Like many (but of course not all) content marketers, I jumped into this career based on my love of writing and creativity.
Over time, as my experience grew and I became personally responsible for ensuring my clients’ work drove real results (sales, bookings, visits) I came to understand the value in connecting research and data with a creative flare. In fact, I eventually realized the right data point could turn a creative spark into a full-fledged business-driving concept.
Using data and research to inform a content marketing plan helps you put a framework together, providing useful ideas (based on fact) that can help generate meaningful story ideas and tactical plans. Here are some of the ways we do it at VERB.
The Why, Who, What, When Content Framework
Why?
Why are you making this content plan? What’s its goal or purpose? The answer needs to be more than “my boss wants me to start a blog” or “I read content marketing is integral to any marketing plan”. The “Why” of your content plan should be fed by concrete goals that will be measured by a series of Key Performance Indictors (KPIs).
The data you should gather to inform your “why” can include:
- Sales goals and Year-over-Year/Period-over-Period data
- Recruiting goals
- Lead goals
- Engagement goals
- Awareness goals
Once you synthesize these insights, you should articulate these goals as a mission statement for your content plan.
Who?
“Who” refers to the target audience for your content plan. You can get to know your audience by reviewing:
- Google Analytics data around top geographies and demographics
- Social analytics
- Customer surveys
- Secondary sources such as research reports and whitepapers
In our business, we try to curate this data to create audience personas. By personifying our audiences, we’re better able to see them as people and create content that appeals to their needs and interests.
What & When
Next, our plan needs to take into consideration the topics and types of content to create and the publishing schedule. Inputs you can use to help here include:
- Google Analytics and social media metrics (use these to determine what types of content on social drive traffic back to your site, what blog content generates the most time spent or readers, what social content generates the most number of engagements.)
- Google Trends to research terms and phrases that are popular and relate to your work or business.
- Trending and relevant hashtags.
- Holidays, seasonality and social media special dates (such as Ice Cream Day, National Dog Day).
- Landscape and competitor benchmarking (We use a tool called RivalIQ).
- Social Listening tools (We use Brandwatch and SproutSocial).
Once you understand why you’re producing content, who it’s for, what it can be and when you will publish, it’s (relatively) easy to get started.
