For Content Marketing Success, Meet More Often

by Fronetics | Aug 8, 2016 | Blog, Content Marketing, Marketing, Strategy

B2B marketers who meet more often to discuss and evaluate their content marketing strategy report success at much higher rates than those that meet less frequently.

Do you feel your content marketing is producing results? Only 30% of B2B marketers say they feel effective, and a shocking 55% admit they do not actually know what content marketing success looks like.

If this sounds familiar, take a note from the most effective B2B marketers: Meeting more often can improve content marketing performance.

Another meeting? Say yes for success

We all have been guilty of thinking, “Great. Another meeting to squeeze into my schedule.” But the B2B Content Marketing 2016: Benchmarks, Budgets, and Trends – North America found some interesting correlations between content marketing effectiveness and frequency of meeting. For instance:

Meeting daily or even weekly improves content marketing results.

61% of the most effective B2B marketers meet daily or weekly with their content marketing team, either virtually or in person.

Meeting more often is time well spent.

Teams that meet daily or weekly find the meetings to be more valuable (70% of respondents) than those who meet less often — like biweekly or monthly (49%). But, only 36% of the content marketing professionals surveyed met once per week, and only 8% met daily. And you guessed it: Those were the teams that reported having the most success with their content marketing.

Meeting strategies

There is more to success than simply holding a meeting, of course. Time spent around the conference table is not going to bring results unless you are asking the right questions with keeping eyes on your content strategy.

What are the new challenges the team is facing? What is happening in the news or industry that might affect or interest your audience? How is your audience responding to recent content? There must be more to regular meetings than coffee and bagels.

Equally important is ensuring the team has a clear vision of your goals and benchmarks. The greater the team’s understanding of what success looks like — clearly defined objectives, expectations, and your content marketing goals — the more effective they can be at their job.

Things to discuss about your content strategy:

Purpose: What is the goal or objective the team is striving for from content marketing efforts? More leads and increased brand recognition are common examples.
Audience: Who is your target audience, and what are their needs, interests, and concerns? Where do they consume content (e.g., LinkedIn, blogs)? When do they visit those channels?
Tactics: What platforms are you using for distribution, and how do they work together? Is there an email campaign as well as daily Facebook, Twitter and Instagram posts, for example? Are images important for results?

General discussions to include:

Open-topic communication: Tap into knowledge from all members of the team to generate ideas, information, and data for content creation. Open discussion can bring insight and fresh angles of approach.
Ways to improve and reach objectives: Fresh ideas are as important to the team as fresh content. What could you be doing better? Should you be measuring something that you’re not? Are there new technologies or tools that you should try? Every team member should have a voice in how to best execute or improve your content strategy.

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How to Fail at Content Marketing: Don’t Document Your Strategy

by Fronetics | May 4, 2016 | Blog, Content Marketing, Marketing, Strategy

Having a documented content marketing strategy increases effectiveness and provides a baseline for measuring ROI.

Content marketing is one of the most effective ways to increase brand awareness, broaden your customer base, and grow your business. Yet of the 88% of B2B marketers using content marketing, only 30% feel their efforts are successful. Why do so many organizations feel they are failing? Simply put, they do not have a documented content marketing strategy in place.

You would never operate your business without 1) creating a strategy, 2) documenting it, and 3) following the strategy. Nor should you launch a marketing program without having a clear idea of what you want to accomplish and how you plan to do that.

A content marketing strategy outlines the methods by which you will target, reach, and engage your audience. Research and execution of these tasks can be quite complex. Writing out a plan and assigning appropriate resources can offer clarity and guidance to your organization throughout the course of your program.

Also, remember that content marketing is more of a marathon than a sprint, and achieving results often takes months, even years. Documenting your strategy allows your team to keep focused on your goals and your plan for achieving them in the interim.

Here’s why you should take the time to draw up a plan and then write it down.

A documented content marketing strategy is more successful than an undocumented strategy or no strategy at all.

Research conducted by the Content Marketing Institute reveals that businesses that document their content marketing strategy find their efforts significantly more effective than those who don’t. Among B2B marketers surveyed:

60% of those with a documented strategy rate themselves highly, in terms of content marketing effectiveness.
Only 32% of those with a verbal strategy rate themselves highly.
Of those who rate their organization’s content marketing programs as not at all effective, a mere 13% have a documented strategy.

Further, organizations who meet regularly to check in on their content marketing strategy are much more likely to find it successful — 61% of the most effective marketers surveyed meet daily or weekly to review their progress.

A documented content marketing strategy helps measure ROI.

Many B2B businesses struggle with content marketing or have trouble garnering C-suite support for the program because return on investment is notoriously difficult to measure. In fact, more than half of marketers say one of their top challenges is measuring content effectiveness (57%) and/or measuring the ROI of their content marketing program (52%).

Having a documented strategy in place gives your organization measurable goals against which to compare your results. Your strategy should:

Document what you hope to achieve through content marketing — more leads, higher conversion rates, more newsletter sign-ups, etc.
Outline a specific methodology for executing those goals
Assign human resources to each of the tasks
Designate intervals at which to check in and evaluate/adjust your efforts
Offer a time frame for completion

Documenting your strategy in such a way clarifies where you are investing time and resources so that calculating ROI is less of an abstract process.

Content Marketing Institute’s research confirms that content marketing success increases when there is organizational clarity about what success looks like, and that organizations with a documented content marketing strategy feel they are successful at tracking ROI. While only 21% of marketers feel they are successful at tracking ROI, that number rises to 35% when there is a documented strategy in place.