As promised last week, I’m going to share the content marketing portion of a new consulting engagement with a Silicon Valley IT security client. This company is the proud owner of impressive technology and it is smart enough to specifically target only three verticals. Luckily, it has stockpiled a large arsenal of great content, but only haphazardly deployed...until now.
The content marketing portion of this engagement is elegantly simple:
1. Recycle Existing Content
- Goal: Create a pre-approved messaging document
- Slice and dice all existing content. Save the wheat; throw away the chaff.
- Put approved content into digestible sizes:
—250-400 word range for blog posts
—< 140 characters for tweets
—50-75 words for LinkedIn and Facebook (lighter content) posts
—30-60 second video clips for social media and blog distribution
2. Create New Content
- Domain experts at this company will feed me new content in alignment with our influence goals by targeted sector.
—Yeah, I’ll have to bird-dog them, but this is normal.
—Note: Normally, I do most of the new content development for most of my graphic arts clients, but since this company’s service offerings are outside of my graphic arts domain expertise, they need to do this for me.
3. Implement Content Marketing Schedule
- Tweets: 3-5x per week
- Posts: 2x-3x per week on LinkedIn (tech or hard biz) or Facebook (light biz)
- Weekly blog
- Targeted PR: Attributed content on other influencer blogs, trade pubs, etc.
- Information format: Text, Videos, Graphs, Infographics, Case studies, using a traditional challenge/solutions/results format, Baseline studies for new clients, challenge/solutions/intended results, White papers
4. Feedback Loop
- Do more of what works
- Do less of what doesn’t
Common sense? Yeah. Will it work for every graphic arts client as is? No. End of story? Hardly. Content marketing that doesn't fit into an overall inbound marketing campaign is incomplete.
* * *
Join me next week as we start a four-part series on Inbound Marketing. We will discuss how to develop qualified leads in targeted verticals, effective prospect-to-customer conversion strategies, upsell and cross sell activities (there’ll be a surprise here!) and how to prove marketing ROI.
- Categories:
- Business Management - Marketing/Sales
Very much alive and now officially an industry curmudgeon, strategic growth expert T. J. Tedesco can be reached at tj@tjtedesco.com or 301-404-2244.