Content marketing is the art of consistently building relationships with your top prospects through generous, empathetic education. If you excel at this, you can take full advantage of all other marketing disciplines. Without this, consistently effective marketing is impossible.
Excelling at your own content marketing is exceptionally difficult. It is, truly, the most difficult part of marketing. We intimately understand both the critical importance and seemingly impossible challenge of creating and maintaining a thriving content marketing practice in your firm, and we have made a business out of solving this complex problem. Our approach is a careful mix of pattern-based insights born from our deep industry experience, and a custom approach based on the subtleties of who your firm is, who you serve, and the situation you’re in.
There is not a one-size-fits-all solution, but there is always a solution. We can do this, but you have to be right there in the thick of it with us, and you have to want it at least as badly as we do. That’s a tall order.
We affect this change inside of your firm in three ways: Initial Content Strategy Definition, Monthly Content Coaching, and, for firms who need it, Content Creation.
Content Strategy Definition
Our approach addresses the two most challenging aspects of content marketing today:
- Implementing a system that allows you to consistently produce the right volume of content in the right format, no matter how busy the rest of your work schedule is
- Ensuring your content delivers a profound point of view that captures the attention of your most highly qualified prospects, and is not lost among the sea of generic content flooding the web today
We begin by carefully defining your target audience segments and using those insights to meaningfully inform a messaging strategy tailored to those prospects at various stages of the buying cycle. We teach you how to choose smart, novel, detailed topic ideas that bring your most informed, seasoned perspective to the surface in a way that is discoverable and memorable to your audiences. Together, we create a specific topic library full of ideas that embody your expertise in a way your prospects need to hear it.
Next, we build a detailed editorial plan that enables your team to consistently deliver your smartest thinking. This involves identifying your core content marketing team and specifically defining their roles and responsibilities. We choose content types that not only align with your experts’ various communication styles but also support the objectives of the content marketing strategy. And we pull it all together in a matrix that documents all the details of your content marketing plan, including your personas, buy cycle stages, content platforms, writers, delivery dates for email blasts, and writing deadlines. This plan isn’t an editorial calendar; it’s a time-based, structured system for managing the production of content.
Monthly Content Coaching
Having a smart editorial plan is not enough to see success with content marketing. You need to know if your content is delivering a meaningful point of view. You need to be held accountable to your publication schedule. You need insight into what’s driving results and what’s not, and why.
You need a coach.
Our monthly content coaching program ensures your continued momentum and success with content marketing. Your content coach becomes the lead strategist, editor, and administrator of your content strategy. Each month, we create your content production and promotion schedule, lead your monthly editorial meetings and topic ideation sessions, manage your content team’s production deadlines, edit all of your content, structure it for SEO, and regularly report on the efficacy of your published content within the context of the goals we set at the beginning of each quarter.