But what happens when your business starts to grow beyond the ability to manage your outreach with the same hands-on, one-content-person-wears-all-the-hats approach?

To remain competitive and responsive in our global digital “multiverse,” you need to be ready to scale up your content efforts to reach new markets, in new countries, and to communicate using new levels of sophistication.

Content Marketing Institute’s latest webinar, Content Marketing Two-Step: Scaling Editorial Calendars and Multiple Content Channels, provides marketers with some fantastic tools to address these challenges — with the help of a few seasoned content pros.

Scaling editorial calendars for global use

As Integrated Marketing Manager for Intel, Pam Didner recognizes the importance of content planning that is built to scale as outreach objectives grow. Pam started globalizing her editorial calendars last year, and has shared some insight into how Intel manages the process.

Pam says the secret lies in tight collaboration between the company’s headquarters (HQ) and its regional offices (geos). “Geos are your BFFs,” she says, so in order to manage expectations — and the flow of communication — establish clearly defined roles and responsibilities for each participant from the outset. Once you know who is in charge of each task, the content process boils down to a few manageable steps:

1. Prioritize your geos/countries, and the topics that are most relevant to each one, based on budgets and goals. Here, HQ takes the lead in making the decisions, but geo involvement and feedback is vital. When you are providing content on a global scale, it’s likely that every region will have its own distinct ideas, communication styles, messaging goals, and business objectives. Help each geo understand the focal points that will best speak to your current brand priorities by giving them the reasoning behind each choice. While you can’t always make every region completely happy, open communication will help ease potential conflicts.

2. Finalize the editorial timeline for outreach, based on each geo’s specific business objectives and product launch schedules. HQ should take ownership of this step, which, if Step 1 above is done correctly, shouldn’t take much time.

3. Create geo-specific editorial calendars to set deadlines for content creation and execution. This step requires equal participation from both HQ and geos. HQ makes its recommendations on topics, and each geo will then take its budget and message priorities into account to select the topics it will create content around.

4. Create a topic marketing kit. This HQ-driven task includes: 

• Outlining the key story you want to tell in a given geo
• Determining your overall brand messaging and positioning
• Listing the key search terms you’ve identified for that geo
• Listing the specific content pieces that will work best (e.g., white papers, social media messages, case studies, videos, etc.), and templates the geo can use to customize any materials that HQ has created to share. 

5. Craft an engagement plan. Once geos have the topic marketing kit in hand, they can begin developing their own plans to create, launch, and manage their content. Here, individual geos can use their knowledge about the audience to ensure that messages will resonate with their audience, based on its distinct communication style and cultural priorities. A few general tips apply here:

• Make sure to allow yourself a long enough lead time to produce the kit
• Use simple, headline-driven creative content that can be easily customized
• Videos work well when creating content templates that cross cultural and geographic boundaries. But make sure your videos focus less on dialogue and more on images and demos so that key messages don’t get lost in translation.

This step is also where geos will determine the media strategies they will use to distribute their content (e.g., direct marketing, local events, search campaigns, etc.).

6. Share engagement results. After the campaign has been executed, it’s vital that HQ and geos take the time to debrief each other on the program’s performance. Metrics should be discussed and measured against expectations, and any unexpected events should be noted and explained. 

7. Refine the editorial plan and marketing kit. Taking into account all results and learning from Step 6, HQ can go back and tweak the process for future use.

Virtual communications: Delivering a global content plan

Once you have designed and developed a scalable content strategy, there’s still the question of how to execute those plans. Scalable distribution of content presents its own challenges, such as how to capture customer attention, how to deliver consistent and personalized messages, and how to make your content accessible anywhere, at any time, on any device. Fortunately, there is a wealth of virtual communication solutions available to help marketers address these issues. 

In his part of the webinar presentation, Mark Bornstein, Senior Marketing Content Manager at ON24, urges marketers to expand their perception of content execution and distribution beyond the trusty webinar. As virtual communication evolves, enhanced tools and capabilities are becoming available, such as:

• Engaging rich-media experiences, including video, demos, Q&A screens, and more
• Integrated branding opportunities that enhance, rather than interrupt, the audience experience
• Multimedia content options that add sight, sound, and context to presentations
• Enhanced interactivity, such as chat functionality, that allows the audience to participate, rather than just view what’s happening on the screen.
• Social media integration, so participants can share what they’ve learned with their colleagues and the business communities they’ve cultivated online. 

Virtual communication vehicles also work well when reaching out to consumers who aren’t able to attend your live events. For example, solutions such as briefing centers or user conferences and trade shows work well for distributing educational and informative content — particularly for busy professionals who don’t have the time or budget to attend many training sessions or press events. Another benefit of virtual communication events is that they can be archived and viewed at the consumer’s convenience. “These are not one-time environments. They live on after the original events,” says Bornstein.

Speaking of archived events, you still have a chance to experience all the fantastic insight shared by Pam Didner and Mark Bornstein in the Content Marketing Two-Step webinar. View the archive version here. 

Right now, marketers are coming to terms with the fact that a financial transaction is no longer the end-all, be-all of the customer relationship. Sure, achieving a sale is an undeniable win. But it isn’t always enough to drive the loyalty, evangelism, and repeat business that a durable business thrives on.

