Do you struggle with content production? As you engage in content planning, do you find it difficult to identify topics to write about? Does your team toil over what type of website content or which content type will have the greatest impact on your target audience? Do you agonize over which content piece will attract your target audience? Do your marketing activities ever grind to a halt at this point?

You're certainly not alone.

Content writing can be challenging. Highly visual content and building a strong content calendar present their own unique challenges, too. This is true whether you're engaged in influencer marketing or building a B2B content marketing strategy. Producing engaging, effective content is the top challenge for most content marketers. More than one digital marketing strategy has stalled out at this critical juncture of the customer journey.

Regardless of the content format you select, this roadmap will help you navigate the path to achieve both engaging and effective content — and more importantly, a marketing roadmap will help you answer the question: "What should I write?"

An effective content marketing plan can help your company create consistently good content and write its own success story. Because we all know it doesn't feel good to spend a lot of time and effort writing effective content that nobody reads, or worse, that they do read and think was a waste of time.

Step 1: Start with business strategy and audience needs.

Cascade business strategy and context.

Without a set of defined business goals to achieve, your growth marketing strategy is flying blind. A marketing roadmap brings both vision and clarity to your content plan.

A successful content marketing strategy starts with the set of business goals you're out to accomplish — brand awareness, lead generation, sales, etc. These goals must cascade down from your overall business and department objectives to your written content and ultimately to your potential customers. OKRs — used by Google's search engine and Intel — can give you a simple framework to think about how your marketing roadmap strategy can cascade if your organization doesn't already have a formal process.

Even if you've been doing content marketing for years, go back to this step and really understand what your business goals are for your content marketing strategy. You may find that those goals and your current execution are not in alignment with a successful content marketing effort.

Don't gloss over this step.

Before any talk of content creation occurs, write out your business goals and make sure your entire content team is in alignment with them. Everyone needs to know what the finish line looks like for providing valuable content. Your marketing roadmap must make this clear.

Understand your audience's needs and preferences.

While you are developing your foundational understanding of a successful inbound marketing business strategy and context, you should also be doing some parallel research to identify your audience's needs and preferences, right down to the social media channels they tend to prefer.

Don't let the organization's product launch objectives interfere with how you approach this step. This can influence the results, creating an understanding of your company's ideal customers, instead of your real customers. Aim to understand your real audience and develop content that addresses their current need, not your company's "want."

There are many ways to do this research prior to developing your marketing campaign. Start your information-gathering initiative with the development of buyer personas. An effective content marketing strategy for your campaign should answer questions such as:

• What is your audience's goal?
• Is there a common problem your audience is trying to solve?
• What is your audience's motivation to achieve that goal or solve that problem?
• Where are your audience's biggest pain points?
• Will your content promotion campaign effectively address them?

Get your hands on website analytics for recent posts and competitive intelligence. These will help you better understand what is engaging your audience on your website, the websites of your competitors, and on social media. Your marketing strategy roadmap should answer questions such as:

• Where is your audience going for information?
• What behaviors or actions are you looking for your audiences to perform?
• Where and why are they taking an action?
• What topics and terms are your competitors using to address your audience's needs?
• Where do you currently have topic gaps in comparison to your industry?

Step 2: Identify key metrics.

After you've defined your business goals and have an understanding of your audience, you must determine how your marketing roadmap will measure the progress of your strategy.

It is vital that you establish these metrics before launching the strategy. All too often, measurement is an afterthought, and marketers simply measure whatever is easily available — which usually takes the form of soft metrics like social media shares and page views — things that don't report well to the C-Suite.

Without establishing metrics that align with the overall goals of the strategy, marketers will have no idea if their marketing roadmap is succeeding or failing. The point of measurement is to determine the true trajectory of your marketing roadmap. You manifest what you measure.

Effective reporting begins with the basics.

Identify to whom you will be reporting these metrics. Just the product manager? Or do they report up to the C-Suite? The Board of Directors?

