What is content marketing?

Why is a content marketing strategy important?

Creating a strategy that’s suited to your specific business and target audience is how you stay true to your brand and make marketing materials as effective as possible. It’s important to evaluate every asset for the value it adds to the strategy as a whole, and
then make adjustments as needed. A 360-degree content marketing strategy educates customers, nurtures prospects and closes sales.

B2C v B2B content marketing

Content marketing applications are industry-agnostic. Regardless of target market, geography, language or product, companies have to publicize their message and form a connection with customers.

In general, B2C is characterized by a heavier reliance on consumer-centric social media platforms, ecommerce websites, mobile-friendliness and shorter-form assets. Sales cycles are shorter and user expectations are extremely high.

Learn more about B2C marketing

Conversely, B2B content marketers typically make greater use of LinkedIn, long-form collateral, account-based strategies and niche audience development. Sales cycles can take months or years, and customers may have million-dollar RFPs.

Learn more about B2B marketing

What does a content marketing manager do?

A content marketing manager is the quarterback of your content marketing investments. They devise the strategy, support its execution, facilitate the publication and distribution of assets, measure performance metrics and report on analytics.

They are uniquely positioned to make a large impact on the success of your efforts and are tasked with turning the marketing team into its own revenue center.

Learn more about this important role here: Everything you need to know about content marketing managers.

Quantity vs quality

Search engine algorithms are now better at identifying content quality than even the engineers who wrote the algorithms, according to Google. As such, the quantity vs quality debate isn’t really a debate worth having for marketers.

The goal of every piece of content you create is to make a connection with a human reader, listener or viewer. Some enterprise companies who have the scale and reach to do so can post online several times a day. The average marketer, however, may create and publish content once or twice a week.

The biggest thing to remember about content marketing, though, is that volume is not a metric that search engines measure, and it may not be one that consumers care about. On the other hand, marketers have traffic and conversion quotas to meet, and a higher volume of content can help hit those milestones. Balancing those internal data benchmarks with the actual value you’re providing to users is where your content marketing managers enters the equation.

They should have a discerning eye for what’s needed and what’s overkill. 

Some of the best-ranking sites, like Backlinko, publish only once a month, if that. Yet they rank highly for every keyword they target – quantity is not an important metric for them.

Drawing that line at your company can help marketers design more strategic campaigns and keep all stakeholders apprised of the underlying objectives they’re hoping to achieve.

The goal of every piece of
content you create is to make a
connection with a human reader,
listener or viewer.

Building content marketing workflows

Although every business inevitably works in its own way, your marketing programs should stick to dedicated protocols due to the number of steps and stakeholders involved. Companies working with vendors, contractors, freelancers, temporary staff or other types of external parties will especially benefit from organized workflows and milestones.

Another consideration is software and its potential integrations. With project management apps, content delivery APIs, file hosting platforms and various forms of chat messaging channels, making all of these systems work together cohesively is key to marketing uptime and content quality.

Generally, starting with your goals and working backward is a successful, measurable track to take. Here’s a sketch of what that might look like:

1. Set objectives for a defined period of time.
2. Determine which stage(s) of the funnel will produce agreed-upon goals.
3. Decide which distribution channels will best serves those stages.
4. Qualify which types of content will best serve the target audience in question.
5. Quantify how much content is needed.
6. Identify internal or external resources capable of creating content under this strategy and timeframe.
7. Measure baseline analytics before a campaign begins.
8. Track real-time performance metrics and benchmark them against your baseline and your end goal.
9. Make content, distribution or strategy adjustments as needed.
10. Finalize the end of the campaign and report of end result.

The distinct workflows on an asset-by-asset level may vary, as a blog article takes fewer hands and less time than an on-location video shoot, for example. That said, the content marketing manager will be the central vehicle driving deadlines, handoffs and quality.

Practitioners of agile methodology may adhere to a sprint-based workflow, working in short bursts to produce large batches of coordinated content. Other types of workflows may be more linear, with departments working one at a time like an assembly line – known as waterfall.

Depending on the scale of your campaigns and the resources you have in play, you may need dozens of marketing assets in the works at a single time and multiple people managing the scheduling, collaboration and approval of each stage of those assets. Any micro-delay can lead to missed quotas.

To keep the full scope of your workflow on the rails, consider using:

• A single project management software for all departments and vendors.
• User-friendly video conferencing tools.
• Collaborative file-sharing and file-editing.
• Clear metrics, benchmarks and milestones.

Unified communications systems, which merge martech tools and functions into a simplified suite, are ideal for more complex omnichannel workflows.

How long does it take for content marketing to show ROI?

Return on investment can be tracked, analyzed and reported in a number of ways – and no two companies do it the same way.

After more than a decade delivering real results to our clients, we’ve found that a general rule of thumb to follow is: Content marketing takes about 6 months to begin showing true ROI.

As such, content marketing is a long-term investment. Which is a good thing because, just like personal wealth, it compounds and builds over time. As long as your website and social feeds remain active, you have a comprehensive catalog of pages drawing traffic every single second. The better your content is, the more likely it is to generate higher ROI.

We’ve also discovered that it can take at least 100 days (or about 3 months) for your content to “fully mature” in the eyes of search engines. You can’t publish a blog post one day and expect immediate gains the next. Search engine algorithms must crawl your pages, parse through enormous amounts of code, assess the quality of your content and index those pages in SERPs for the appropriate searchers. 

This process does not happen overnight. Google may rank your blog post in position 3 on day 10, but then position 12 a few weeks later – and vice versa. This volatility is Google’s way of finalizing just how valuable your web pages are to searchers and where in SERPs they should be featured.

After the 100-day mark, you can safely assume that those pages have “matured” and settled into a more concrete, predictable SERP position.

With this in mind, setting appropriate expectations within your company is key, as some stakeholders may demand quick wins or scientifically unrealistic goals. As your programs begin to show results, track their performance milestones and optimize subsequent content marketing investments accordingly. It may turn out you’re posting too many infographics and not enough videos, or you should focus on acquiring more backlinks and not more social likes.