That’s what engagement is for.

So how can marketers crack the engagement code in content marketing and determine the role it should play in a campaign? And, more importantly, how can we develop a process that helps us engage with customers and prospects more reliably and successfully, time and time again?

There are no magic formulas — after all, we are talking about connecting with something as unique and unpredictable as the human being. But there are many tips that content professionals have picked up in the marketing trenches, and CMI’s latest eBook is loaded with them.

Take a look at Your Kick-Start Guide to Engaging Content, where author Thomas Clifford, and a host of other experts and CMI bloggers, share their perspective on engagement, including:

• What it means and why it is essential to marketing
• The four qualities that must exist for content to be engaging
• How to use content to pump excitement into even the most common product
• Ways the experts engage the mind by appealing to the heart
• The five main categories of engagement tools, and great examples of each
• Knowing what to measure, and ways to use what you learn to determine your next steps

Whether you are looking for some guidance to boost your success rates or need to get up to speed with some useful information and easy-to-implement techniques, we found a lot to think about here, and we hope you will, too.

While it may not be top of the to-do list, media law is becoming an increasingly important consideration for content marketers. Whether you’re producing content in-house or outsourcing it, there are steps you can take to avoid writing your way into a sticky situation.

Having worked with these issues for 10 years, I believe there are a few things you should do yourself — or demand of your suppliers — to protect your business and your content:

1)    Create an editorial policy

An editorial policy has all kinds of uses. In this context, it establishes your understanding of the law and how it applies to what you do. It defines the professional standards that your writers are required to adhere to. And it sets out the measures you will take to mitigate any legal risks associated with publishing content.

Your editorial policy should be, primarily, an internal document and probably not something you would publish on your website. But you might show it to individual clients (and potential clients) to reassure them that they’re in safe hands. You can also use your policy to set ethical standards for your organization such as restricting yourself from writing or linking to certain types of content (pornographic or discriminatory websites, for example).

2)    Check your insurance

Whether you are creating content yourself or you’re using an agency, you need to understand who is liable for any potential legal ramifications that arise, and make sure your end is covered by an appropriate insurance policy. If content marketing is a new venture for your business, it probably isn’t safe to assume that your existing coverage will be sufficient. A quick chat with your insurance broker won’t kill you and it could pay dividends if things go sour.

The chances of getting into legal trouble over a company blog, a press release or a news article are remote, but the potential downside of not being prepared for problems occurring is huge. According to The Guardian, a British newspaper, libel cases involving online media have doubled in the last year. People are paying more attention to what’s published online,  particularly on news sites, blogs, and social media platforms making relevant and comprehensive insurance a wise investment for anyone in the publishing game.

3)    Training and monitoring

Insurance is to a content marketer what a safety net is to a trapeze artist. You wouldn’t want to be without it, but you hope you’ll never have to use it. Just like the trapeze artist, lots of training and checking is the key to keeping your content marketing efforts up on the high wire where they belong.

Your writers don’t need to be practicing IP lawyers, but they should have a solid operational understanding of the important elements of media law such as libel and copyright, for example. Your editorial policy will form the basis of their knowledge, but you’ll want to run regular training sessions demonstrating situations with real-life examples to ensure they can apply what they know.

To back up these regular training sessions, you also need to check your content regularly for potential problems. If there’s a problem with something you’ve written or commissioned, it’s better that you discover it before anyone else does. One of the benefits of digital publishing is that swift action can clear up a molehill before it becomes a mountain.

4)    Become an expert

Perhaps you don’t need to become an expert yourself, but you should make sure you have easy access to one. If you’re producing a lot of content in-house, someone on your staff needs to be the media law nerd. If you’re outsourcing, then make sure your supplier has a sufficient level of legal expertise. This will save you having to call your lawyer every time you receive a complaint.

In general, it’s good practice to respond whenever your content is challenged, and if it looks like a legal issue might be involved, it’s important to remove the posted content quickly so that you can begin your investigation. But quite often, issues can be settled without involving lawyers. If you have someone at your disposal who knows the legal rights and responsibilities of content, you’ll feel much more confident responding and taking action when necessary. This will not only make you more comfortable with your content marketing activities, but it will also save you money.

What are your thoughts? Please share your thoughts in the comment section below.

Since then, I’ve changed gears a bit, moving from the entrepreneurial life of an independent social business consultant to the team-focused corporate environment at Bob Evans Restaurants. It’s been an interesting move for me, especially in terms of building out our own content marketing department.

In the process of doing this, I’ve forced myself to step back and really try to drill down on what I feel are the most important principles in content marketing that will guide my own decisions now and going forward. My hope is that by sharing some of these principles, I’ll be able to help you guide your decisions when doing the same for your company.

Please, feel free to take these ideas, use them, and add anything I’ve missed in the comments. Fair?

Treat content marketing as another potential revenue stream for your business

If you ask most business owners if they would consider their company to be a publisher, the answer would be a quick “no.”

That makes sense. If you’re a restaurant or retail shop, publishing is not really your business. Or is it? Companies like Starbucks and Hubspot, which have exploded as a result of their content marketing efforts, look at their content as a mission-critical part of their businesses and, in some cases, a potential revenue stream. Because they’re willing to sell some of their content, they’re also willing to make deeper investments in producing that content.

