescribe a solution, but instead articulated a series of interconnected business needs. Then we color-coded the value proposition within each narrative, visually depicting how customer benefit from our products throughout the day.

The Narrative in Action

The end result was a non-technical, entertaining description of the expected user experience that mapped product requirements to larger business goals, positioning the narratives in a way that resonated with senior management. Howard Edwards, a Home Depot employee and Patriots fan, is the star of one of the narratives. Below is an excerpt:

“After hanging up his coat in the break room, Howard is ready to work on his first task of the day, which is building a Fall Colors paint display. Howard is easily able to “punch in” and record details about the task he is working on. He can also look at information related to the task like: how long the task is expected to take, and what is the average time it has taken employees at other Home Depot stores in the region to complete the task. Howard is excited to see if he can do it faster than his colleagues. He also sees that there is an employee discussion thread related to this task. Howard joins the thread, which says that the stand used to build the display has a faulty leg, and that it has toppled over in several stores. The recommended fix is to prop the display stand up with a can of paint to keep it from falling over.”

Value Propositions:

• Effective planning
• Productivity
• Membership in a community

The individual narratives varied in length, from 500 to 1,500 words. This easily digestible format made each narrative easy to present at the beginning of a meeting, and equally consumable to people unfamiliar with the project and those intimately involved.

Narratives Have Power and Prowess

The power of user narratives lies in this accessibility and in their chameleonic nature. In the early planning stages at Kronos, we used the user narratives to provide a sense of scope so we could begin identifying workflow and information architecture that would address the user needs. Later, the narratives were an effective primer for bringing senior project sponsors up to speed about who and what the team was designing for, and for onboarding new people into the project.

The power of user narratives lies in their accessibility and chameleonic naturetweet this

Using the narratives brought a refreshing new way to express the big picture and the details together in an engaging story. We found people identified more quickly with the business purpose instead of weaving their own story out of the functional requirements.

A good narrative will transform itself to meet the needs of the team employing it. Developers may create a user narrative to visualize the system as it will be used by a specific group of people, revealing use cases and requirements that might have otherwise remained undiscovered until the application was built. By using a narrative as an introduction and a leave-behind piece, stakeholders—including architects, testers, and service design teams—are able to understand users and their needs, serving to promote a user-centric view even as the UX is just forming.

Because narratives strive to answer questions about who and what and where, when, and why things are done—staying away from how things are done—they leave room for design teams to interpret the narratives for their own process. The narrative that developers use to optimize efficiency could be used to pitch an idea to venture capitalists or stakeholders. That same narrative could be adopted by researchers to help with usability testing, and by the marketing department as the basis for a campaign.

A narrative can go as deep as it needs to, for as long as it needs to, which is invaluable during fast-paced development, using lean and agile methodologies. In these environments, requirements are often being defined simultaneously with interface design. Starting with a narrative means that a team can identify the requirements and get feedback before designing, putting the focus on therequirements and not on the design itself.

Presenting Your Narratives

The very nature of a narrative is compelling to audiences. Humans are more likely to retain facts when they are embedded in a story—the narrative allows us to make an emotional connection with the information, resulting in higher levels of understanding and investment in outcome.

Understanding this, and realizing that the narratives could have a powerful impact across departments, our team wanted to present them in a dynamic way. We introduced the narratives to the company as part of a project kickoff, initially focusing on securing funding and resources while also confirming direction.

Given the diverse level of audience members, we elected to use a Prezi animated slideshow to bring the story to life in a very fluid way, using the narrative as a script while presenting photos of people, places, and things that contextualize the narrative within a realistic setting. We presented specific screen concepts of UI designs, highlighting how narratives drive design by focusing screen design.

The Prezi presentation was compelling

Conclusion

Our user narratives were received positively throughout the company, and have become an integral and ever-evolving part of our design efforts. We plan on continuing to use the narratives as a central theme, serving to connect what can at times be an overwhelming number of functional details that are produced in a product development lifecycle. They provide a consistent storyline to ground planning discussions right up to launching and training, and rescue related conversations from edge cases and dark alleys. Put simply: We love our user narratives.

Image of hardware store employee courtesy Shutterstock

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR(S)

Marc Cajolet

Marc Cajolet has worked as an interaction design manager and UX strategist for 10 years at Kronos Incorporated.

Sarah Bloomer

Sarah Bloomer has been working in the UX field for about 20 years, establishing companies in Australia and the United States. Currently, she runs her own consultancy, providing design facilitation, customer experience research and interaction design. She also works with UX teams, helping with set-up, training, mentoring, and coaching.

Alexandra Stevens

Alexandra Stevens is an experience designer at Sarah Bloomer & Co., a Boston-based UX consultancy.