My answer is that content marketing’s influence permeates all aspects of the sales process throughout the buyers’ journey, though it may not always be obvious.

With so much information available online, buyers are spending more time researching and becoming more informed before any conversation with a salesperson. Experts disagree on how much of the buying process occurs before a sales touch (some studies estimate between 50% and 70%), however but they do agree that interactions with sales are still a hugely important influencer during the buying process.

This means that before a lead ever speaks to a sales rep, he or she has likely engaged with content on one of your channels. Your prospect has likely taken a visit to your website, read an email, seen your posts on social media, heard a presentation at an event, or experienced your brand through any number of your channels.

Sometimes a lead will discover and access content on their own; other times sales will direct a lead’s attention to relevant content. Content marketing and sales shouldn’t operate as completely separate spheres operationally because there’s so much crossover in practice. Content marketing and sales work in tandem to attract relevant leads and helps those leads arrive at a purchasing decision.

To help attract, convert, and retain customers at every stage of the sales funnel, you should align your content strategy to the buyer’s journey, from discovery and consideration through evaluation and decision–and beyond.

Content Marketing Buyers’ Journey: Discovery

The companies that rely on content marketing the most are high-consideration products or services with longer sales cycles. Discovery to purchase isn’t meant to take place within a few minutes or even a few days. But providing great content opportunities where the prospect can engage more deeply sets the stage for a consultative sales process.

Let’s start where your prospect starts–with discovery. If a prospect’s first interaction is with your website, it is likely that they got there via search. And if they started via search, they are beginning with a specific intention, such as looking for a solution to a problem or more information about a specific issue. The intent at this stage is informational and is often self-directed, that is, without the intervention of the demand gen or sales teams.

The company blog is often the first digital touchpoint for search traffic. Therefore, content on this dynamic area of your website should be highly targeted, relevant, and timely. A blog should primarily seek to educate, inspire, and help. Essentially, it’s a relationship building channel and its purpose is to lay the groundwork for future conversations that will lead to revenue.

A heavy-handed approach (read: lots of self-serving sales messages, aggressive retargeting, or too many annoying popups) can be counterproductive on your blog. A prospect can be easily turned-off because they feel “pushed” to take action instead of “pulled.”

Additionally, social media content is also a prevalent discovery channel. More specifically, amplification by macro or micro peers and influencers can be a very effective first line of interest. The “discovery” of your brand comes with the context or even the endorsement of someone they know.

Content Marketing Buyers’ Journey: Consideration

Once a prospect understands who you are and what you’re about, they’ll begin to explore how you might help them solve a problem. For example, when reading Curata’s blog, any visitor would instantly know that we play in the content marketing space because we cover topics related to those issues and opportunities. But to get more specific about what we do, we’d have to lead them to content that specifically communicates how we help our customers.

At this point, prospects are typically still engaging with content (not sales) to understand the basics of what your company can do for them. Once your prospect has consumed this content, sales can more readily have next-level conversations when they get leads on the phone. Used in this way, content marketing is helping to create a more efficient sales funnel. However, that comes with a big “if;” success at this step can only come if the content effectively communicates who the company is, why they exist, and what they have to offer.

Most B2B companies have a “Solutions” area of their website. But often this messaging can be overly complex or not differentiated enough for a prospect to get a clear understanding of what a company actually does. If sales has to spend a precious call clarifying basic concepts and clearing up misconceptions, that’s wasted time and goodwill that could have been spent guiding a lead further down the buyer’s journey.

Great consideration content doesn’t begin and end with your “solutions” section, however. Having strong “leave behind” sales enablement content that a sales team can utilize in their follow-ups reinforces the key messages that a sales rep may introduce during a discovery call or a product demo. This kind of content helps your company frame the sales discussion even if no one from your team is in the room. Imagine that content–be it a link, video, or even a guide–being shared by a potential customer with his or her boss and peers.  

Content Marketing Buyers’ Journey: Evaluation

The line between consideration content and evaluation content can sometimes be a bit fuzzy. My rule of thumb is that during the consideration phase, a lead or opportunity is seeking to understand what your company does and which problems you solve. During the evaluation stage, they are seeking to understand how well your solution might work for them.