When you’re planning your content to market your business, don’t forget to consider how your brand can potentially sell some of the content you create. Your content can always be assigned a value and that can be used to create additional offerings down the road.

When content is king, consistency is the queen

I picked that one up from my friend, Eric Vessels, in a patio conversation over beers a few weeks ago.

Eric and his partners have been running a content marketing business since before the term was even popularized through Joe’s work. Eric’s company, What They Think, has become the single largest online publication for executives and business owners in the printing industry, with revenues in the millions — not too shabby when you consider that the company is operated by just a handful of partners.

One of the stories that Eric shared with me years ago changed my perception of how content works on the web. He and his team pride themselves on never having missed a single publishing deadline in over 10 years of operating What They Think. Come hell or high water, their newsletters are always on time, and fresh content is always up on then site when they say it will be. No exceptions and no slips.

Consistency is queen.

Change your focus from publishing content to programming content

Every Wednesday night, my fiance and I look forward to watching the hit series, Modern Family. It’s hysterical, and while we don’t watch a ton of TV, the program has become a welcome part of our weekly routine.

Then, a funny thing happened. We started watching this show called Happy Endings that airs immediately after Modern Family. That one was funny too, and so our Wednesday night TV viewing time investment has essentially doubled, all while staying on the same television network.

Television and radio have always bought into the idea of programming content. And, rightly so, it’s media. Much different from things like books and articles that are, for the most part, intended to be read and digested once or twice by a consumer, media programming has been designed to keep end users coming back over and over again by establishing a placeholder on that consumer’s calendar.

When you’re planning your content, try to think more like a television program director and less like a single-book author.

Promote the human brands behind your content marketing with the same support you would give your company brand

Welcome to the age of Internet celebrities! Who’s yours?

Let me put it this way — I had never heard about Thomas Nelson Publishers until I started digging the stuff that Michael Hyatt writes on leadership and values on his blog. I was never really a big fan of Ford until I started following Scott Monty. I hadn’t even heard much about Edelman until Steve Rubel and David Armano piqued my interest with their content.

Brand has shifted, folks. Because of the social web and content marketing, human brands are now equally as (if not more) important as company brands. Companies merely exist. People, on the other hand, are very much alive.

When planning your content marketing strategy, be sure to consider what human brands will help you carry your company’s brand into the online conversation and how you will help them shine.

Be willing to trade being perfect for being one of the first

Speed is everything in content marketing, and I think a lot of marketing teams get stuck on this one. For traditional marketers that want our content and work to be perfect before it hits the digital shelves is simply part of our business DNA. That’s not a bad thing,  but be willing to make the choice to let some of that go.

There are real benefits related to getting attention from search traffic and fresh consumer eyeballs on the content you publish, but only if your content hits the market as one of the first to arrive. On the web, waiting 48 hours to hit your publish button can mean the difference between first page placement for a certain phrase and being buried in the SERP sand.

Keep in mind, too, that the Internet conversation is ongoing. You’re allowed to evolve your opinions and thoughts on just about anything, and your audience will appreciate that you are brave and attentive enough to do so.

In content marketing, teasing people is a good thing

What did you listen to on the way to work this morning? If it was a morning radio talk show, you were probably teased and didn’t even know it.

My friend Lex McAllister reminded me of this a few months back when I joined her on her radio show, No Excuses. Lex, like other talk radio hosts, makes it a consistent practice to tease her listeners before going to commercial breaks in order to hook them into the content that’s coming up next.

When you’re starting to execute on your content marketing editorial calendar, make sure that you are building the expectations and affinity of your audience by teasing them with the content you have coming up next.

Do a good job and be ready to be on call

Number seven is the deadly sin in content marketing, if you forget about it.

I was raised by two registered nurses who liked to make extra dollars by working overtime or being on call. Having pagers go off during dinner was simply part of the norm in my parents’ house. And why not? Why not make a little extra cash by hedging your bets that it would be a slow night. (That said, it’s rarely a slow night in hospitals.)

Now, think back to why you are doing content marketing in the first place. Yes, every business wants to boost sales and build brand awareness; but the truth of the matter is that to reach those goals you must first succeed in building an online conversation around the content objects you produce.

When and if people will be talking about your content (and the humans who put it out there for discussion), make sure to be ready to participate in real time. Look at ways to staff your online presence with humans from your company, and make sure to design shifts and assign staff to man the outposts on weekends and evening hours. Don’t be afraid to put members of your team “on call” at home, but make sure that you compensate them for that time.

If you want to win big bonus points, reward them BIG time if they can show you that they consistently respond to your customers in less than 10 minutes.

What’s your take on these seven principles of content marketing?

What did I miss?

Building a new content marketing team or large-scale initiative is like building anything else. If you want to do a professional job, you need professional tools and you need to know how to use them. You don’t need to start with every tool—just start with what makes the most sense for your team and go from there.

Why you need a content marketing toolkit

Having a standard set of tools helps content creators to efficiently develop consistent content. It also helps to promote a clear and consistent vision and definition for your content marketing initiative.

