Content marketing has hit its stride and entered the marketing mainstream. According to a Content Marketing Institute (CMI) study, 60 percent of marketers plan to increase their content marketing budget this year; that’s up 9 percent from 2011.

Before you start creating content in earnest, however, you need a strategy. And before you can create a strategy, you need to get a handle on the content you already have. That means cataloging all of your content—and not just what resides on your website. This list includes:

•    apps
•    articles
•    blog posts
•    case studies
•    newsletters (print and digital)
•    interactive content
•    magazines (print and digital)
•    mobile content
•    podcasts
•    presentations
•    slideshows
•    social media
•    tools (such as an online calculator)
•    videos
•    webinars/webcasts
•    white papers

It’s also a good practice to audit the content you’ve posted on sites such as YouTube, SlideShare, LinkedIn, and Facebook.

At Tendo, we recommend auditing your content at least once a year, preferably every six months. If a lot of the content you’re creating is time-sensitive (as opposed to evergreen), you should consider auditing your content quarterly.

Audience and goals
When taking an inventory of your content, think about the target audience for the content and what stage of the buying cycle it addresses. Ideally, you want a mix of content that targets all your audiences at each stage of the buying cycle. Focus your content creation efforts on the gaps your clean-up exercise uncovers.

Consider, too, whether the content type is the most appropriate and effective for the topic. For example, a customer success story currently executed in HTML or as a PDF on your website may be more effective and reach a broader audience as a video on YouTube.

Finally, review all content for how well it addresses your business goals. You may have a plethora of case studies for acquiring new customers but a dearth of content aimed at retaining your customers. Keep the distribution channel in mind, too. Different channels are more effective outlets depending on the goal. If one of your company goals is brand awareness, then sharing your content on Twitter makes sense. But if you want to improve your company’s thought leadership in the industry, a webinar or SlideShare presentation would be a more appropriate distribution channel.

Creating a variety of engaging content—and enough of it—is a challenge for most businesses. Knowing what content you currently have will help you decide what you want to keep, revise, or repurpose, or get rid of altogether. From there, you can focus your efforts on creating content to fill the gaps.

When was the last time you cataloged your company’s content?

To do that, you need to know your audience—their needs, their preferences, and their behaviors. Without that vital information, you can’t create content that effectively builds awareness; impacts a potential customer’s decision to purchase your product or service; or keeps current customers engaged with your company, resulting in repeat business or referrals.

When it comes to creating content, perhaps it’s better to think of the customer experience as an hourglass rather than a funnel, as Tricia Smith suggests in a recent SmartBrief post. This would ensure you’re meeting the needs of current customers, creating information resources that are useful after they’ve made a purchase. For example, start a community on your site where customers can help each other or provide the ability to post reviews of your product or service. And these resources can be a great well of information that you can then use to create new content to help build brand awareness, for example.

This underscores a best practice we mention often to our clients: Content types and topics should be appropriate to your audience and their goals—as well as your company’s objectives. White papers, how-to articles, and webcasts are helpful for addressing the awareness and consideration stages of the sales cycle, for example, whereas online demos and case studies are useful for influencing the purchasing decision.

Finally, when you’re creating content for all phases of the sales cycle, don’t forget about SEO. A joint study (PDF) from Google and TechTarget highlights the importance of making sure your SEO efforts, such as keywords and titles, are specific to the particular stage of the sales cycle you’re targeting with your content.

What content are you creating to keep current customers engaged with your company?

Tendo recently spoke to Jeanette Gibson, director of social media marketing at Cisco, about how to build, grow, and maintain communities. But before we begin, a quick disclaimer: Cisco is a Tendo client.

What are some of the most important considerations when starting a B2B community?
You need to know that you’re committed for the long haul. If you’re thinking about creating a community, you should understand that it’s a long-term relationship.  Think about how you’re going to sustain it over time versus just putting up a community for an event or a launch.

You can’t just open a community and expect it to be self-sustaining right away, and that’s probably the biggest lesson to learn for every company. You also need to understand the audience you’re serving and why it’s going to your community. If it’s for support, don’t clog it up with a lot of marketing messaging.

How did Cisco determine the audiences it was trying to attract?
A lot of the audience growth in our communities happens organically. For example, people will self-select into the learning community because they have a specific goal around achieving certification for Cisco. And customers are going to Cisco both on Facebook and via our own Web community to get help in achieving their goal. 

In addition to giving customers communities in which they can help each other, we’re trying to get more people to join the Collaboration or Virtualization communities to help influence their peers in the sales process. At the end of the day, we know that B2B purchase decisions are made by peer influence.

