How to Develop a Content Strategy Process (for your blog)

Brian Solis writes about a new age for social media marketing. To me, static and often stale Web sites have been in dire need of evolution for a long time. Content formats shared in social media and networks suit the way we evaluate, talk, and socialize our decisions about products and services better, at this stage.

Although we all know that it's still very early days. We're trying to retrofit how we think and organize our knowledge, recombining and building on information, as well as out humanness, in a medium that has a long way to go on mapping to either one. Content comes close, but only when it's activated with engagement.

Just like TV didn't kill radio, the company Web site still plays an important role in the digital marketing mix. Razorfish highlighted the importance of Web content to provide experiences in their 2008 FEED report.

Instead of building a site around an organization chart, which in many ways mirrors the company's hierarchy, we should build the context around customer needs in two areas of browsing:

(1) search - for answers
(2) sharing - of stories

These two desires and functions are the bread and butter of blogs, where more recent, or shared trump content win. Plus, blogs help with the relationship thing in ways that Web sites don't - by humanizing the interaction with your company through conversation and relationship building.

Blogs

As Brian writes, based upon MarketingSherpa benchmark survey, social media marketing has reached a level of maturity that allows us to focus our efforts more strategically in those areas that provide the greatest results to the business. One such area, especially for B2B companies, continues to be blogs.

This is both good and bad news. It's good news because B2B companies historically tend to have smaller marketing budgets, and blogs, from a purely monetary angle, tend to cost less than big media placements. It's bad news because B2Bs tend to have smaller marketing teams and fewer resources allocated to original content creation compared to lead generation for direct and indirect sales. 

Time and resources are the most challenging parts in developing a blog and social media content strategy. This was also the consensus in a recent survey and post by Lee Odden at TopRankBlog. Among the challenges, as reported in the post, are:

• knowing what to write about
• maintaining a consistent flow of good content
• setting the right tone for the company and the readers
• figuring out how to overcome legal and regulatory constraints
• being able to rely on the security of a good hosting company and tool
• identifying a theme to focus on, given broad offerings or a complex brand
• having the technical knowledge to appeal to the readers/titles the company wants to attract

These are some of the issues agencies and internal teams bump into. To me, the content part is the responsibility of the company. For a blog to be effective, it needs to come across as genuine. It's easy to get sidetracked by a thousand commitments at work.

Knowing how to manage your time and where you want to go are helpful. The most helpful to all is a process to keep you on track and get you there.

Process

Marketing strategy in hand, you need first to determine the role blogs will play within that - what's you blog's purpose? Your vision may change over time, however you need to make clarity on this point to get started.

Regardless of whether your business faces regulatory constraints, find a way to raise above the specific product or service view of the world internal teams usually have. Instead, look broader at industry challenges, issues, and conversations. What kind of leadership or guidance will you provide?

For an example of good execution, look to GSK's healthcare blog [hat tip, Neville Hobson]. The blog gained momentum thanks to solid planning and consistency. If they can do it, you can, too.

Other ideas to help you build your process:

• get in a room with legal, regulatory, and HR and iron worst case scenario: agree on the process you'll engage in that case, and remember to ask "how can we do this?" instead of "can we do this?" This needs to be part of your content process to formulate disclosures

• identify and enroll a roster of people passionate about their subject matter expertise: this could be writing about issues the industry faces, in the case of a communicator, all the way to getting into the technical aspects of service delivery, depending on your goals

• develop an editorial calendar based upon an observed need in your industry (that also pays off your expertise and value): this could be thinking about a new point of view not pursued by other companies that fits with your brand and knowledge and will help you gain visibility and establish tone and personality

• support your team of contributors by providing ongoing coaching and intelligence: this ranges from stats about the blogs, to topics and conversations they may have missed that are a fit, providing data, visuals, and integration with your other social media outposts

• find ways to socialize your content with internal teams: we're social animals and your teams are the most in the know about the issues and challenges of the day. Plus, they also read industry information as part of their jobs

• think a tiered content contribution if you can support one blog, but aim at attracting buyers in different roles/levels: high level and future trends to all the way in the technical weeds. As long as the dots are connected throughout, this approach may work well for you

• consider mixing it up once you establish a regular cadence of posting: the unexpected and novel continues to be a good attractor. Think things like guest posts, special video interviews, deeper dives on content, fun moments when appropriate

What else?

What have I missed or overlooked? What would you do differently? How do you go about your content strategy process?

© 2006-2010 Valeria Maltoni. All rights reserved.

Comments

[KatFrench]

I think this is a great article, but since you asked what you missed or overlooked... I think forums and message boards are still hugely important.

My most active B2B client (an OEM) works in an industry where their customers (retailers) are struggling with issues of misunderstanding and misinformation regarding their product. And the vast majority of the consumer conversation about their product goes on in forums (over 90%, based on our monitoring tools).

Developing a content strategy for forums is different than it is for blogs. It's more like developing an evolving and customized set of FAQs. You find yourself answering the same set of questions, just to different communities.