Understand your audience

Different people will use different content tools across the organization. Take a moment to think about who needs to be supported in creating quality content. Your list may include:

• Your dedicated content team
• Content contributors from other areas of your organization
• Content publishers and web traffic coordinators
• Visual design team
• All company employees
• Content freelance contractors

Make your content marketing toolkit usable

All content tools should support user tasks and be easy-to-use, but give extra attention to tools used by staff who are not content specialists and whose primary job is not creating or contributing to content. Your content marketing toolkit should:

• Be available online. Encourage staff to interact with the tools online, rather than print, to ensure they are using the most up-to-date information. Keep all your tools in one, easy-to-access place.
• Be printable. Staff will want to print some tools and keep them for easy reference. Allow for this, but make the date of publication obvious, and ask them to check periodically for an updated version.
• Display only the tools relevant and available to each user group. Create permission-based access to the toolkit. That way you’ll have one central repository to manage and update, but your users won’t be overwhelmed with documents or tools that have no relevance to them.
• Be clearly branded as a content marketing tool and part of the larger toolkit. The writing, visual design and format should reflect the brand of your organization and the sub-brand of your content initiative. Be sure to model content best practices.

Provide training

Never assume that people will understand how to use the tools or where to find them even if it seems obvious. Taking the time to educate your users will help you better understand their needs and obstacles and make them feel involved and included. This will result in better adoption of the tools. Include a review of the content marketing toolkit as part of the welcoming and training process for all new employees in each user group.

Create high-quality, useful tools

Remember that your content tools are representative of the quality of content that you’re looking for. Don’t lower your quality standards just because your audience is internal.

Be sure to match each tool with one or more user groups. This will help you to focus it on your user needs as well as set access permissions. Here are some of the tools you may want to include in your toolkit:

Art collection: A repository for pre-approved art and images for content marketing that the content team can grab and go.

Article submission brief: A form to collect the necessary information from content contributors who are submitting an idea for an article.

Article template & checklist: A brief outline and fill-in-the-blanks template to help content contributors write an effective article. Include key concepts and a high-level checklist.

Brand brief: A one-page, high-level description of your corporate brand, voice and personality.

Content maintenance calendar: A maintenance schedule identifying content that needs to be updated or removed. Include a schedule and reason for update.

Content marketing playbook: A comprehensive overview of the different types of content marketing products that your organization creates. Include descriptions of content products, their purpose, key audiences, resource requirements, and their position in your strategic content mix.

Design style guide: A comprehensive set of rules and guidelines for content visual design. Be sure to include guidance for photos, images, font and color-schemes.

Editing checklist: A checklist to ensure that your editor looks at all aspects of quality content. In addition to writing style and grammatical issues, be sure to include things like fact-checking, full URLs included, indications of where this content will be linked to or from, SEO optimization, cross-channel requirements and opportunities, metadata and ALT text descriptions and scheduled maintenance, if necessary.

Editorial calendar: A calendar of all content approved for upcoming publication, including content requirements, responsibilities, and schedule. If you only have time to develop one item in your toolkit, this is the place to start. Idea list: A list of pre-approved article ideas that content contributors can choose from.

Kick-start content ideas: A one-page list of idea-generating techniques to help content contributors identify and create new content ideas and opportunities.

Opportunity calendar: A tool for collecting content requests and timelines from different departments. You can distribute the calendar at regular intervals such as quarterly, and each department can identify key concepts, themes or campaigns they have coming up that may impact your content marketing.  Typically, this information is captured in an Excel document, which is reviewed by your editorial team as they decide on upcoming content.

Personas: Hypothetical archetypes that represent distinct customer-groups. Each persona is a one-page fictionalized customer account derived from real customer data for that segment. Personas are used to guide content focus and decisions to ensure your company maintains a customer-focused approach to content development and delivery.

Pre-publication content checklist: A checklist to ensure content quality prior to publication. Make sure that links are checked, metadata and ALT text descriptions are included, images are properly formatted and sized, and pages display properly at target resolutions on relevant browsers.

Process diagrams: Diagrams to communicate the process flow through all stages of the content life-cycle.

Quick tips for quality writing: A one-page overview of the most important writing guidelines with examples.

Quick tips for social media: A one-page overview of key social media concepts and guidelines with examples.

Writing style guide: A comprehensive set of rules and guidelines for writing to quality standards. Be sure to include sections on tone and voice, writing mechanics, information design, social media, and SEO.

What other tools have you found helpful in the past?

Photo credit: Austin & Zak

Planning

I’ve seen many email newsletters in my inbox, and some make me wonder if they actually went through any planning before they pushed the publish button. You don’t have to put together a business plan, but you do need to plan your email newsletter content to match your overall content marketing strategy. Did you set goals for your newsletter? If you didn’t, you really should.  For instance, if your goal is to educate your readers and establish yourself as a thought leader, consider including more informational content in your newsletter.

Make sure you develop the newsletter around the goals and ensure they’re measurable. Think about it; how will you know if the newsletter was successful? Speaking of planning, do you have an editorial calendar for your newsletters? Setting one up, just as you do for the rest of your content marketing activities, will help you plan things like:

• The schedule of your email newsletter: Do you have a consistent schedule?
• Special dates: Does your schedule take into account for special dates or events?
• Opportunities for reuse: Do you have a plan to repurpose some content in your blog, upcoming event or informational products?