There’s a lot of variation amongst B2B companies in terms of how much evaluation content they should make publicly available, i.e., what can be published on their website versus what is exclusively in sales enablement materials. Some companies don’t like to make too much publicly available because of competitive or intellectual property issues. Regardless of where this information lives, evaluation content is crucial not just for making the sale, but in setting expectations for your post-sale relationship.

Evaluation content needs to be specific and clear to avoid misconceptions. Though these materials should be well-designed and clearly communicated (like everything else you do), substance over style rules the day in this instance. Some examples of evaluation content might be descriptions of integrations, competitive comparisons, and case studies.

A note about case studies: often companies think of case studies and testimonials interchangeably. I think there are some important distinctions. A testimonial is essentially an endorsement of your company by someone in a specific role at a specific company. Often testimonials are on your website where someone in the consideration stage can see a person like them having success with your product. Testimonials are typically short and sweet.

A case study, by contrast, should be much, much more specific. Good case studies detail what the company did, how they did it, the role your solution played, and what the outcomes were. True case studies are intended for the evaluation and/or decision making stages.

Third Party Content

When it comes to evaluation stage, another opportunity to consider is where the prospect is sourcing their information. A company website may be a primary source, but it’s certainly not the only one. Review sites, long part of the ecommerce world, have begun to make a big impact in B2B. G2Crowd, TrustRadius, and GetApp are just a few examples of peer-to-peer review sites that your prospects may check to get the unvarnished truth. And, of course, expert review sources such as Forrester’s Wave Report or Gartner’s Magic Quadrant can help buyers verify any preconceptions or claims.

Being proactive about the content that appears on those sites is a great way to build positive consensus on your product or service. Asking successful customers to leave reviews and addressing negative ones can help you manage your company’s reputation. Additionally, developing relationships with the big consulting houses is certainly a long-term strategy, but can one that can certainly payoff.

Content Marketing Buyers’ Journey: Decision

In the decision stage, victory is close, but it is far from certain. The buyer is now seeking to understand if the cost of your product or service is worth the price. They need to have a reasonable expectation of what their gains will be and what is included in their costs. The price of the product is just one factor. They also need to understand their internal costs for launching, integrating, and maintaining your product.

A healthy relationship between your content marketing and your customer success organizations can help you create content that answers these questions and supports the decision phase. This content helps the buyer understand what resources they will have access to and what they can expect post-sale.

For example, resources that describe training and adoption plans, educational tools, peer-to-peer networks, and even technical implementation will give the buyer confidence that this isn’t your company’s first rodeo. Planning templates that outline the steps your primary buyer will have to take can be especially helpful.

Content Marketing Buyers’ Journey: Retention

After the sale closes, many marketers forget about customer retention. But content marketing can play a big role in supporting customer retention, too. If your company continues to provide information and resources that speak deeply to the needs and interests of your customers, it will keep that relationship strong and support the value they get out of your product or service. Building trust isn’t a one-time activity; it needs to be continuous, especially in subscription-based business models. 

Though the focus tends to be at the top of the funnel, content marketing is influential at every stage of the customer relationship. Your content is more than what you put on your website; it’s present in every interaction your company has with your customers.

1. Discover Hidden Backlink Opportunities

This post from the Portent blog is a great how-to resource for discovering great backlink building or co-marketing opportunities hidden in your Google Analytics

You should know the channels that drive tons of leads…While that’s great information, your boss will probably also know what’s obviously working. What we want are traffic sources that are unsung heroes in your marketing mix.

See Also: Content Marketing Moneyball: The Secret Strategy to Data-Driven Content Success

2. Content Gap Analysis

Before you finalize your 2018 content plan, it’s crucial to do a content gap analysis first according to a recent post on Search Engine Journal. (Plus, we think our Content Marketing Platform is pretty handy tool for helping you do just that.)

It doesn’t matter how many visitors you drive to your website if you don’t have the right content and user experience in place to optimize for conversion. This is why it’s essential to not only conduct a website gap analysis but a full content audit.