In general, we want to make it easy so customers can go to whatever community meets their need at any given time—whether it’s on Twitter or Facebook or Cisco.com.
 
What tactics do you use to grow your community?
We have different ways to bring them into the community. On Facebook, Twitter, and our blogs, we spread the word that we want to have a two-way conversation. For example, with a data center launch, we use the blog and the community to post videos and opinions, so we can talk to people whether they’re in the research phase of the purchase process or they’re ready to make the purchase.

We’re trying to add more social capabilities as well as incentive programs to communities. Our MVP programs, for example, identify “top talkers” and give rewards to customers who help each other. In addition, we’re creating more ideation capabilities with communities so customers can give us feedback on what they’re hearing, what trends they see, and what we should be thinking about.

Does Cisco have dedicated managers for its communities?
With the Developer and Support communities, there were dedicated managers from the start. But as we built new communities that focused more on thought leadership, we had to provide training so that employees recognize that communities are an organizational responsibility.

Monitoring a community can’t just be someone’s night job or weekend job. If you’re building a community, you have to have a community manager. We’re helping managers understand that it’s about nurturing the community over the long term and that they shouldn’t get into it unless they’re prepared to assign staff and resources and nurture the community properly.

In addition, we have a social media advisory council to address broader issues around creating award programs for customers and long-term sustained engagement, and to help us connect the dots because we’re such a big company.

How do you evaluate and/or measure the success of your community effort?
We look at both quantitative and qualitative measures. We’ll look at the number of customers who had a question and whether it was resolved to determine if coming into the community lead to a successful result.

We’re also looking more and more at engagement. We want to make sure customers are helping each other and that we’re reducing the number of support issues that arise. There are huge opportunities to get customer feedback. If customers are in the support community, for example, and they have product feedback, you need to make sure there’s routing internally so that product managers and engineers get that information.

What is the most important piece of advice you would give fellow marketers about launching a B2B community?
Listen to your customers and make sure you’re meeting their needs. Remember that you’re creating a community for them—not you. It’s not for you to market to; it’s a forum that facilitates two-way conversation so that you can serve customers in a new way.

It’s so important to make sure you’re transparent and authentic, and that you’re creating the community for the right reasons: to help customers get more information about your company and connect with your peers. It’s not a marketing vehicle; it’s an opportunity to help the customer.

Also according to the Nielsen report, the total mobile viewing audience “grew 51.2 percent year-over-year, surpassing 20 million users for the first time.”

This trend is supported by an eMarketer survey showing mobile content and Internet usage of U.S. mobile phone users. Although video streaming falls close to the bottom of the list in this survey in terms of content usage, it’s estimated to more than double this year from 2007, from 11 percent to 25 percent. And in 2011, that number will grow to 33 percent.

These statistics aren’t too surprising given the proliferation of smartphones and the introduction of other Internet-enabled mobile devices, such as Apple’s iPad. These devices present a great opportunity for reaching your audience in an engaging medium—video. With so many eyeballs on the small screen, the question is does video factor into your current or future marketing plans? If not, why not?

Content strategy has come of age. While consumers continue to embrace social media and emerging Web channels and turn away from traditional media, large corporations are being pushed into a more direct relationship with their customers. Along with LinkedIn and Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, corporate websites are becoming the main channel for this new relationship marketing, and marketers are challenged to deliver relevance and value to earn the loyalty of their customers. But most large corporate websites are a mess—difficult to navigate, stuffed with outdated and/or incorrect information, and geared for promotion and transaction rather than offering value to their audience.

Enter content strategy.

Tendo has been delivering content strategy services long before the term could be found on Wikipedia. We asked one of our most experienced content strategists, Vice President of Content Services Chris Zender, to answer some common questions about this “old but new again” discipline.

Q: How do you define content strategy? What is it? When you conduct a content strategy, what’s the deliverable?
A: Content strategy is the road map for planning, developing, creating, and executing content that will achieve your website’s goals. There are a couple of key phrases in there. First: Planning. It’s the linchpin to success—I’d rather spend three weeks in planning and one week in creation than vice versa. Second: Achieving your website’s goals. Content should support the goals of a website.

When people hear “content strategy,” they sometimes think it’s a dense, complicated document that’s going to give them a lot of theory and not a lot of practice. The truth is that the best content strategies tell you the best route to your destination and how to get there—not one or the other.

Q: How has the discipline of content strategy evolved or changed over time?
A: Most companies weren’t thinking about “content” as a strategic asset five or more years ago. There was, and still is, a tendency for companies to take what I call the Billion Dollar Bucket approach to building websites. They spend an inordinate amount of time and resources building a gorgeous shell—the bucket—then they fill it with any old crap: old and outdated content, broken links, images and videos that don’t reflect current brand standards, etc.