Design and layout

I’m no designer, but I know when I see a design I like and I know how important it is to make newsletters effective. Even if it has the best copy in the world, a poorly designed template can turn off your readers and cause them to hit the dreaded delete button. A few things to keep in mind for an appealing design include:

• Appealing colors and a natural blend of copy and design. (No dark backgrounds with blue text).
• Keep the layout free of clutter – no one wants to navigate through a busy email with too many visual elements.
• Videos and photos are great, but trying to pile them throughout the email make me want to scream; keep it to just a few photos or a link to videos.

Readability

Many newsletters fail to keep the reader engaged due to one simple error – they don’t make their content readable. Oh yes, there’s a difference between readable and unreadable content; ever try reading a one-paragraph, 500-word article? So, what are some ways to ensure your newsletter passes the readability test?

• No large paragraphs. Keep a paragraph to 3-4 sentences.
• Avoid content overload by not putting everything in the newsletter. Learn to link out to your website or blog too.
• Keep it consistent and use standard faces and sizes for your font.  Some standard fonts to use in your newsletter would include Helvetica and Arial.
• Add subheadings, where possible, to break-up sections.

Subject line

OK, this one is a no brainer.  For your subject line, craft one that’s compelling, related to the newsletter content and makes the recipient click and not hit delete. When you’re looking at developing a great subject line, consider these points: Ask yourself, “How does this make the recipient feel?” Try to draw on emotions or general curiosity.

If you have a numbered list of points, try to integrate that number into your subject line just as I have with the headline of this post.

Sharing

Do you think your newsletter is only for your existing subscribers to read? Actually, it’s not.  What do you do when you read something that’s WOW? Do you keep it to yourself or share it out? Yep, you share it out with your friends, connections and family. This is what you need with your email newsletter. Now, how do you get your existing subscribers to share your message?

• Ask them to share it with someone who will benefit from it.
• Give them many options to share it. This includes email, social media and other methods.

Calls to action

Most of the email newsletters I get have a good amount of valuable resources without trying to sell me something. Or do they? An effective call to action isn’t an ad or a button telling me to buy now; rather it’s subtle but effective. Some great ways to keep your readers engaged involve getting them to see more about you and your business. Consider these simple but effective calls to action:

• Add icons and links to connect with you on social networks. Check out the Content Marketing Institute Newsletter for a perfect example of this.
• Invite your reader to an upcoming event.
• Ask the reader to subscribe for their own updates if someone forwarded the email to them.
• Welcome feedback and see what your readers think of you.
• Add links to other relevant content, such as your blog.
• If you have to add a sales message, keep it small and let your content speak for you instead.

Testing

If you just write something and send it out, will it succeed? How do you know? Unless you’re Professor X and can read minds, you will need some method to test your message. What elements of your message would you test? Try these on for size:

• Do A/B testing with different subject lines or even different opening statements.
• Not everyone’s email client is the same; test on multiple email clients and operating systems.
• Speaking of that, are you testing your content on mobile devices? Does your message fit and display properly for those on the go?

Thorough testing gives you a better shot at success, and it will show when you go through your email analytics. I could go into more with these metrics, but I will save that for another post.

Content Marketing With Effective Email Newsletters

Email newsletters are not dead; they are very much alive and remain an essential element to successful content marketing. When you incorporate each ingredient, you have a checklist for successful email newsletters. Do you have a checklist for your email newsletters? What would you add to this list?

The goal of this post is to show you step-by-step how you can create and build a content strategy for your company or your clients. But first, let’s be clear about what content strategy is.

In the words of the brilliant Kristina Halvorson, author of Content Strategy for the Web:

“Content strategy is the practice of planning for the creation, delivery, and governance of useful, useable content.”

Richard Sheffield, author of the Content Strategist’s Bible defines content strategy as:

“…a repeatable system that defines the entire editorial content development process for a website development project, from very early tasks such as analyzing and classifying readers to the very last tasks, such as planning for the ongoing content maintenance after the project launches.”

Content strategy is a process that can make a significant difference for your web presence.

Pulling generously from the authors and books mentioned above, I have mapped out my own content strategy process from start to finish.  I’m not advocating that my process is 100 percent perfect for every campaign, but it is a good launching point for you to use and adapt to your own clients and websites.

Phase I: Research Overview

Your first step should define the roles of your team members who will review, evaluate and determine the scope of the project. Introductory and preliminary phone calls are made to the client to get more insight into the problems your team is trying to solve. This is a phase of discovery and learning about what the client is currently doing, what content they have and how it is being produced. Further research is necessary beyond initial client Q & A.

There are a few things you need to research before you can start whipping up strategies and stellar content for a website. When it comes to informational, marketing or promotional content, the more content you have, the more difficult this job can potentially be. This leads me to the first step of Phase 1.

Track Existing Content:

You need to know what you have and where it comes from before you can make informed decisions about what content you need.

Deliverables:

Project summary is a short spreadsheet that includes project name, contact, website URL, phone numbers, team players and roles. This should help with managing the campaign.

Content audit or inventory is a spreadsheet that keeps track of all content that is published on your website and out on the web that is branded with your company.

Missing source content report lists the content for which you cannot find the digital source. You or your client may need to re-create these files to move forward with the content in question. For smaller campaigns, this could be a short punch list.