See Also: How to Conduct a Content Audit

3. Podcasting’s ‘Super Listeners’

This post from the Knight Foundation could be a masterclass in persona research. The most engaged podcast listeners prefer their content to be asynchronous, mobile, and niche. And they’ll also tell you about it—super listeners are big boosters of the podcasts they love.

This active audience is incredibly mobile: 93% say they listen to podcasts via smartphone, with 84% indicating that is their primary means of listening to podcasts.

See Also: A Content Marketer’s Guide to Podcasting

4. Audience-Centric Content Strategy

The folks over at Moz recommend creating a content strategy that starts with customer pain points and your unique value proposition and then layers a keyword strategy over that framework

Moving away from a keyword-first-driven content strategy and into an audience-centric one will put you in a better place for creating SEO content that converts. Don’t get me wrong — there’s still an important place for keyword research. But it belongs later in the process, after you’ve performed a deep dive into your audience and your own brand expertise.

See Also: SEO Survival Guide

5. It’s Time for Creative to Retake Center Stage

This post from Marketing Land is specific to the advertising industry but has learnings for us content marketers as well. In a sea of digital noise, focus on creating highly relevant, highly useful experiences that are a pleasure for your audience. More isn’t necessarily better; better is better.

But somewhere along the line, the problem of how to distribute the message became more important than the message itself. Creative now takes a back seat to the media plan.

See Also: The Two Best Secrets to Writing Brain-Craving Content

1. Google Search Algorithm Explainer

If you have a hard time keeping Panda, Penguin, and Pigeon straight, Brafton’s handy infographic is a good primer.

Modern SEO attempts to establish high relevance in as many of Google’s ranking criteria as possible. What’s important to understand is that those criteria have changed since 2015, and SEO has changed with them. More than ever, they err on the side of quality [content].

See Also: Eight SEO experiments you can run using your website and search analytics for content marketing superpowers.

2. Lies My CMO Told Me

In MarTech Today ON24’s CMO outlines some of the marketing “truths” that are often taken for granted, and how he’s bursting his own bubble. One marketing myth he addressed is the persistence of quantity over quality when it comes to lead generation:

Why, then, do marketers continue to share prospects who have clicked on one link in an email? Because we’re not focusing on the quality of their engagement. Instead, redefine how you’re qualifying those leads and change the metrics that evaluate a prospect’s likelihood to purchase.

See Also: Boost Engagement and Traffic to Accelerate Lead Generation to get tips on increasing and tracking on-site engagement with your content.

3. ROI Focused Keyword Research

These Search Engine Watch pointers focus on scoring quick wins and building on existing search authority to quickly gain position and pageviews.

Optimizing for individual keywords is so far outdated – content marketing helps us move beyond this and optimize for topics. This helps us to be more informative and more comprehensive than our competitors. By grouping keywords by tight semantic relationships, you will not only have the head term, but also all the queries people have.

See Also: The Ultimate Guide to Your Content Marketing Keyword Strategy for more information on the rise of semantic search.

4. Need Creative Inspiration? Do Something Boring

It may sound counter-productive, but as Note to Self‘s Manoush Zomorodi explained in Fast Company, boredom can clear space in our brains to allow us to come up with more creative ideas.

To see if she could amp up their creativity, [University of Central Lancashire researcher Sandi] Mann gave subjects an even duller task, asking them to read phone numbers aloud before brainstorming uses for those paper cups. This second time, subjects had ideas with far more originality and flexibility–like earrings, telephones, musical instruments, and Madonna-like bras.

Extra credit: Pick up Zomorodi’s book, Bored and Brilliant, and try out the behavior-adjusting challenges for yourself.

5. In Praise of Curiosity

Bernadette Jiwa’s blog, The Story of Telling, is Godin-esque in it’s ability to poke at the very heart of marketing and business challenges and assumptions in a few short sentences. Concerned by what she sees as an uptick in insular, self-interest in society at large, she laments:

Today, eyes down, earbuds in, thumbs scrolling, we are the losers. Our capacity to be interested is diminishing, as a result of our obsession with being interesting. We don’t know what we’re missing.

