Join us in picturing this:
You’re the marketing director at an energy company. It’s 4:00 pm on a Thursday afternoon. Your marketing team has been talking over each other for the past hour and a half regarding the pros and cons of a B2C email campaign announcing a new electric vehicle infrastructure program launching the following month. Meanwhile, your public relations manager pipes up from the corner of the room with the idea to partner with the local municipal office to cross-promote the program through a press release and ribbon-cutting ceremony.
Your web copy staffer is scrambling to simultaneously update the new program’s landing page and draft a blog post explaining the importance of access to EV infrastructure. Your B2B program lead wants to know what channels you’ll be using to promote the program to your commercial customers. At the same time, your social media specialist is trying to anticipate the number of social media posts your company will be able to get out of the announcement. At the end of the meeting, nothing gets decided.
The next week, the same things happen. Unwittingly, at least six opportunities for promoting the program to your customers are left on the table. Meanwhile, your customers know nothing about this exciting program that will make it much easier to access electric vehicle chargers throughout their city, thereby eliminating one of the major barriers to electric vehicle adoption.
You leave each meeting feeling stressed and mentally ticking off the number of days until the launch of the program: “30 days until we go live…23 days until we go live...”
Deep breath, and now we’re back to the present. Whether that scenario sounded completely atypical or anxiously familiar, chances are you’ve been in a position in your company where, at some point, the idea of content marketing came up. A new program, a need for building brand awareness, a partnership to expand services for your customers, increasing your brand’s presence on social media, establishing your CEO as a thought leader, updating your website, simply maintaining regular channels of communication with your stakeholders…all of these warrant the consideration of content marketing.
More importantly, they warrant the consideration of a content marketing strategy. At its core, a content marketing strategy establishes the process of creating valuable, high-quality content to engage, intrigue and inform current and potential customers. Without a content marketing strategy—an outline for every piece of content your company puts out into the world—there’s no opportunity to connect with your customers.
Driving that point home, consider these three statistics:
- The average person consumes over 11 pieces of content prior to making a purchasing decision.
- 75% of marketing leaders polled by Forrester saw bottom-line outcomes, such as loyalty or reduced marketing or media expenses, from content marketing.
- 96% of B2B buyers want content with more input from industry thought leaders.
Unfortunately, the biggest barrier to adopting a content marketing strategy is the content itself. The Content Marketing Institute estimates that 60% of companies fear that they cannot produce content consistently, and 65% of companies find it challenging to produce engaging content. Overall, 32% of marketing teams rate their content marketing workflow as fair or poor.
If you find your company in the same boat, take a step back and answer these questions:
- What is your company’s mission? What are your goals?
- What KPIs need to be met in order to meet those goals?
- Are you currently meeting them with the content that you have?
- Who are your audiences? Write all of them down, both primary and periphery groups.
- What content channels are you currently using? Paid? Owned? Earned? Write them all down.
Getting a solid perspective from the answers to these questions will help set you up for content marketing success. From there, give us a call! We’re here to help you build a content marketing strategy that will help your company exceed your customers’ expectations. A tall order maybe, but we’re up to the task.