If you're not sure, you might check with human resources to make sure you're following established company protocol. Understanding to whom you're accountable will help target the metrics that will most effectively measure and communicate your content marketing success.

For example, a COO may value sales and revenue metrics over online marketing consumption metrics. Email marketing figures matter more to content creators than business administration types. Social media numbers matter to your brand awareness types. Adjust your metrics accordingly.

In order to have a true understanding of whether your content program is working, Jay Baer suggests that you "create an array of metrics that are selected from four primary buckets: consumption metrics, social media sharing metrics, lead generation metrics, sales metrics."

Which goals will show the success or failure of your strategy and give you insights into whether to adjust it? What metrics will give you the best pulse on your strategy?

Also, understand how you will get to these metrics. Google Analytics, social media statistics, and your company's CRM are great places to start.

New content intelligence tools are utilizing big data and predictive marketing to give you more insight into individual metrics by diving deep into your existing content and understanding what's resonating with your current audience. These insights not only help you create great content moving forward. They also help you optimize existing content you've already created.

With a solid foundation of business goals, audience understanding, and metrics, we can now begin the task of diving into the creative guts of your content marketing strategy.

Step 3: Develop content marketing editorial mission statement.

At the beginning of any marketing initiative, Joe Pulizzi suggests content marketers get clear on this key part of editorial planning, which can then serve as a guidepost for all content creation and social media campaigns. The mission statement answers the question, "Why do you exist?"

Pulizzi recommends answering three basic questions to create your initial mission statement:

1. Who is your core target audience?
2. What will be delivered to the audience?
3. What is the desired outcome for the audience?

Because you have your business goals and understanding of your audience already in place, this section should come together rather quickly.

When creating your editorial mission statement, keep in mind your own differentiators you discovered from your competitive intelligence gathering. What unique attributes does your company bring to the market when solving your audience's problems?

Step 4: Create an editorial calendar.

Go back to your audience preferences and identify the content types/forms that will work best to address their needs. As you develop your marketing road map, ask yourself:

• What (if anything) would be more effective than a blog post?
• Does it need to be more visual?
• Would video be more effective than the written word?
• Do we need to reach our audience through online, print, broadcast, social media, and other mediums?
• Where is our audience currently getting content for this issue?
• What resources are needed to create content in the forms that will be most effective?

Do a gut check. Check that the types/forms of content you selected lend themselves to the metrics you identified in Step Two.

If not, you may need to establish better metrics to show success. This may be an evolution of an existing metric. For example, if you have video content, and one of your goals is sales instead of just "views," you can use links within the video descriptions to get people back to your site where they can buy your product.

Within your editorial calendar, you will also identify the appropriate promotion channels. Once content types/forms are selected, you'll have a better idea of what channels will work best to promote them.

Step 5: Adopt a data collection and reporting schedule.

It's important to discuss and agree on when and how you will report the progress of your marketing plan and content marketing efforts — not only to your team but to the relevant organizational leadership.

With the right metrics and marketing analytics, you should be able to quickly shift your roadmap strategies depending on their initial effectiveness. Keep an eye on the end goal, and if the strategy is veering off, correct it.

This is why constant monitoring and reporting is your best friend. It may help to have more frequent meetings with your content marketing team to have these discussions — the most effective teams meet daily or weekly, as reported by CMI .

Step 6: Write, edit, publish, and listen.

At this point, you should have amazing clarity around how to answer the question, "What should I write?" Not only that, but you should also be able to answer the question, "Why did you write that?"

So, do what you do best — write, edit, and publish effective content that will engage your audiences and deliver the business results your organization needs to be successful. To help make the creative process even smoother, the Content Marketing Institute offers 10 ways you can write like a pro.

Then, be sure to listen. (This is one place social media can become one of your best friends.)

Listen to how your audiences are responding to your marketing effort. Nurture the product roadmap connection you've established with them. Feedback what you hear into the understanding of your audience in Step One, and see how that new information trickles down the rest of the marketing roadmap. This will all help later on as you seek to build a marketing roadmap template with a proven track record.

