By Saeed Khan
Content marketing is all the rage. Well written, targeted content can propel your website traffic, can deliver more leads, can increase your perception as a thought leader etc. And so companies have joined the content marketing fray and started corporate blogs, posted videos on YouTube, and created targeted micro-sites. Companies also create brochures and whitepapers for download, chalk talks and recorded webinars for viewing etc. And each of these is usually measured for clicks or views or likes or downloads etc.
And while all of this content is generating a lot of activity — “Hey, our latest ‘Harlem Shake’ video just went viral!” — is there thought given to a clear purpose and target audience for each piece?’
More content is not definitely better than less content, and more “views” or “likes” are not necessarily better than less.
Optimizing Content + Marketing
“Content Marketing” has two parts: the actual content that is created and the marketing of it. i.e. getting it to the right people at the right time for the right purpose.
And it’s that last sentence that is key. When you create content, do you first identify who it’s targeted at, why it’s needed and when it would be used? If not, then your content marketing efforts are being wasted.
Someone asked me for my opinion of a white paper recently, and I said that before I could give feedback, I needed more context. In particular, I wanted to know the following:
- Who is it targeted at? Role/persona?
- What questions/concerns is it intended to answer?
- When during the sales cycle would this be best utilized?
If those 3 questions aren’t clear, then why create the content? In this case it was a 12 page whitepaper? But it could be a video, chalk talk, customer recording etc. It doesn’t matter.
Content without clear purpose is noise.
Brandon Hickie at the Openview blog wrote a great piece that puts structure around this idea. He talks about defining a “content matrix”. It’s purpose is:
to help your company’s director of content strategy prioritize content production to ensure that his or her team is focusing on the content production activities that matter.
I actually think that a content matrix is much more than that. It’s a standard and structured way to maximize results for content creation, publishing and use. It helps you decide what to and what not to do, and if the matrix itself is published (internally), it helps those people who use the content understand what was created and why.
I discuss a similar — though more general concept — in my presentation on Lean Communication.
A lot of content is created and published without a clear purpose in mind. Use the 3 questions above, or tools like the content matrix or principles of Lean Communication to help maximize the impact of and return on your content marketing efforts.
Saeed
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About the author
Saeed Khan is a founder and Managing Editor of On Product Management, and has worked for the last 20 years in high-technology companies building and managing market leading products. He also speaks regularly at events on the topic of product management and product leadership.