What is content marketing?
In a nutshell:
It’s providing value to your online visitors through content. Content refers to blog posts, white papers and reports, video and webinars, and social media.
The idea at work here is that through this value, you’ll build trust. And this is what converts sales prospects into leads, and leads into customers.
For a complete set of content marketing audit templates, checklists, and tools, visit our Resource Download center.
What is Enterprise Content Marketing?
So what is Enterprise content marketing? Is there a difference from “regular” content marketing?
The answer is this:
The goal of Enterprise content marketing remains the same. What changes, though, is the scale of strategy.
These content marketing programs call for Enterprise-grade techniques. This means tracking performance on a grand scale, being competitive in your industry, and developing new strategies.
Now the question is how to apply Enterprise-grade techniques to content marketing. Keep reading to learn how.
Enterprise Content Marketing Strategy – The AOM Strategy
To get the most out of content marketing, you have to apply a formula. This is useful because it keeps programs moving forward and generating business value. Here’s a basic formula to keep in mind:
- Analyze your current content marketing efforts on a grand scale. For Enterprises, this means analyzing your industry as well.
- Optimize your content based on performance. Your analysis provides the insight, and optimization is the action.
- Measure the outcome. This means seeing how well your new actions plans are working.
Now that we have a basic formula structure, let’s dive deeper into the mechanics.
Applying the AOM Strategy to Enterprise Content Marketing
We’re now at the point where we can apply our simple strategy to content marketing.
To reiterate:
Content marketing is how your company delivers value through online material – e.g. blogs, video, social posts, etc. Now let’s apply our AOM strategy to these forms of content marketing.
Here are a few areas we can work with:
- Blog analysis to hone in on content that drives business value.
- SEO (Search Engine Optimization) to boost your content visibility.
- UX auditing to ensure a beautiful user experience.
- Social footprint tracking to engage with your community.
Your Company Blog – a Content Marketing Cornerstone
Analyze
Use your blog analysis to shed light on performance. Analyze blog data like visitor traffic engagement and usability metrics.
You’ll also want to look at what competitor blogs are doing. You can use Pagezii’s Blog Analysis Report for this data. It’ll find industry SEO scores, provide a social platform breakdown and show top authors in the industry.
Optimize
Now you understand how your blog is performing. You also know how you stack in the industry. Now it’s time for action.
You can optimize your blog by setting a performance benchmark. Look at what content provides the most business value and optimize content based on that. A few things you can look at:
- Communication style: What Reader Profile has generated the most visits, social shares, lowest bounce rates? Hone in on a Reader Profile that’s works and craft blogs that resonate with your visitors.
- Blog Promotion: Which social networks are you getting the most traction on? Is this consistent with your industry? Focus on promoting specific content types to social platforms that make sense.
- Trending Focus: look at what direct and indirect competitors are writing about. Are you aligned with what’s popular? If not, it’s time to start focusing on what your readers are talking about.
Measure
You’ve analyzed, optimized, now take a look at your blog’s performance after a meaningful period of time. Did your efforts increase blog performance?
SEO – Creating Content Visibility
Analyze
Visibility plays a big role in your content’s performance. Now that you’ve created the content, you need to get visitors.
Look at your content performs from an SEO perspective. Higher SEO scores mean more potential for visitors to find your content. To help visitors find your content, make sure you’re applying SEO best practices.
Optimize
Optimize content for search engines is a straight forward process. By making tweaks to your page content, you can improve SEO scores instantly.
Start optimizing content with lower SEO scores. Important SEO elements to optimize are meta elements like page title and description. Also, focus on body elements like headers, page text, and images. For a complete guide on what to optimize, download our On Page SEO Checklist.
Measure
You’ll be able to measure your efforts quickly. Look at your SEO scores for content you’ve worked on. The higher the score the better.
You can also look at your Google Search Console data to see if average positions are trending in the right direction.
UX Auditing – Improving User Experience
Analyze
Next, analyze your content’s UX. This will highlight page communication style and breakdown UX performance elements.
For page messaging, make sure you’re tailoring communication for the ideal reader. An “artisan” style message cut it for an “engineer” type reader.
You’ll also want to check your content for important page UX elements. These are elements like good navigation, simple usability, and present credibility boosters.
Optimize
Use your analysis to see where your content can improve on UX. Optimizing UX is a combination of quick wins and longer processes.
You can take two routes when it comes to optimizing. You can work on quick wins first and focus on longer processes with your team. Or you can focus on UX elements that need the most attention.
Measure
After improving UX, measure your results based on the goal completions of your content. If your blog post is meant to funnel visitors to downloadable content, check content paths using Google Analytics. Or if your landing page is designed to capture leads, is it delivering?
Social Footprint – Engaging with the Community
Analyze
Now it’s time to analyze your social footprint. This is a look at how well you’re using social media to promotion content.
Similar to your blog analysis, look at how your industry is using social. By this, I mean analyze how your industry interacts with communities and how they converse. This data is going to give you insight into how strategy improvement.
Optimize
Base your Twitter optimization on your Analysis report. There’s a ton of data here to work with.
You can optimize your account by conversation style. See what other industry accounts are formatting their tweets. If you see a specific style of tweet gaining traction, test this style moving forward.
Another route you can take is to optimize by what is popular. Your Twitter analysis report tells you what people are talking about. Use this information to your advantage and join the discussion.
Measure
You can measure your efforts through Twitter analytics. See how your optimization is boosting metrics like impressions, followers, etc. If you’re seeing improvements in your analytics, your strategies are paying off.
A Simple Strategy for Enterprise Content Marketing
With the right tools, the AOM framework to take content marketing to new levels. Are there anything else you would include for Enterprise content marketing? Let us know in the comments section.