See Also: 10 Best Examples of Companies That Get B2B Marketing

The expectations for a content marketer’s areas of expertise have inflated in every direction. We’ve needed to evolve into masters of multiple formats as diverse as blog posts, whitepapers, social media, webinars, videos, podcasts, snaps, and other assorted forms of micro content. This multiplicity of formats and channels also means that the role of the content marketer has expanded from the traditional roles of writer and editor to include designer, videographer, and often ad hoc website developer among others.

What’s more, content marketing has become more operationalized, making organizational skills such as project management, people management, technology evaluation, and especially data analyzation increasingly important. Even the title of “content marketer” might be somewhat outdated given that we support not just marketing in all its permutations, but also sales, customer success, HR, and any number of other departments or initiatives at our organizations.

With such a diversity of channels, roles, and spheres of influence, content marketing KPIs can be very difficult to define.

Content Marketing Influence: Hiding in Plain Sight?

But content’s omnipresence ironically might be responsible for making its full impact opaque. Most marketing analytics and attribution tools are focused on a specific function or point in the funnel (such as SEO, acquisition, or demand generation) instead of measuring the impact of the content that all of these functions utilize. It’s like David Foster Wallace’s famous anecdote about the invisibility of ubiquity.

Content Marketing KPIs: Siloed Data, Siloed Knowledge, Siloed Access

For many of us, trying to measure the ROI of content marketing is like trying to measure water in the ocean: overwhelming and too slippery to pin down. Think of all the different types of data a marketing team may use to determine what a successful program looks like: search position, social shares, pageviews, conversions, MQLS, opportunity value, and revenue. These are all different types of data using different systems used by different teams for different purposes. Sounds insane, right? Yet here we are. And this problem is compounded for the content marketer because none of these things are actually meant to measure content marketing KPIs, at least not primarily or fully.

What’s even more pernicious is that not only is data across different marketing functions siloed, but so is access to and knowledge of these different systems. The majority of content marketers are focused on creating, managing, and distributing ever-increasing amounts of content on an ever-increasing number of channels, not Salesforce. And the folks who are responsible for the complexities of marketing automation or CRM systems are typically focused on lead and account performance, not content’s influence on those leads and accounts. So when it comes to content marketing KPIs, their point of view is often limited to conversion rates of gated content items, not all the links the chain that might have lead up to that conversion.

Create a Content Marketing KPI Structure That Fits With Your Business Model and Culture

All of these missed connections results in a very limited perspective on content marketing’s impact. For the content marketer, that means that we are often perceived as an internal service organization instead of as a strategic partner equal to acquisition or lead generation. If that sounds familiar, then one of your main goals should be to work to change that perception. It can be a chicken-and-egg problem, but the best place to start is by developing content marketing KPIs that speak to your company’s business model and culture.

Understanding what your organization values, where content is playing a role, and how content marketing is perceived by both the marketing function and the wider business will allow you to map content marketing KPIs that are both comprehensive and readily received. It also helps you understand if you’re currently measuring the things that truly reflect your impact.

Inclusive content marketing KPIs allow you to prove content marketing’s value to your organization. But beyond proving your worth, the right KPIs will allow you to grow as well. You’ll be able to quantify and justify spend on your content program, perhaps even expanding your program to include additional content formats (like video) or improve the depth of your team’s design or coding skills with specialized hires.

Take Control of Your Team’s Time and Resources

Even more importantly, inclusive content marketing KPIs based on what you know works. Too many content marketers have to make guesses about what to create because their metrics are insufficient. Or even worse, content marketers may spend a lot of time creating content just to placate the “hunches” or opinions of people throughout the company. Sometimes these perspectives can be helpful, but other times it just sends the content team chasing their tails. A solid, data-based approach using the right content marketing KPIs gives you firm ground on which to make decisions about what and where to spend your team’s time and resources. Data-driven content creation will help earn your seat at the strategic table.

So how does the content marketer map KPIs that demonstrate content’s true impact on the organization?

First, you have to deeply understand your business. Discovering the answers to these questions is an essential starting point:

• What is your company’s business model? How does your company make money?
• What is your company known for? What does is want to be known for?
• Who are your company’s customers?
• What does your company value internally? (actions speak louder than words)
• In what ways is success defined for the business overall?