The project agenda is used on larger projects to ensure everyone’s input is added to big decisions. This is optional if the project is small and doesn’t have multiple stakeholders with strong opinions.

The agenda will provide a list of short workshops in which the entire team and/or client get together and discuss and gain consensus on critical items. This includes:

• Brand voice
• Tone and messaging
• Content-specific requirements
• Preferred style guidelines.

Phase II: Analysis Overview

Once you have gathered your research, you need to think about what you are trying to achieve on the project. What do users want or need? How will you measure success? What can you do with your available time, talent and budget? Align your thoughts with the following:

• Business goals
• Tactics
• Requirements and restrictions
• Project objectives
• Assumptions
• Identified risks
• Communication ecosystem

A content strategist will spend time creating and understanding proposed solutions and figuring out what content needs to be created for each solution. There will also be a list of deliverables for the client to provide analysis.

Deliverables

This is when you deliver your content analysis document, which is a collection of different documents.

The existing content analysis report summarizes the existing content in terms of readability, scanability, conciseness, objectivity, effectiveness of communicating the brand message and recommendations.

The competitive analysis report takes a deeper look at your website or the websites of your competitors. Look at the differences in how the competitor describes their products and services, how they write press releases and what their content silos consist of.

The editorial process calendar documents how you or your client currently publishes content on the web and includes recommendations on how you should conduct this process moving forward. This is a great time to recommend an editorial calendar revision and map out the remaining work on the project.

The readiness analysis is an optional spreadsheet for a smaller project, but it is a necessity for larger ones. This document evaluates the readiness of a content strategist, a team or a company for conducting the project successfully. This document should look at the three “R’s:” resource readiness, process readiness and technology readiness.

Phase III: Strategy and Design

At this point in the project, you have delivered quite a bit of analysis. To begin this phase, both ends of the table will have agreed to an approach moving forward. During Phase III, you will need to help everyone working on the project figure out how it will be built around the strategy. In short, this is where the strategy is finalized and applied to content creation.

As a content strategist, you will need to determine what existing content should still be used, what needs to be created, who is responsible for each piece of content and what the editorial processes and guidelines are.

Deliverables

While there are only two deliverables during this phase, they are extremely important documents.

The content matrix is the most important document in the entire project and is your guide and tracking tool as the project moves into Phase IV.  Updating and completing  your content matrix will make it easier for your team to create content.  The content matrix is a spreadsheet that records all the attributes and milestones for every single piece of content needs for the project. This is a list of matrix columns you should create for your spreadsheet:

• Page or module
• Asset ID/File name and location
• Page/module description
• Content/page type
• Website area/category
• URL (pages only)
• Existing URL
• How this is affected by the project
• Information providers
• Source content reviewers
• Description of change
• Word count
• Author/editor
• Stage of creation
• Submitted for review
• Reviewer comments
• Changes made/submitted again
• Legal approvals
• Creation date
• Testing date
• Publication date

The editorial style guide is used to guide the folks with content creation and editing responsibilities. This is a great starting point for the creation of an official editorial style guide to be used and maintained by the client or company. The editorial style guide should:

• Provide consistency with technology usage and terminology
• Sets standards for grammatical usage
• Specify formatting rules
• Clarify identification and usage of branded terms
• Act as a forum for the discussion, evaluation, and adaptation of a company’s changing conventions.

Companies and clients may have an existing editorial style guide, so ask about it at the very beginning of this phase. As for the content matrix, very few clients or companies will have even heard of this document, and even fewer will actually have an existing one. These deliverables, up until now, pack the biggest punch so it is worth the time, effort, and headache medication it takes to create these deliverables.

Phase IV: Content Creation and Testing

Now that you have researched, analyzed, and strategized, it’s time to create. If you are a writer at heart, it’s high time to lick your chops because this entire phase is a “deliverable.” By following your content matrix, you will create, edit, and approve content — all with the complete communication with the client – while maintaining constant updates, estimated budgets and timelines.

Once you have all your content created (see, wasn’t that easy?), it needs to be tested and approved on the development site. The content strategist is responsible for providing the “test team” (which could be the content strategist as well) with guidance on what content is new, repurposed and a list of specific changes to verify work has been completed.

If defects, errors or catastrophes are detected, the strategist will also have a plan for dealing with them. Once all content has been created, approved and tested, you are ready to go live.

Phase V: Maintenance

Many experts say that as soon as a website is launched it is outdated. A content strategist should have this mentality entering Phase V: Maintenance. Develop a plan moving forward from launch that maps out the creation of new content. This will be a new editorial calendar that spells out exactly what needs to be created, when it needs to be published and when old content should be removed and archived on an ongoing basis.

In most content strategy projects, there will be a few things that slip through the cracks — a hanging participle, a run-on adverb — so you will need to continue to maintain the content you created in order to provide the best possible outcome for your client.

To learn more about what makes readers actually click through, Outbrain, a content discovery platform serving content recommendations on top publisher sites, looked through data on 150,000 article headlines or titles that were recommended across our platform. The purpose of this research was to offer content publishers and marketers insight into headline characteristics that get the desired click-through. Here are our findings.

