Why You Should Be All in with Your Content Marketing Strategy

Content marketing, even if you’re not the one executing the work, is a major investment of your time, energy and resources. A company can’t just hire an agency and say, “Hey, go ahead and launch this thing and report back on it in a month.” It doesn’t work that way.

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There are so many things to consider when it comes down to planning and executing a content marketing strategy, but here are three considerations to whet your whistle.

Money

Let’s go ahead and start with the topic no one likes to talk about. Money. The Content Marketing Institute found that the most successful B2B marketers spend 40 percent of their total marketing budget on content marketing, and the most successful B2C marketers spend 26 percent. That’s a pretty penny. And in today’s world of blogging and social media, you often have to put your money where your mouth is if you want the traction you’re looking for. You may have to pay to amplify your content, pay influencers to further support your message, pay an agency or third party to create content and maybe even pay for a content management or customer relationship management tool like Hubspot to help manage your inbound funnel (if that’s part of your strategy).

Time

There is a ramp-up period for most projects, and for a content marketing strategy, the same rules apply. It takes time to create the framework, then it takes ongoing time to manage the framework. You don’t just build a house then walk away. You have to decorate, repair, live in it and start all over. There is a certain amount of frequency required to really make an impact. Did you know that according to HubSpot, companies that published 16 or more blog posts a month got almost 3.5 times more traffic and 4.5 times more leads than companies that published four or less posts a month? To make a dent, you need the time to create good content (check out this #AskJon video that takes a stand on time investment being one of the main reasons your content marketing strategy is failing).

Staffing

Your content marketing program can be the most boot-strapped, shoe-stringed operation around, but if you don’t have the human capital to develop, publish and monitor the thing, what’s the point? It takes more than one person to run a content marketing strategy. You need someone to write the content, and often times you need a subject matter expert to provide you with the basis of a piece of content. Then you need to publish, promote and amplify. At Hodges, that kind of work is a two- to four-person account team.

With these considerations in mind, to be successful, your strategy should be a collaborative effort. There is a cyclical process among the various hands involved, and it is constant and evolving. Having strong communication amongst the team to set deadlines, goals and objectives is key. And having the trust in each other that everyone is doing their part also is an ingredient to long-term success.

Casey Prentice

A self-proclaimed organizational junkie and data geek who confesses to a secret desire to be a professional organizer, Casey enjoys account management, writing, editing and digital content strategy. Her agency work has helped clients like Virginia’s Community Colleges, VCUarts and Swedish Match.

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