Strategy to Simplify Your Content Marketing with One Page Plan
If
you lack a written strategy, a one-page plan is a great place to begin. If you
have a detailed strategy but struggle to gain traction, boiling it down to one
page will make it easier. A one-page strategy can help you:
- Crystallize your content
marketing strategy
- Gain stronger buy-in more
quickly from executives or clients
- Keep content producers
strategically aligned
Get started
To
create a content marketing strategy in one page, first focus on what the
organization needs to accomplish in the next year.
How
to ascertain this information depends on your environment. Whether you engage
C-level executives, read the company’s internal and external documents
(including the overall marketing plan), or use another research avenue, you
should identify:
- Company’s growth strategy
- Revenue growth targets (as a
percent or dollar figure over last year)
- Profit targets (as a percent or
monetary amount per share over last year)
- How growth will be achieved
(e.g., new product launch, add-on sales to existing customers, new
markets, acquisition, new customers, increase in market share)
- Other factors or criteria
important to the organization’s growth
These
business-level elements will appear in your plan as:
1.
Objectives: What qualitative results must the
company accomplish over the next year?
2.
Goals: How will progress toward objectives
be measured quantitatively?
Next,
work with mid-level marketing, sales, and product leaders to sketch a content
marketing plan. How will content marketing help the company achieve its goals?
You may find some ideas that content marketing can support, and others that it
can’t. What content marketing can support will appear in your plan as:
3.
Strategies: What will the content marketing
function deliver qualitatively during the next year (e.g., introduce a new
product, increase awareness, dramatize your solution’s differentiation)?
4.
Metrics: How will marketing measure the
achievement of content marketing strategies (e.g., increase awareness by a
certain percent, deliver specified number of marketing-qualified leads to
sales, contribute a certain dollar amount to the sales pipeline from qualified
leads, produce a certain amount of revenue)?
Don’t
shy away from revenue goals. It’s bracing to have quantified goals to meet, but
quotas bring a clear finish line and value to all content marketing activities.
They measure the sales pipeline, customers won, and revenue generated. These
are the metrics executives really care about.
Take it to the executives
Now
that you have completed the first four parts of the plan, present the draft to
the executives and middle managers. Walk through the plan step by step and
discuss it immediately, face to face. Be open to questions and input. Be
succinct. Be wise – narrow the scope of discussion to avoid misunderstandings
or setbacks. The results of their input will help you sharpen the plan, but you
still must keep it to one page.
Through
your exchanges, you’ll learn that most executives care about the financial
numbers. As one CEO put it, “When you come into my office, I see either a penny
of expense or a penny of profit on your forehead.” They want to know:
- Content marketing costs
- Revenue planned to be generated
and by what date
- Profit produced based on
company or product margins
- Targeted return ROI for content
marketing
Work
toward a straightforward understanding with your executives – a simple and
scalable marketing model. For instance, I reached this understanding with a
CFO: For every $3 in revenue generated by marketing, the company would spend an
additional dollar on marketing. The more revenue generated by marketing, the
more budget it would have to spend.
Align content creators
I
pin the agreed-upon one-page plan above my computer screen and encourage my
team to do the same. Use the plan as a litmus test for ideas. Let it simplify
decisions about which content goes forward.
As
you well know, all your agencies, freelancers, reporters, writers, and digital
and social experts need to work from the same content marketing strategy. When
it’s only one page, they’re far likelier to use it day to day than they would a
multi-page document.
In
addition to one-page strategies, content creators also need:
- One-page message map
- Buyer personas
- Understanding of the buyers’ journey
- Editorial calendar
Template example
This
content marketing strategy template fits on one side of standard printer paper.
If you absolutely need more space, use legal-sized paper or even an 11- by
17-inch piece. The important thing is to keep it to a single page that can be
easily shared to maximize its impact and usefulness with executives and content
creators.
Content
Marketing One-Page Plan
Objectives:
1.
Increase revenue from product X over the next 12 months.
2.
Position this disruptive new product as a viable alternative to (competitor’s
product).
Goals:
1.
Increase revenue by X% to X% in 2015.
2.
Build buyer awareness to XX%.
Strategy:
1.
Become the best source of information on (customer problem or product
category).
2. Deliver
useful information and thought-provoking insights.
3.
Educate buyers on:
- How to address key technology
and business challenges
- How to generate revenue, reduce
expenses, and improve user experiences
Metrics:
1.
Increase website traffic +XX% year over year.
2.
Convert XX% of website users. (You may track soft conversions and/or hard
conversions.)
3.
Add to the sales pipeline XXXX marketing-qualified leads per year, including
$YY million in potential deals.
4.
Generate revenue of $X million.
Who
we serve: Capsule version of buyer personas
What’s
in it for buyers? Ideas to further buyers’ careers and
their companies’ success
Topics: List topics where the company seeks to position its
helpful content.
Serving
sizes & frequencies
Time (to get message across) Words
Media
7 seconds
23
Headline,
tweet, sound bite, cartoon (daily)
2
minutes
400
Web page, blog, news release, video, infographic (2X/week)
5
minutes
1,000
Magazine article, contributed articles, long video (monthly)
20+
minutes
4,000+
White paper,
application note, eBook, speech, webinar (quarterly)
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