Length matters

A title with eight words performed best. These titles received a 21% higher click-through rate than average.

Pics get clicks

Outbrain’s data analysis showed readers are attracted to content with images. Thumbnails worked better than logos and increased click-through rates by 27%.

Lists with a twist

Lists and photo galleries typically drive more page views, but they get more click-thorughs as well. Headlines that contained odd numbers had a 20% higher click-through rate than headlines with even numbers.

Going deeper

A colon or hyphen in the title — indicating a subtitle — performed 9% better than headlines without.

Questions work

Titles that ended  with a question mark had a higher click-through rate than those that ended with exclamation marks or periods. If you really feel the urge to use an exclamation mark, our studies have shown that three (!!!) received almost twice as many clicks as all other punctuation marks.

I hope these simple tweaks will help your headlines really click with your readers. After all, they worked on you didn’t it? (Odd number…eight words… sound familiar?)

What are your thoughts? Tell us what types of headlines grab your attention and why?

Yesterday, I introduced the Creating Valuable Content Checklist, which I use to quantify what makes content valuable to our content consumers.  Today I’ll explain the steps in each of these benchmarks. 

Download the Creating Valuable Content Checklist™. [PDF]

Findable content

When creating your content, you must remember that unless something is emailed to users, they probably need to find it (and even then things can get lost in an inbox!). Therefore, you must make sure that you’ve done everything in your power to use the right SEO best practices to write or create findable content.

The steps below assume that you have already done keyword research on your project. Based on the goals and user research, you should choose the keywords that you think will be most effective for your content. If you need help finding the right keywords, check out this post on how to find the right keywords for your content marketing efforts.

For text on web pages

• Use only one h1 and multiple h2 tags on your web pages because  they benefit search engines ranking and they help break up text on a page. Make sure you highlight them in the copy deck (or whatever system you use to move content from creation into production) so that the person laying out the content understands how they should be encoded. Use h3 tags if necessary, but understand they won’t get you the same bang for your buck in terms of SEO results that h1 and h2 tags will.
• Customize the metadata (title tag, keywords and descriptor tag) so it describes the content on the page, according to your keyword research.
• Include links to other pages on the site to increase the content value that search engine spiders assign to your pages (spiders are the robots that crawl through your site).
• Include alt tags on your photos and other images so they appear in image searches. Describe the picture in the image (because alt tags were first designed for the visually impaired) but also use them to plug your content. For instance, if you have a picture of doctors performing surgery, the alt tag could be“The doctors at Sweet Valley Hospital in Sweet Valley, California, are experts in separating identical twins in a surgery,  known as identical separation, shown in this photo.”

For video

Post your video on YouTube and/or Facebook to increase the likelihood it will be seen. I like using YouTube because it allows you to accurately count the views. Regardless of what platform you use, you need to tag the content so it can be found:

• Include possible keywords in your title.
• Provide  a detailed, keyword-rich summary.

For audio

• Consider distributing your audio in different formats, such as mp3, wav and wiff so it’s available to different audiences.  If your potential customer doesn’t have the required format to listen to the audio file, then your whole goal of creating and distributing the content has been stymied during delivery.
• Create a detailed summary and title where the content will be downloaded. For some delivery vehicles, that’s the system it’s stored in, like iTunes. For others, it might be the page you post the file on.
• House each audio clip on a relevant content page, so the text and audio support each other in SEO efforts by demonstrating relevant content to the search engines.

Readable content

Once users find your content, do they consider it to be readable? While this only applies to written content, this is the primary way people consume info, so it’s an incredibly important category.

When considering readability, the most important thing to consider is that users scan until they find the content they need. Any great Web conversation with your user respects their time. Therefore, consider using:

• The inverted pyramid style of writing:  The most important facts should be at the top. For an example of this, see the figure produced using eyetracking software.  You can see where the user’s eyes scanned on the page:  see how that shape follows an inverted pyramid?
• Chunking: Keep paragraphs short. I follow the rule of three:  no more than three sentences in a paragraph, and no more than three paragraphs under one heading.
• Bullets and numbered lists:  When people want to consume information quickly, lists and bullets are helpful.
• Consistent language: By keeping content consistent, you avoid confusing your users.  For example, how do you refer to your business, company or institution on a page? If you keep switching back and forth from your name to the use of the term “us,” it’s going to confuse your customers. Keep it consistent. Use a style guide to help everyone get on the same page.

Understandable content

Creating content that users really understand is challenging when subjects are complex. In healthcare, where I do a tremendous amount of consulting and content creation, I am very aware of this. Many times I write on an eighth grade reading level, and even that might be too elevated for my readers.

So how can  you create understandable content, no matter what industry you are in?

• Choose the right content type. For example, if users have an “aha” moment when seeing something sketched out, use a visual medium such as a video or a slideshow instead of written text.
• Create user personas for your different user audiences, and match the level of the content’s complexity to the user’s ability to understand it.
• Always provide context. Even if you think it might sound condescending, consider explaining even the most basic concepts to your users. You never know where someone is jumping in on the conversation.  Build a contextual roadmap into your content at all times.
• Apply a standard reading level to your content for each project and stick to it. This should be based on your users’ personas and market research. There is a function in Word for testing reading levels—you may want to experiment with that scoring. Or, find a person on that reading level and test them. You may be surprised to hear what they do and don’t understand.
• Provide valuable information to the user. This could be new information or a new way of articulating an existing idea. Sometimes metaphors help people understand better.