Once you’ve defined the big picture, hone in on marketing’s role within the business:

• In what ways does marketing contribute to the organization’s goals?
• How is that contribution measured today?
• Is the marketing function perceived as a service organization or strategic partner?
• What are all the different sub-functions within marketing?
• Are the marketing functions equally credited with driving marketing’s contributions? If not, which areas are credited the most?

Then dig into content’s role in both the marketing function and in the wider organization:

• What are content’s current responsibilities?
• What are content’s current KPIs? Do they encompass all of your responsibilities?
• How does content support all of marketing’s sub-functions?
• Do other business units utilize content that your team creates?
• Does your team create content specifically for these other business units?

Having insight into these questions will help you identify what your company values and how it defines success. You can also uncover any new opportunities to demonstrate content marketing’s impact through data.

Aligning Your Content Marketing KPIs to Success Stages

Revenue generation or revenue influence is the ultimate measure of success. However, it should not be the only measure. Some experts advocate for using revenue as the only metric, but I think this is over-committing. The revenue metric is the result of getting a lot of other metrics right along the way. Especially for businesses with long sales cycles, it could take months (or years) to get feedback on your work if your only measure of success comes at the very end of the cycle.

I recommend aligning your content marketing KPIs to the traditional funnel model, especially if your business is oriented around lead generation. Funnel models have certainly changed over the years with more and more complex stages. Start with a simple Top of, Middle, and Bottom reporting framework first. This will be easy to understand and share with others in your organization.

Strategic Content Marketing KPIs vs. Operational Content Marketing KPIs

One other thing to consider is that KPIs aren’t the only kinds of reports you’ll need. There’s a whole other class of reporting that I like to categorize as “operational” content reporting.  Those are reports that help you make specific decisions: what to write, what to promote, what to socialize with your sales team. The following KPIs are intended to help you track your program’s high-level success and contribution to the business at each funnel stage. They are by no means the only reports you could and should create, but they are foundational and are the best candidates for an executive dashboard.

Content Marketing KPIs: Top of Funnel

These KPIs are intended to measure awareness and interest. For the content marketer that almost always includes both search and website metrics. 

Average Position of Unbranded Terms

This query report based on Google’s Search Console data within Google Analytics shows the average position – or SERP (search engine results page) rank – of all the unbranded terms that a user types into Google to surface a URL from your website. The lower the number, the closer it is to the first position on page 1. From a KPI perspective, your objective should be to get that number as low as possible.

“Unbranded” means the search query does not contain your brand name. Most brands rank in the top spot for their branded terms. By focusing on unbranded terms, you can get a better line of sight into the performance of your thought leadership topics. Since this is taking into account all of your unbranded terms, the average position for all those terms may be quite high, especially if you are in a highly competitive space.

Another option for this report is to further refine unbranded terms into topic clusters. You can create reports that are focused on one keyword or a group of related keywords. This report is important because it tells you how competitive you are in the search channel via your position and if (via the CTR) users’ intent matches up with the content you are creating.

Percentage of Organic Users on Website

This report is based on Google Analytics’ Audience Overview. I added a segment of organic traffic (traffic on your website that came from search engines), to isolate the performance of that segment and compare it to overall traffic or even other segments such as display advertising. I think it’s most powerful to represent these numbers as percentages. Based on this example, you could report that organic accounts for 74 percent of all users (or unique visitors) and new users and 71 percent of all sessions (or visits) to your website.

Recently, top of funnel metrics like these have gotten a bad rap in the industry as “vanity metrics.” I think that’s a bit unfair. Sure, visits do not equal revenue (heck they don’t even equal conversions), but for most companies, there’d be no leads without traffic, no opportunities without leads, and no revenue without opportunities. At best, it is incomplete to only use top of funnel metrics as your indicators of success. But if you are using full funnel KPIs in the proper context, then I believe they have a place on your strategic content marketing KPI dashboard and in a data-driven content marketing strategy.

