Digital marketing requires participation.
And, as a rule, participation as the cost of entry is setting the bar pretty low. In fact, it’s the award you got in P.E. when you weren’t good enough at sports to win any other awards (welcome, fellow geeks!).
From that standpoint, digital marketing is pretty simple. Get a website. Register your business on a bunch of networks (facebook and twitter aren’t the only ones, people). Start a blog. Post some pictures. Take a little video.
Yup, that’s it.
Except when you factor in a content strategy. That’s where the work, the planning, the effort all come in to it.
You need strategy for digital marketing, because you’re not just doing this to make friends. You’re doing it to make customers. But that business/customer relationship changes so much when you get into the digital realm, and social media, and all that it entails; if you’re not prepared, if you don’t have a strategy, you’re setting your business up to fail.
Publicly.
Without strategy, your blog gets neglected. Your facebook page gets no interaction. No one follows you on Twitter. Your pictures gather dust. Your video gets ignored.
Ever go to the gym and see people standing around? Those are the people with no plan. They don’t have a strategy for what they want to do. No goals. No way to measure their progress. No real chance at success.
Plan or fail. That’s when participation makes a difference. When your business takes the time to think about what to say, when to say it, how to say it, who to talk to, and why, that’s when it starts to pay off.
In other words, content strategy. Break this down into four parts:
- Learn,
- Plan,
- Create, and
- Govern
Here’s how that works. This is the content strategy workflow that was developed by Kristina Halvorson in her book Content Strategy For The Web.*
Learn- Take a look at all the content you have. All of it. Yes, someone has to read it. Create a spreasheet with all the information you have about those pages, including analytics and quality. Most small businesses don’t have any analytics info (one of the reasons digital marketing hasn’t paid off for you, if you’re in this group), so you’ll have to go on pure instinct: does this content help us with the direction we’re thinking of going, or is it outdated?
Plan- There are literally thousands of ways to market online using new and updated content. There are two main questions to ask here: 1) What are your objectives? and 2) What are your tactics? If you don’t know how to answer those questions, seriously consider hiring professional help. You’re a small business, so every dollar counts, and there’s nowhere that your money will go farther than in the planning phase of your content strategy.
Create- Ah, down to business. Here’s where you’ll map out who will do what and when, then put someone in charge of organizing it. Develop a workflow, and decide who will write, photograph, video, edit, etc. You’ll also decide what is getting created and when. The creation piece basically dictates who owns what; don’t leave it to chance. There’s plenty of room for strategy here, even with very small (like, two person) teams.
Govern- One of my favorite content strategy quotes from Kristina is “Text is messy as hell”. That’s why it needs to be managed. Once it’s up, it’s not finished; monitoring your content for conversion, for improvement, for user interaction, for growth… that’s all part of the deal when it comes to content strategy for small businesses. You can’t just publish it and forget it (and that goes for all of your content, not just text). Who owns the content when it’s up and running? That’s the question you answer in the governing phase.
What do you think? Does this process make you feel lost? Or is it too simple for what you have planned? I’d like to hear about how you’re using strategy for your content…
*Edited. The post did not originally name Kristina as the source for these ideas.
