Streamline your content marketing strategy

Both Scott Maxwell and Firas Raouf discuss the topic of the impossible marketing dream team.  For the same reasons they describe in their discussions, your company’s content marketing strategy can seem disorganized and simply put, wasteful. 

Picture this:  You are a member of a small marketing team tasked with doing the impossible, such as - improve our search engine traffic, get involved with social media, perfect content development, build our brand, improve customer engagement, become cutting edge, deliver more quality leads, define the direction for the product, run an influence marketing program, and so on. 

The above topics are often always included in a comprehensive list of to-do items so it is easy to see how confusing a well-developed content marketing strategy can become. Your content marketing initiatives alone may include:

1. Writing news releases
2. Creating a weekly newsletter
3. Designing and creating an ebook
4. Managing a curated content site
5. Feeding content to diverse social media and/or influencer programs
6. Creating audio content
7. Creating video content
8. Writing articles
9. Writing blog posts
10. Managing particular freelancers  
11. Creating the strategy

If you do not verbalize the details of your content marketing strategy with your peers, your activities may seem one-off or ad hoc.  It’s evident that an opportunity for improvement exists. 

THE EDITORIAL CALENDAR - This tool can bring clearness to any content marketing initiative.

Editorial calendars will bring ease to your team efforts and organize the creation and promotion of your content development.  The tool will help put everyone’s mind at ease as it relates to planning.  Here are the crucial components of editorial calendars to get you started:

• Clearly signal the owner of the content
• Label important dates (due dates, holidays, delivery dates)
• Include the content type
• Include the theme or topic so you can match the content to the specific topic

If you are new to creating editorial calendars, check out my post on OpenViewPartners.com’s editorial calendar or Michele Lin’s post on the OpenView sponsored Content Marketing Institute

Amanda Maksymiw is a Marketing Associate at OpenView Labs.

Tags: content development, content marketing, content marketing strategy

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 8th, 2011 at 3:39 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.