Step 7: Establish a continuous feedback loop and make adjustments to your approach.

Anything in your digital content marketing strategy can change. Your marketing roadmap template is just that, a template that will require adjustment and course correction.

Executive leadership might launch a new strategy or invest in a different market, which would completely alter your content strategy. Your audience's needs and preferences might evolve over time or drastically shift overnight after a major event. Competitors could enter the marketplace or change their own content marketing strategy.

Commit to constantly monitoring Google Analytics, collecting your digital marketing metrics, and keeping a pulse on your audience via social media. That way, you'll be able to pivot as changes occur. You can then feed the new information back into the top of the content strategy. Revising your marketing roadmap template is a sign of progress, not failure.

This is a strong win-win tactic. By doing this quickly and effectively, you'll be able to create the content your new audiences need before your competition and gain a competitive edge. That competitive edge will make you a content strategy hero in your organization. Don't you want to be a hero?

Conclusion

Without the solid foundations of a digital content marketing strategy, any small business will struggle to come up with a great content idea and deliver engaging, quality content to its target audience.

Your content marketing strategy must open your sales funnel to increased traffic in a way that both helps audiences solve a problem and helps you achieve your business goals.

No matter where you are in your company's content marketing strategy, revisit your goals and understanding of your audience to see if they are still in alignment with where you are currently spending your time and resources. If they're not, it may be a sign that your digital marketing program needs to change — for the better. Much of what we call marketing management is merely tweaking an underperforming marketing tactic to deliver more consistent results.

What will you do to be a better content marketer today? How will you incorporate social media monitoring into your marketing plan? Do you need help building or modifying a content marketing roadmap to meet your company's marketing goal? If so, consider contacting a Relevance strategist today to help you build out your digital marketing roadmap.

The post Roadmap for Creating Engaging and Effective Content appeared first on RELEVANCE.

Search engine optimization.

While SEO has been utilized throughout the for-profit industry for over 20 years, many nonprofits have not utilized the ability to get found in search.

That’s a huge missed opportunity.

If you find that your nonprofit is in this boat, here are 6 ways your nonprofit can begin optimizing your site to gain higher rankings, build more awareness, and increase funding.

1. Position yourself as a thought leader for the problem you solve

Audiences who want to learn more about a specific issue in their community or the world turn to search engines for answers. If you have great pieces of content that address this issue, you are far more likely to be found in search engines than if you simply have a brochure-ware site that only focuses on your organization.

By creating this issue-based content, you’re going to get the right audiences to your site and increase the likelihood of getting donations.

2. Identify the keywords that matter

When creating new content, it’s important to understand what your content is truly about. What specific query would someone search for to find your content? Is this keyword the same keyword you use in your content? This is where keyword research comes into play. Identify the keywords that best describe what your nonprofit does and the problems it solves. Look for keywords that fit your audience but also have a high enough search volume that they are worth your time.

From 919 Marketing’s Nonprofit SEO Guide.

In the example above, it makes more sense to focus on “car donation” than “vehicle donation” due to it having nearly 9x the search volume. In this example, we’re also assuming that both of these keywords have similar organic difficulty - a measure of how hard it is to rank organically for a specific keyword.

3. Transform stories into inbound articles

As a nonprofit, one of your biggest assets is the stories you can tell about how you are making an impact in the world. By combining this information with keyword targeting above, you can utilize keywords people are searching for and incorporate them into your stories.

For example, one of the highest-ranking pieces of content for the query “clean drinking water in Africa” is this story by The Water Project. By focusing even a bit on SEO, they are able to rank highly for this search term and gain new audiences.

4. Make sure your on-page SEO is on-point

Creating great content that engages audiences is only half of the battle. The other half is to get search engines to notice. This requires some technical guidance to make sure your on-page content is optimized for search.

