In this session of Marketing Office Hours, we’ll talk about planning and organizing your content strategy. This is truly the cornerstone of content marketing and you’ll see that many tools exist to help you get organized.

This is a work in progress session with processes that we are putting in place at M/L. We have many very ambitious goals and content creation is a real strategic issue for us.

Why create content?

Content is the real fuel for your inbound marketing. Without content, it’s hard to attract people to you or allow Google to spot your expertise on topics. If you don’t produce content, you’ll quickly be limited to outbound marketing and that can quickly deplete your base.

At M/L, we are rather reluctant to practice outbound marketing. We try to make sure that the first interaction is initiated by the person and that means producing content. That’s the M/L philosophy: give before you get.

Start by giving value to your audience to get them interested, attracted and then talk business.

The consequences of poor organization and mistakes to avoid

It’s pretty frustrating to make content that will have a non-existent lifespan, a one shot. It is important to create content that has a real ROI. Without organization, we make content that is too product-oriented or based on our desires and needs of the moment. It may work once, but it won’t necessarily interest your audience.

Without organization, we spend more time producing content than promoting it. And that’s not good. In content marketing, there is one rule: you have to spend as much energy and budget producing content as you do distributing it.

At M/L, we have a lot of different content (webinars, videos, blog). And the first thing that bothered us was that, by dint of producing so much content, we couldn’t find our way around it. This is one of the most common mistakes: having too much content and not knowing how to use it.

Several questions then arose:

• How do I organize my content?
• How do I plan my different publications?
• How do I get into a logic of recycling and long-term content marketing?

How to organize your content with Divvy?

The first solution we found to organize our content is Divvy! This database will allow us to gather all our content, list them, organize them by type and schedule them in a calendar.

What’s interesting with this digital solution is that we can access all types of content via Sandbox, thanks to organization items such as:

• Content type;
• The publication URL;
• The deadline ;
• The type of promotion;
• The calendar ;
• etc.

You will be able to tag this content and associate it to one or more marketing campaigns, with choice of audience, publication channels and SEO keywords.

You can also create content directly in Divvy, from a text editor. You will be able to associate a shared briefing to a member of your team or to an external.

Finally, a powerful search tool allows you to easily find your content using a multitude of criteria: type, tag, subject, creation date, strategy, status, priority level.

Everything is centralized in one place.

How to plan your content?

Thanks to Divvy, you will also be able to plan all your content much more easily and set up a real content marketing strategy.

This digital solution allows you to deploy several calendars. At M/L, we have chosen to set up 3 different schedules:

• Blog articles ;
• Marketo tips; and
• Webinars.

This way, you can easily plan your content throughout the year and check that the publication dates do not overlap between the different formats.

You will also be able to have a global vision of the different campaigns, like a monthly newsletter for example. You will easily find out which content to include in your news, go into creation mode and assign people to the production.

Define the tags of the different contents

The definition of categories and tags associated with content is very important. These tags and categories have their own web pages that can be found on your site or blog.

The reader can choose to use either tags or categories. In terms of SEO, it is important that your queries are well visible by Google. It is therefore important to choose the right tags so that the associated pages are rich in terms of content. Otherwise, it’s bad for SEO.

If you want to work on a particular keyword, you must limit the number of tags to relevant queries and that the keyword is well referenced on all systems to harmonize the choice of tags according to the platforms.

This work of defining tags and categories allows to massify the work of content and to optimize the SEO.

How to define your content marketing logic around a funnel?

At M/L, we have chosen to start with a monthly logic, saying: we have major themes that interest our audience. Each month, we will create a body of content around the chosen theme, at different levels of the funnel.

Each piece of content created must be linked to an offer or a call to action. When we thought about the subject of data quality, we created different types of content:

• The tops of the funnel (infographics, snack content, blog posts) that are easy to read;
• In the middle of the funnel, we will find an in-depth article with a video, the 12 data quality campaigns to create and a marketo office hours;
• And finally, even more advanced articles such as the cornerstone content, which is the reference on this topic. We can also add a webinar or other more complete content.

This organization also allows you to organize your SEO strategy according to the different contents, to create a real corpus of keywords from a SEMRush study. This tool helps you to easily find keywords and expressions according to their search volume, then to follow the progress of your content on search engines.

You will be able to create a semantic cocoon and design content around the same family of keywords and that are linked together by an internal mesh.

To guide readers, you can also use a chatbot that will suggest other content to be consulted on the site or sent by email. It is therefore possible to link your content to marketing automation and improve its ROI.

To organize your strategy, you can work on Miro to centralize all the useful information for each team member. And then use SEMRush, Google Analytics and Marketo to measure the ROI of your content.

How to amplify the reach of your content?

How do I meet my audience to offer them my content? Obviously, you can do SEA, but it is not enough to amplify your content in an “industrial” way. There are 3 tracks to follow:

• social media management ;
• the loyalty program ;
• the pod.

Amplify your content with Limber

Limber is a solution that allows you to create marketing scenarios for each type of content. When you publish a post, you can send it to your personal channel, your professional channel and your Facebook group.

After 24 hours, we republish on our personal channel and the channel of our collaborators with automatic likes and shares. Then we plan a monthly, bi-monthly, weekly, etc. rescheduling of the event.

Limber allows you to take control of your social networks and automate a certain number of publications, within a planned scenario across different accounts and pages. Regularly, my content is automatically pushed and amplified on different channels.

This type of solution saves time and gives your collaborators the choice to comment, like or share.

Limber also offers a social wall where all your content can be easily shared on social networks. Your employees have access to this wall and can select the contents of their choice, with a gamification system.

This platform also makes it easy to keep track of your social networks.

Finally, M/L ambassadors can also amplify our content in exchange for benefits such as vouchers or discounts on our offers. They can be a precious help in promoting our marketing content.

Questions and comments from participants

• In the content formats developed, is variety favored? And what works best? 

If you make the effort to do a 3000 word article, you have to see it as a nugget to be converted into lots of little diamonds. Repackaging high-value content in different media isn’t the hard part. At M/L, we try to share as many different types of content on the same theme as possible, to reach a maximum audience. We start with a theme and see how it can be developed, not the other way around. Each reader or listener is attracted by a different type of content. It is therefore important that everyone finds their way in your proposals.

It’s better to do less content and take a topic and really go deep into it and make it last over time.

By being very organized and using the right tools, you can even produce a maximum amount of content with a small team. The more you work on your process, the more you will be able to develop your strategy and multiply your content on all platforms.

It is so complicated to make content that works, so it is essential to combine expertise on content, SEO or marketing automation. You have to think of marketing and communication as a single team involved in content marketing.

It seems essential to combine all the forces involved.

Thank you all for attending this Marketing Office Hours session. Do not hesitate to contact us if you have any questions.