Anyway, that's my small contribution. :)

[heyrobertdavis]

Like this post - though I can't help but feel it's more specifically about a content strategy for blogging... and leaves aside the greater role of a content strategy, especially for B2B, in terms of how content will support a consumer buying process that includes active use of social media by the buyer. As plenty of research now shows (see IDG Connect, etc.) buyers use different forms of social media differently in different stages of their buying process, have different expectations of what kind of content will be offered/linked to, and which voices they will hear in the content (vendor, customer, 3d party, etc.)

We see this as the ultimate role of content strategy in social media for our B2B clients, and are doing our best to acquaint our clients with the knowledge to make really informed choices as to both the production of social-ready content, as well as the content of social interactions themselves (to the extent that they can be guided by broad themes, to varying degree by social channel.)

Thanks for your good thinking on this, Valeria.

[Valeria Maltoni]

@Kat - thank you for the addition. Leaving room for the rest of you brainy people to add from your smarts. Funny thing is I was thinking blogs because they're such a no brainer for many businesses.

@Robert - you're right! Can you tell I'm very focused on blogs? Thank you for expanding our thinking into more directions. I wrote the post in one breath without rereading the title and missed that I was narrowing down.

[Jay Ferrari]

A challenge with which we still contend in almost every social-media component pitch is simply getting people comfortable with participation. It's not even hand-holding; it's more like a fireman's carry. We get people comfortable with the idea that their expertise is worth sharing, and that they have the skills (and now the outlet) to share it. It's never a problem getting people to believe that they are experts, but applying that knowledge and making it the backbone of a good social media outreach effort? Huge.

One of the best ways we encourage epiphany is by explaining that most folks already readily share their insights and ideas. When you mutter at the newspaper or TV, when you hand a magazine article to a co-worker or share a link, you almost always preface it with "check this out, brilliant" or "wait until you read this baloney." Those opinions are rooted in perspective, and you simply need to recognize that impulse and translate it into the action of creating your content. When we spell it out like that, I see the light bulbs go on throughout the room.

[Kristina Halvorson]

Hi Valeria,

Great post on blog content strategy. But, like Robert, I'm pretty concerned about the title of this article. We struggle with our clients mistaking channels for strategies: i.e. "Our strategy is to distribute content across blogs, Twitter, and Facebook."

A strategy is a plan to achieve a specific goal or objective. A blog is a channel for sharing content. In fact, all social media outlets are simply channels for sharing branded content.

If that content is conceived and created in a silo apart from the organization's other content channels, it opens the door for inconsistent messaging, irrelevant content for current target audiences, and so on.

All that said, the definition of "content strategy" is being discussed and defined in a variety of communities right now--user experience designers, marketers, publishers, social media planners, and more. Everyone is going to have a unique focus. An organization's enterprise content strategy defines business objectives and user goals--what are we trying to DO with our content--prior to determining the best channels for sharing.

There's an ever-growing international community of content professionals duking it out over all this: http://groups.google.com/group/contentstrategy

Thanks again for a great post.

[Valeria Maltoni]

@Jay - well, I had a very nice comment written up until TypePad went down. Let's see if I remember it (darn unreliable tool). That's where I focus my training and coaching. Learning to be comfortable with establishing and maintaining a presence through content authoring and sharing. Good tips on drawing parallels. Although I would caution you that sometimes they go all the way to the other side and become too loose, water-cooler loose.

@Kristina - many companies don't have a business strategy, that's why the obsession with marketing strategy. to me you have one business strategy, which marketing pays off in different media. Thank you for the tip on content professionals community. I'll check it out.

[Rinaldi Syahran]

hi Valeria,
good article anyway. The post about how to develop a content strategy process is cool.You review about time and resources to develop a blog and the process of it base marketing strategy.I think, if someone want to develop his/her blog suggest not to manipulating link. Manipulating link can make your blog look like bad base on search engine.

[Jon Buscall]

I think you're spot on when it comes to static business sites not cutting it and blog-drive sites being able to put the customer in focus.

As you rightly note, the big problem here is resources. It's all very well identifying that "daily updates" are the right strategy to take but then you have to have the resources and writers to produce that. Quality blog content is not something bashed out over the morning coffee.

How do we get this message out to businesses? Those of us working in this kind of space get it, but how do we put our message across to those who haven't been able to figure it out yet?

[Valeria Maltoni]

Jon,

Make them do it :) The world is filled with people who fly in, poo-poo all over everything, and fly out. The more grandiose the idea, the less of a chance they lifted a finger to do it themselves. No hustle, no gain.

[ibagrak]

My experience has always been: "why don't we start a blog, and why don't you contribute", and I don't think that's a viable strategy since for the contributors it boils down to doing something extra that they have no incentive to do. Once it starts it's also very difficult to keep it going, since the level of motivation varies greatly in the organization, and it's hard to do a recurring task that requires creativity.

Forums are great too, and they can be an avenue for rallying your customers to be your spokespeople. It doesn't work for all products, and it's difficult to manage, but if your product is at the right maturity level, it can be very effective for building the right image in collaboration with your customer base.