Some of the most important aspects to remember:

1. Utilize your main keyword in your meta title and header (H1, H2, H3, etc.) tags
2. Create a meta description that sells  your content to potential audiences - it’s your elevator pitch in search results
3. Make sure your images have the appropriate alt text
4. Make sure your content loads quickly - Google loves a fast site
5. Break up your content into chunks so it’s easier for users and Google to navigate

5. Get .edu and .gov links when you can

Getting inbound links from authoritative sites is still a major ranking factor in Google searches.  Nonprofits often have an ace up their sleeve when it comes to getting authoritative links, as many are already working with schools or governmental agencies - which, in most cases, have high Domain Authorities. Simply asking for a link back to your nonprofit’s website from these organizations can result in a major boost for your site’s link profile, which will help all of your content in search rankings.

6. Don’t limit yourself to regular search engines

Google is obviously the largest search engine in the world.

Do you know what’s #2?

Not Bing.

Nor Yahoo!

Nor Facebook.

YouTube.

YouTube is the second biggest search engine in the world and is an amazing vehicle for nonprofits to reach potential audiences and share stories and their impact on the world. If you’re creating any videos, make sure that you are posting them on YouTube and optimizing them there as well. That extra exposure will help drive the development and awareness of your cause than simple blog posts sometimes can’t completely convey.

But wait, there’s more!

Our friends over at 919 Marketing made a great nonprofit SEO infographic as well with even more tips and tricks for nonprofits. 

The post 6 SEO Tips to Drive Awareness & Donations for Nonprofits (With Infographic) appeared first on RELEVANCE.

Unfortunately, no silver bullet exists for quickly and automatically elevating your company’s virtual properties up search results. Improving search visibility requires persistent effort and revolves around the following foundational questions:

• Who is my target audience?
• What topics does my target audience care about?
• What keywords will they use to hunt for this information?
• How do those keywords relate to what I do? Particularly, what is my market differentiator in this area?
• How can I create content that is 10x better than what currently ranks supreme?

Say you have answered these questions. Your content is optimized, informative, and tailored to your audience’s needs and the way they search for content. But, you are still not cracking the coveted top three search results. You are not alone. This all-too-common result reflects the reality that more brands are investing in content creation and, frankly, they are getting better at it.

Frequently, content doesn’t rank because it attempts to encroach on competitive territory that brands have staked a claim with excellent content long ago. You may try to amplify your content through social media, another important tool to attract traffic. However, the likelihood that branded content, especially about a niche topic, achieves virality is approximately nil.

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Is that enough bad news?

Well, here's good news. There’s hope for your content, whether you posted it a day, a year ago, or have yet to create it. When you earn backlinks, also known as inbound links, it signals to search engines that your content is credible, valuable, and worthy of a top spot in rankings.

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Inbound links are key to a successful search marketing strategy for your company, and as Moz’s SEO/Marketing Flywheel demonstrates, creates a virtuous cycle of results.

Step 1: Rank well in search

Step 2: People find your content in search and believe it is valuable

Step 3: People link to your content

Step 4: Your content ranks even HIGHER because of the backlinks

Step 5: Repeat steps 1-4

Improving search rankings with original research

But what about Step 0, actually getting your web properties to rank well in search?

Inbound links are a proven means of signaling to search engines that you have created quality content that people seek. However, dedicating resources to securing inbound links to an individual piece of content does not scale. You will spend significant time and money supporting a single marketing asset, a dubious strategy in a content landscape that demands both quality and quantity. Exacerbating the problem is that many brands rightfully focus on niche topics that have limited linking opportunities, meaning you may face diminishing returns.

However, if you take the same strategy discussed for a single post and dedicated it to your ENTIRE website, you will command greater Domain Authority. Moz coined the term Domain Authority to express the result of an involved formula that quantifies how well a website will rank within search results. A significant component to Domain Authority is getting high-value inbound links from trustworthy sites.

Original research has time and again proven among the most effective ways to earn links from those within your industry, including influencers and trade publications, as well as those outside of it like mainstream media outlets.

Earning links from media and respected sites is a boon to your brand. Google and other search engines care less about how many links you have to your site and more about the reputation of those linking to you. A major news outlet or blog with a high Domain Authority linking to your site will do more than links from a dozen dusty blogs built on a 1997 Angelfire template.

