- Make it mean something. EVERY piece of content you produce needs to mean something to the people who read it. AND it needs to advance the interests of your business. Fail on the first point and they won’t read it. Fail on the second and – very best case – you’ll just be doing them the favour of growing their knowledge, instead of growing your business too.
- Make them want to read it. In an age of hyper-sophisticated content tracking metrics, measuring where it goes can end up eclipsing how well written it is. Badly written doesn’t get read. On any platform.
- Make it work equally hard wherever it appears. A white paper doesn’t work the same as a tweet. Plan for all the platforms you want your content to appear on before you start to produce it.
- Make the effort to follow it up. There’s no point expecting ‘followers’ in cyberspace if you don’t make the space in the schedule to keep an eye on the progress of your content once it’s released.
- Make sure your own people know what’s going on. The single most important audience for any content-led marketing you will ever produce is your own internal team. They can’t champion it, or benefit from it in any way, if they don’t know it exists.
- Make sure your own people understand what’s going on. Having your people knowing about the existence of your content marketing is vital but still only half the battle. They also need to understand your message, otherwise they can’t meaningfully engage in the market conversations it should be designed to inspire.
- Make sure your own people can see the point. Your team deserves to know what you are aiming to achieve with your content production. That’s a basic courtesy. It’s also indispensable if you want to count on their support.
- Make sure everything you produce has an owner. Every piece of content needs an internal sponsor, preferably a senior one who has high expectations from it. This way, things will happen. The alternative is an ownerless vacuum: fatal to the effectiveness of content.
- Make sure you measure what matters. Intricate metrics from shiny measurement programs will detail traffic. But it’s outcomes that really matter. If a white paper goes to one well-chosen prospect who reads it, likes it, meets you and engages with you, that’s a triumph. The rest is ‘stuff’.
- Make sure you set meaningful targets. Make your content distribution programs outcomes driven not volume based. Your market isn’t a wall. And your content isn’t mud.
sharing thinking
