You are the proud owner of your service firm’s content marketing program.
Unfortunately, so far, it’s been a lot of work and not a lot of return on investment. You spend more time finding content then pursuing leads it generated.
You wonder if it is worth the effort and ask yourself what you need to do to make it live up to its promise.
The answer to your value question is yes. With occasional exceptions, the “pull” of content marketing outperforms the same investment in paid promotion. However, like everything else in life, the caveat is: If you do it right.
Content marketing ROI lives and dies on the success with which the program links the needs of the target market back to a company’s value proposition. If your program is underperforming, your content strategy may be failing to make this vital connection.
Here are five fixes that can help your program live up to its promise.
Fix One: Focus your content on your customers.
Does this sound like your situation?
Your posting schedule drives your content. Topic selection is all over the map and dictated by the subject that is easiest to produce. Your program has become primarily about feeding the posting beast, rather than expressing leadership-level thought in your market.
That’s understandable. You’re busy. However, if you let the ease of implementation and maintaining a schedule undermine your quality, you are sabotaging your program before it has the chance to succeed.
Solving this dilemma requires a shift in your thinking. Don’t buy into the premise of “publish or perish.” You aren’t the New York Times. If you have nothing to say, don’t say anything.
Filler doesn’t help. Your audience will ignore these sub-standard posts. They only see and appreciate the posts that resonate with them.
Action Step:
Conduct a content audit of your potential and published materials. Measure every topic by the yardstick of whether it speaks to your markets’ hot-button needs and if it offers a compelling value that both helps them to achieve their goals and links back to the value you add.
Cross-reference your audit findings with your content program strategy. Look for high performing or high potential intersections. Use those optimum topic areas (or the content gaps) you discover to build out a content inventory that will keep your program focused.
Do this, and you will gain traction and build your brand. Oh, and you will sleep better.
Fix Two: Establish a competitive differentiation.
Yours is not the only voice competing for your market segment’s attention.
Despite the cluttered social media environment, most service firms plan content in a competitive vacuum. They don’t take the competition’s editorial activity into consideration and so fail to stake out a competitive voice.
Your content planning should begin with the questions: What topics can we own, and how will we leverage that to demonstrate our credibility to target markets?
Action Step:
Develop a core content strategy statement that establishes a unique position in the market. Reexamine and if needed, readjust your content strategy to identify opportunities for topic leadership. Give preference to areas of deep professional competence in your organization that can plow new ground rather than echo competitor efforts.
Fix Three: Give your program the resources it needs to achieve excellence.
Have you ever heard this parable?
“There was a well-intentioned farmer who wanted to make some more money. He decided that if he fed his animals a little less, he could cut his expenses and earn some more. He was thrilled with how well it was initially working and the extra money he was earning, so he decided to reduce the feed a little more. That went on for most of the summer until one morning; he entered his barn to find his animals dead. He had starved them to death.”
The moral: The most successful content strategists recognize that this is a mission-critical marketing program that demands financial support.
Action Step:
You don’t want any dead cows on your hands. Augment your in-house capabilities with experts that can build your inventory, maintain quality, and guide content strategy so that it aligns to your branding and lead generation goals, and perhaps most importantly, manage the editorial calendar. The experts will quickly pay for themselves.
Fix Four: Promote your team as people.
The most successful content marketing programs – the ones that achieve thought leader status – are those that speak with a recognizable human’s voice.
We get more than enough anonymous crap in our inbox every day. It is reassuring and refreshing when we gain valuable information from actual people we get to know and respect.
You may want to emphasize your brand, but as a service firm, your people are your brand. You ignore this at your peril.
Action Step:
Review your topic areas and look for opportunities to link a channel to one of your team’s subject matter experts. If you are currently doing this, look for opportunities to widen your program’s contributors to showcase the professional credibility of a broader range of your experts.
Tip: I recognize that service firm professionals are often not accomplished writers. Hire a professional writer to provide backup to your people. Have your staff give the article outline to the writer to flesh out. After it is fleshed out, he or she will send the piece back to the staff author for fine-tuning. You’ll be amazed at the throughput improvement.
Fix Five: Reconnect with your vision for the program.
This one is simple. Think back to the start of your program. Do you remember your ambitious goals and quality objectives?
The day-to-day reality of program implementation has a way of causing vision drift.
Your job is to find your way back to that vision.
Action Step:
Reconnect with your goals for your program’s quality vision and measure every activity from here on out by whether it makes you proud.
Do this if nothing else and your program will do more than perform, it will thrive.