Actionable content

Obviously, you are creating content so your users act upon it. How can you ensure this while creating content?

• Include an obvious call to action.
• Make it easy for users to comment and ask questions, both publicly and privately. For instance, enable blog comments or direct people your company’s Facebook page.  If you accept comments via your “Contact Us” page, make this page easily accessible. Ask your users to share the content by including: “Please share this content with those you think might enjoy it.”
• Provide links to relevant content or program your content management system (CMS) to provide options to other content that users have liked.
• Include a list of actionable items at the top if the content is long (remember the inverted pyramid style of writing that helps make content more readable). For example, if you are writing about diabetes care, add three bullets at the top that define diabetes and explain how you can control it.

Shareable content

One of the best ways to have your content spread is to have your readers share it because people trust their peers more than brands. How can you entice more of your users to share content?

• Consider provoking an emotional response in your readers. When I first started writing articles on content marketing, one of my editors told me, “People are more likely share controversial stuff.”
• Provide a reason to share—perhaps you actually illustrate the benefit of sharing the content within the story of the content. For example, you may to tell a story about how sharing health information with each other helped one family increase their exercise efforts.
• Ask them to share.
• Make sharing easy. (Work with your developers to research and decide on which sharing widget is best for your organization).
• Allow users to personalize the share. For instance, when I retweet things, I like to edit them, so I can add hashtags or reference another source. If I can’t, I feel frustrated.

As Gawande explained, most professions are resistant to checklists because “we believe our jobs are too complicated to reduce to a checklist.” If doctors, project managers of major construction projects and the World Health Organization were convinced by the use of checklists, then why shouldn’t we be?

Download the Creating Valuable Content Checklist™ [PDF]

Do you have experience using checklists in your content marketing? I’d love to see your examples. Or, let me know what you may change in this checklist.

Who said that?  It’s definitely someone in content marketing, web strategy or digital communications, right? Don’t we all feel that way? Every day our jobs are getting ahead of us, instead of us getting ahead of our jobs.

It may surprise you that the above quote is from Atul Gawande, MD, who wrote a supremely useful and convincing book called The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right. Gawande is a general surgeon who suggests that applying simple checklists to both complicated and routine medical procedures can affect overall success rates and reduce infection and mortality.

What does this have to do with content marketing? A lot. As I always say, “Great content strategy is about taking the guesswork out of execution, so creativity about content can flourish.” To help get all of the execution details straight, I’ve developed the Creating Valuable Content Checklist™.

UPDATE: You can now download the Creating Valuable Content Checklist in German.

An overview of valuable content

The checklist is designed for digital content creators and marketing teams, and it defines valuable content using five benchmarks:

• Findable
• Readable
• Understandable
• Actionable
• Shareable

Hat tip to Colleen Jones who inspired some of these benchmarks.

Today I’m going to share some quick tips on how to use the checklist, and then I’ll break down each of the elements tomorrow.

Download the Creating Valuable Content Checklist™  [PDF].

Get the decision makers in the same room

Before you start using this checklist, it’s important to understand how to use it. The first thing is to get the right people involved.

One of the most persuasive stories Gawande tells is about how some of the most run-down hospitals in Detroit instituted a checklist for inserting a central line. Hospitals use central lines, which are injection ports, to minimize the number of needle sticks. However, these lines can often become infected.

To reduce the probability of infection, a doctor named Provonost created a central line checklist and persuaded some hospitals in Detroit to participate in a study to see if the checklist was effective. Each hospital that participated in this project assigned a senior project manager as well as an executive “who would visit at least once a month, hear the staff’s complaints, and help them solve problems.”

Why did the executive need to be involved in something considered tactical? Some of the staff’s issues were things that only the executives could solve, such as supplying the right kind of antiseptic soap and proper size drapes. By capturing the attention and action of the executives, these hospitals in Detroit brought down central line infections by 66%.

In content marketing, your executives may be the people who can effect change in your resources or who can influence your company’s policy towards things like social media or the overall “voice” of your brand. By educating your key executive about the content marketing challenges facing your team and proposing solutions, you have a real opportunity to make a difference. Maybe you can increase traffic to your site by 66%. The point is, that by methodically moving down the basic details you need to attend to with every project with your decision makers, you may be able to solve problems more easily than you realized.

Share the checklist with your team

Over the years I’ve developed my own internal checklist of what needs to happen to keep the user interested in what I was writing. But I’ve also known that I control only part of the process. Visual design, information architecture and usability combine to create user experience and are key in keeping users on pages. To implement the checklist properly, you need to get all the members of the digital strategy team working through the checklist together and make changes as needed. They may even have their own checklists, so combine them for maximized effectiveness.

I hope you will print it out and use it often.

Want to learn more? Check out the next post in which I look at each of these benchmarks in more detail so you understand specifically what each point means and what you can do to make your content more valuable.

Download the Creating Valuable Content Checklist™ [PDF]

Please consider leaving a comment about the checklist—do you think there are things you would add for your organization? Do you use something similar?  If so, does it work as effectively as promised above?