“By producing insightful research, brands create a unique pitch that sets them apart from the tidal wave of self-centered features that journalists typically receive and ignore,” says David Chapman, CEO of a franchise PR agency. “The sharing of proprietary information about emerging industry trends, for example, entices publications to not only cover your story but to link back to the research. It’s a win-win for your public relations and search marketing.”

Getting started with original research

Before you start sending out surveys, you will need to put on your detective cap. Many brands, such as Lyft, RedFin, and Allstate, have used the insights and data that they have to provide unique insights for years. Instead of competing directly against brands that have already carved out a niche with original research, you can look for a new, unique angle that will interest media and your audience.

If you’re having trouble identifying a good angle for your brand research, consider examining disruptive trends that are having a wide-ranging impact. For example, how is your industry integrating the next wave of technology (virtual reality, artificial intelligence, or the Internet of things) into its offerings? How has the rise in veganism impacted menu offerings at restaurant chains? What effect have nap spaces in workplaces had on efficiency and employee well-being?

Consider researching an evergreen topic that you can update on a quarterly or annual basis. For example, the Content Marketing Institute has released an annual report every year since 2010. Common evergreen topics include analyses of the overall economic impact of a specific industry, trends in industry salaries, and the growth or decline of jobs in the industry.

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Doing the research

Once you’ve identified what research will resonate with media, industry stakeholders, and your target audience, you can begin collecting the data. Like the Lyft, RedFin, and Allstate examples mentioned previously, you can rely on your data, if you have a representative sample. Or, you can seek out the additional data using tools such as:

• Google Surveys: target specific demographics without needing their contact information
• Survey Monkey: leverage your existing contacts to uncover insights

If you are tight on time and man hours but have a sizeable budget, you can also hire a survey research firm. Their expertise and experience can be invaluable and may be worth the investment.

Don’t forget to reward the individuals providing the data, especially if you are leveraging your own contacts. Not only will it engender warm feelings toward your brand, it will compel more people to participate. If you can’t afford a $5 gift card to a coffeehouse for every participant, consider having a raffle for one big prize, such as a tablet or wearable.

Once you have the research...

1. Find what’s interesting

Now that you have the data, it’s time to analyze it, identify key findings, and contextualize it into exciting stories. Remember, numbers often don’t tell the whole story. If you find a significant shift within your industry, use your in-house expertise to explain why it is taking place and its potential long-term impact. Not only does this bring the story to life, it makes your brand more credible and opens up media opportunities.

2. Create the content

Before you start to put together a lengthy white paper summarizing your findings, you must weigh two factors equally:

• How does your audience prefer to consume content?

In some instances, brands will publish a single report that summarizes the findings of a national or international industry. For example, the Edelman Trust Barometer is an elegant piece of research that informs about multiple industries in countries around the world.

On the other hand, RedFin and Lyft often break their research down to trends in particular cities, garnering media attention from many local outlets. Outside of geography, you may determine it valuable to focus on a particular function or demographic.

The choice about the type of report you put together will come down to your data, the story, your audience, and your goals.

• What format lends best to the story you’re trying to tell?

No matter your audience, simply putting text on a page will not have the optimal impact. You should consider infographics and videos that will help amplify the content on social and attract the attention of reporters. (More about pitching reporters in a minute.)

Also, your brand will have invested significant resources into this research. You need to make it last. Repurpose your content by breaking down the report into blog posts that tackle one aspect of the report at a time. Pepper your social media profiles with facts and graphs throughout the year. In doing so, you will wring every cent of value out of your original research.

Using original research to pitch reporters

To maximize your efforts and to earn backlinks that enhance search visibility, put a PR pitch behind your outreach. Identify the standout storylines that the data reveals, and then pitch the publications that will reach one of your target audiences.

Don’t forget, pitching no longer means reaching out just to journalists and news outlets. Consider the influencers in your industry who will find this research compelling. They might post about your work directly or use it to inform something else they are working on. Either way, your brand gets exposure and an inbound link from a prominent site.

