Innovation & data-driven digital marketing.
“If you build it, they will come,” doesn’t just apply to baseball legends. Content marketing is how we build ideas and campaigns that draw meaningful audience engagement and establish long-term brand equity.
A successful content marketing strategy is more than just writing a good blog post: it’s how we build user pathways that drive behaviors to achieve our goals, with content as the primary catalyst for action. These strategies help your brand prepare and plan against business objectives and develop new channels for client acquisition.
Whether you’re looking to refresh your current content calendar or are just starting the conversation, the foundation of your strategy should be built on four fundamental questions:
1. What is our benchmark for success?
In order to gather valuable data from your campaigns and understand their efficacy, talk about your goals first. Key Performance Indicators (KPI) are the measurable values that you build your strategy foundation against. Some of the most common KPIs include:
These goals should frame all your future conversations: instead of developing content and simply hoping it works, you can mold your strategy to serve an intended purpose and measure its success.
2. Whom are we trying to talk to?
Next, consider this: it’s not about what you want to say, but rather about what your audience wants to hear. In order to drive engagement and conversions with your content, it needs to speak to their specific experience. What are they hoping to achieve? What keeps them up at night? What kind of answers are they looking for?
Our holistic audience profile should dive into details like demographics, psychographics, online and offline behaviors or preferred content channels. These help us outline where our brand offering meets the core needs of the consumer.
For SERVPRO, a national cleaning and restoration company, audience research showed how Covid-19 dramatically changed the concerns and behaviors of their potential client audience. To meet those challenges head on, we planned an integrated content strategy to communicate the company’s commitment to health and safety with specialized Covid-19 cleaning services and treatment.
Over the course of four months, we developed a series of 40+ pieces of relevant articles that leveraged insight from a “Back to Work” office cleaning procedures survey. This content solved a direct client need, ultimately leading to 60 high-value backlink placements. Plus, this included a library of targeted content to improve digital presence.
3. How are we telling our story?
It’s no secret that data drives decisions. In both the B2C and B2B environment, validating your claims with statistical insight is how you create trust with the reader. Qualitative and quantitative research builds a narrative that motivates action—reliable, clear information holds value with consumers.
We collaborated with HealthMarkets to conduct a survey that detailed the cost of Medicare for Americans. This survey gathered information regarding out-of-pocket costs, Medicare-related scams and health insurance plans with the coverage provided.
This information was then coupled with a long-form article, subsequent infographic and influence in-app campaign to help drive a full PR outreach and link building process. Thanks to the success and relevancy of the content, the data found placement in Nasdaq, Becker’s Hospital Review, Health Exec and CNBC.
4. Where can we diversify our strategy?
Lastly, digital content strategies can be as different as the companies that build them. If you limit yourself to one type of content or tactic, you also limit your potential audience capture. Consistently ask yourself where you can expand your strategy or where untapped potential might exist within your current content structure. This could mean moving from traditional thought leadership to building a backlinking strategy, increasing paid SEO practices, establishing influencer channels or even, creating a charitable outreach plan.
CouponBox.com needed to build awareness and digital market share. The national coupon retailer was open to trying something out of the box (pun intended). We helped them to create a custom, strategic charitable campaign to promote Kid Kindness, with a complex mix of web content, contests, social media outreach, surveys and infographics all working together to get the right audience’s attention.
In just three short months, the Kid Kindness project had over 30 high-quality backlinks, including recruiterbox.com Additionally, they increased their Facebook likes by more than 80 percent. In building a strategy that extended beyond one or two tactics, the campaign inherently opened more channels and opportunities for engagement and placement.
When It All Comes Together
The process of planning, developing and executing a content marketing strategy isn’t easy—and you’ll need to have the right plan and players in place to get it done. If you’re ready to get started but short on resources, the experts at 10X digital are ready to help you map a pathway to success and build campaigns and content to reach your long-term brand goals.