Content Marketing KPIs: The Middle of the Funnel

These are content marketing KPIs that meant to measure depth of engagement and intent to purchase.

Percentage of Organic Traffic That Converts

This is a Google Analytics conversion report that gets much more specific than the organic traffic report. In this example, the GA instance has many different options for goal completions. The goal many content marketers would interested in at this point are conversions from premium pieces of content: white papers, webinars, videos, etc. For others it might be a demo or contact request or a newsletter sign up. You could even run different reports against different website goals. Again, expressing this metric as a percentage of the whole allows you to quantify your impact.

One thing to note is that these conversions don’t necessarily equal leads. A conversion may be completed by an known lead or existing customer, therefore would not be a new lead. That’s why I consider this report a great measure of engagement and possible intent to purchase.

Another option for this report is to hone in on a particular area of your site, say, the Resources section that houses all your ebooks. Use a Goal URL report and filter by page path:

New Leads by Program & Asset

This Marketo report takes the concept of conversions a step further and allows you see how many new leads your premium content generated. Instead of using anonymous data like Google Analytics does, a marketing automation program such as Marketo will be able to show you the number of “New Names” your content generated versus names that might have already existed in your database. Post-conversion, those previously “unknown” leads are now “known” leads. Because you have to create a distinct Marketo program for every piece of content to get this performance data, most marketing organizations only create programs for premium or gated assets and not for ungated assets such as blog posts.

MQLs by Program & Asset

This Salesforce report takes the concept of a “new name” or a lead and takes it still a step further. An MQL (marketing qualified lead) or an AQL (automation qualified lead) are leads that go through a qualification process before marketing hands them off to sales. It’s an indication of both the quantity and quality of leads your content has generated.

These reports are similar, but the differences between them can tell you different things about your content. For example, if a content item is high on conversions but low on new names, then you may need to figure out a better way to reach new audiences. If a piece is driving a lot of new names but very few MQLs, then it might not be attracting the right kind of leads for your business.

Content Marketing KPIs: Bottom of the Funnel

These are metrics that measure content marketing’s influence on opportunities and revenue.

Pipeline Generated

This Curata report uses advanced content metrics to show the dollar value of the pipeline created by content marketing. The report tracks all of the content consumed by a contact associated with an opportunity before the opportunity was created. Essentially it shows you how effective your content is at creating new opportunities. An important thing to note is that Curata can track gated as well as ungated content influence. If you are struggling to measure blog performance or connect any top of funnel content to bottom of funnel metrics, this type of report may be able to help.

Pipeline Touched

This KPI shows the total value of opportunities that were nurtured by content (again, all content both gated and ungated). The report tracks what the opportunities’ contacts consumed while the opportunities were open. This report tells you how much and which content items were part of the purchasing decision process.

Revenue Influenced

And here is the ultimate content marketing KPI: how to calculate content ROI. this report shows how much revenue is influenced by content marketing. The report shows the value of won opportunities where contacts consumed content anywhere along the journey prior to the opportunity close date.

Similar to the progression through the middle of the funnel from conversion, to lead, to MQL, these bottom of funnel KPIs show the influence of content through what has traditionally been thought of as the sales process.

Hopefully these suggestions for strategic content marketing KPIs for the top, middle, and bottom of your funnel points you in the right direction for building a strategic content marketing dashboard for your company.

Don’t worry, this isn’t another blog post about the need for content strategy. Although yes, this is a key factor in a successful content marketing practice. However, it is one of at least four areas the best content marketers dedicate their time to: strategy, production, distribution, and analytics.

Looking for an effective content marketing editorial calendar template? Download Curata’s free editorial calendar template.

We’re going to deep dive into one specific area for this post: editorial calendars as part of content marketing production. A consistent best practice of leading content marketers is using an editorial calendar as part of the production process (pictured below).

Curata research shows over 90% of companies are now using a content marketing editorial calendar. More importantly, the “best of the best” marketers view their editorial calendar as more than a simple spreadsheet. It serves as a living, breathing, planning tool and timeline to:

1. Align team members around a common content strategy, cadence and workflow.
2. Track operational tasks and metrics needed to streamline content creation.
3. Attribute an explicit set of labels or meta tags to individual pieces of content to provide a foundation for subsequent analysis of content performance and ROI.
4. Provide a “parking lot” for great content creation ideas.
5. Facilitate better reuse and repurposing of existing content.
6. Manage the contribution of internal and external contributors, reviewers, and writers; including the ability to crowdsource content across your organization.