Whether a journalist or influencer, be sure to provide them with eye-catching visuals as well as a link to an overview page with the stats that matter most. The eye-catching visuals will help your pitch stand out and make the content they create more compelling. By creating an overview page, you give them a natural place to link to from their content.

These important links are where the magic happens – it is the secret sauce that makes everything taste better. Even one or two major pickups will drive a ton of traffic to your site and improve your website’s Domain Authority. Not only will your content rank better, so will your entire domain – including all of your past content pieces as well as all that you will produce in the future.

Soon enough, each piece of content you create will start at Step 1 of the SEO/marketing flywheel. And that’s when your content marketing and SEO initiatives will drive greater and greater bottom-line value for your organization.

However, remember that the marketing mountain has no peak. As you elevate your brand, you will find your competitors nipping at your heels to move into the spotlight (or top 3 ranking in Google results). Sustained success requires persistance and innovation. Continue to learn and tweak your approach, always on the look out for opportunities to improve and new angles to explore.

Finally, remember to celebrate your successes along the way. Successful content marketing is hard work, and every back link earned, each small win, can serve as energy to keep you going on this journey.

The post Link Building Secret Sauce: Original Research appeared first on RELEVANCE.

There are influencers in every industry niche and trade. These influencers help shape buying decisions and are seen as trusted sources for content. From editors of top-tier publications to independent bloggers, they all consistently reach an audience with which they’ve developed trust. By getting their attention and having them help tell your story, you can reach their audiences and develop awareness and trust in your brand.

Reaching out to influencers has traditionally been a PR practice. However, as barriers come down between paid, earned and owned channels, marketers are now finding that influencer marketing is a necessary part of any content marketing effort.

Finding influencers

Whether it’s selling shoes or making surgical equipment, there are influencers in your space that people are engaging with every day. You probably know of some off the top of your head. But there are also dozens, if not hundreds, more that you may not be aware of. Followerwonk, Kred, and Klout are free tools that allow you to search for influencers in social media. Media databases like Cision offer comprehensive information on influencers, journalists, bloggers, and outlets, and enable you to target mainstream and social media influencers at the same time.

When searching for influencers, pay close attention to what they are writing and which topics seem to resonate with them. Also, look at the demographics of their followers. Are their followers truly your target demographic? If not, they might not be the right influencer to pitch.

Pitching

Once you’ve identified your influencers, it’s time to pitch them. The art of pitching influencers is truly that—an art. Do your research on what each influencer is writing about and what his interests are. Don’t send mass emails expecting recipients to pick up your content. Instead, personalize your pitch and give them a reason to want to run your content. Mentioning previous articles they’ve written and crafting your pitch to show the value your content will bring to their readers will increase your likelihood of getting your content picked up.

Provide supporting content

Boost your chances of getting your story picked up by providing supporting content that influencers can use “out of the box” such as multimedia or statistics from a study that you’ve done. Infographics seem a bit cliche in 2014, but they are still a great way to convey information in an easy and digestible manner that takes very little work from the influencer themselves to put up.

Be newsworthy, or at least interesting

Influencers are trying to get people interested in what they publish, so think about what content will be newsworthy and draw an audience for them. Knowing their audience and demographics can help you customize content that fits their, and your, needs.

Build relationships

Pitching influencers is just one part of the bigger picture when it comes to earned media. Building true relationships with influencers in your industry will pay off in the long run with more coverage of your stories, more pick-up of your content, and more exposure of your brand to your target audience. Don’t just leverage them to tell your story, but help them tell theirs. When they run into issues, help them by directing them to resources that you know of - even if those resources have nothing to do with your brand. Be their partner when you can.

It’s all about paid, owned and earned media

The integrated media model is here to stay, and if you’re only paying attention to paid and owned media, you’re missing a major opportunity to expose new audiences to your brand in a trustworthy manner. As content and influencer marketing continue to set roots deep into marketing organizations, those companies that blend integrated media campaigns most effectively will rise to the top.

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