It’s only been in the last three to five years that people have started to appreciate that what you say or view is as important as how you get to that material.

I think there are a few reasons for this shift: The rise of social media and the increasing importance of SEO. Think about it: Before social media, people received information and opinion from “sanctioned” sources—traditional media outlets like magazines, newspapers, TV, or radio, or from sources they trusted like friends and family. But social media gives (almost) anyone, anywhere the ability to broadcast their content. As these voices multiplied and grew louder, they created a need to figure out how to balance this information. And as the volume of content grew, the need to find a way to search for a specific topic also grew.

Q: When Tendo delivers a content strategy, are the website goals already defined, or do they change with the content strategy?
A: We’ve created content strategies for both scenarios. We don’t create any kind of strategy—marketing, messaging, content, etc.—without knowing two things: the goals of the website and the target audience the client wants to attract. So if the goals and the audience haven’t been defined, then that’s the first step in our process. You’ve got to know who you’re talking to and assess what their information needs are, then you marry that with what you want them to do and/or what you want them to know. That marriage is the essence of a content strategy.

Once you know the site goals and the intended outcome or action of the audience/user, then you can create content that meets both objectives. There are certain things that go into every content strategy—site goals, audience profile, content organization, frequency of updates/refreshes, and how to staff or organize or assign roles and responsibilities for content creation and development.

Q: What are the primary benefits of conducting a content strategy? Why is it needed? How does having one, or not having one, affect a company’s bottom line?
A: Content strategies provide several tangible benefits:

They focus all stakeholders around the company’s and the website’s goals. In larger organizations different divisions often have different priorities, which results in the left hand not knowing what the right hand is doing. A content strategy that supports the overall website goals can provide a unifying foundation around which all divisions can stay focused on their priorities without undermining the total site experience.

They ensure cost-effective content creation. By standardizing the types, topics, and frequency of content you put a series of checks and balances in place that help create content strategically. The content has to adhere to the plan or it doesn’t get funded. We’ve been called in to edit content that was off message or just plain incorrect because the division that commissioned it wasn’t operating strategically—it can be a drag on resources.

“Write once, use many” is our Web content mantra. Create content once and leverage it in different ways to amortize the cost—site material, newsletters, syndicated content, etc.

They position content as a measurable asset. Deciding on and building in consistent metrics for content—something that’s not done nearly as often as you might think—enables you to determine the value of a piece of content.

Q: How does content strategy intersect with user experience and information architecture?
A: Content strategy informs user experience and information architecture; if you don’t consider the type of content, the frequency with which it will be refreshed, or even who and how it will be updated, how can you construct a cohesive information architecture or user experience?

Content strategy, user experience, and information architecture are three equal components that need to work together to deliver the highest value experience. Just as a driver might navigate a city by a roadmap, street signs, and visual landmarks, the absence of any one of these compromises the ability to effectively get to your destination.

Q: Does content strategy also include SEO strategy? What about social media strategy?
A: It should include both—and more. A content strategy, depending on what the content is for, should include a social media strategy, a syndication strategy, an SEO strategy, content analytics and metrics, etc. SEO and metrics in particular are always bolted on at the last minute in a kind of “Oh, shoot! We forgot about that” way.

The challenge is that in many organizations, these functions are handled by different people who aren’t working together or aren’t working toward the same goals. If you treat each of these very important strategies as pieces of a greater whole, you’ll increase the effectiveness of all of them.

Q: Isn’t every client’s website goal to generate leads, gain customers, and sell more product?
A: Not necessarily—and not in that order. Toyota has launched content recently in which the primary goal is to manage their reputation, influence public perception, and generate awareness. The secondary goal for this content is to sell cars. Almost every company website in some way builds or supports the brand. But sometimes a site is intended to offer customers service or support, to offer unique insight not directly related to a specific transatcion or sale. The goal of your website and the unique promise of your brand inform how you approach content.

Q: What are the top three challenges you encounter in creating content strategies?
A: First, the people and processes part of the strategy. In many cases, defining roles and processes for content creation creates an organizational shift that is uncomfortable for many companies. Second, once companies realize the importance of content, they often have unrealistic expectations about what content can achieve for them. Many expect content to propel them to a permanent place at the top of search pages or increase their sales by 500 percent. Third, and it’s more of a surprise than a challenge, clients are always taken aback by what’s on their website. We get a lot of “THAT’s on the site? Why?”

Usually it’s because there was no strategy in place.