Let’s Get Some Things Straight

Let’s clarify several things before detailing the core elements of an editorial calendar template for content marketing.

1. What is Content Marketing?
Content marketing is the process of developing, executing, and delivering the content and related assets needed to create, nurture, and grow a company’s customer base. Note that content marketing should impact all areas of the buyer creation process—from awareness building to lead generation to sales enablement.

2. Who’s Responsible for Content Marketing?
All the tools, processes, and technologies in the world cannot, alone, make a great content marketing strategy. Someone must be accountable for its development and execution, even if they and their team aren’t responsible for all content creation. 42 percent of companies have an executive responsible for content marketing, with this number increasing to 51% by 2017.

3. Can I Simply Use a Spreadsheet for My Editorial Calendar?
Yes—but Microsoft Excel and Google Sheets are time-consuming to use and offer limited functionality compared to dedicated calendar software. The editorial calendar template we provide below offers significant advantages compared to normal spreadsheets, thanks to being designed specifically for content marketing.

• Incorporate data into your content marketing process: Metadata collected as part of calendar management in your content marketing platform is the secret sauce for uncovering valuable operations and performance insights. These include the ability to measure content impact on your pipeline, measure by type of content, content pyramid/program, etc; and enabling content asset tracking/audits.

• Increased process adoption: Easy to use for increased adoption and a better content management process. Calendar software advantages include:
  • drop-down field options for more rapid and accurate data entry.
  • auto-fill data cells for efficient meta-tagging.
  • a clean interface for more productive content marketing management meetings (e.g., filtered views; customized views by time period).
  • simple drag-and-drop and auto reschedule capability to accommodate schedule changes and adding new content on-the-fly.

• Better workflow management: Keep your team on schedule through outbound communications and enable visibility into your teams’ work.

• Real-time synchronization for collaboration: No version control issues.

• Data security: Assuming your solution is software as a service (SaaS), your data remains in the cloud for data protection, so someone can’t delete a master file such as with Google Spreadsheet.

• Enables governance: For example, assuring in-process content is aligned with content strategy, and enabling content audits to identify content creation gaps.

If you are not already using an editorial calendar template as part of a more comprehensive content marketing platform, review your options for this type of software to boost your content marketing impact. Check out the Curata CMP content marketing platform or other companies’ software as presented in Ultimate List of Content Marketing Tools.

Core Attributes of a High Impact Editorial Calendar Template for Content Marketing

At Curata we publish hundreds of pieces of content every year for an audience of over 80,000 content marketers per month. This process includes tapping into multiple data sources and leveraging many writers—both internal and external. We identified 12 core attributes in our editorial calendar template used for every piece of content we produce, including eBooks, PowerPoint presentations, infographics, blog posts, and SlideShares.

1. Title

Be bold, be relevant, and stay on target with your content strategy and SEO goals.

• Resources for title selection:
  • BuzzSumo.com for social media activity around given topics/titles.
  • UberSuggest.org for ideas on keyword groups.
  • Google Adwords Keyword Planner to evaluate search volume.
  • Your content marketing team: At Curata we often select from multiple title options for the final title. (Do ensure your title is true to the actual content of your post or piece of content. No one likes misleading clickbait.)
• Other good blog posts for title selection:
  • Write the Best Titles for Content Marketing: A 10-Point Checklist by Roger C. Parker.
  • How to Write Compelling Titles for Blogs & Content by Heidi Cohen.

2. Publish Date

Have an estimated publish date, then update if required once content goes live.

3. Content Type

This field describes which type of content is being produced. It not only helps with the production process, but enables you to analyze the impact of different types of content on engagement and your pipeline. Here are examples of the “Content Type” fields we use at Curata.

Types of content:

• Blog post: infographic
• Blog post: long-form
• Blog post: short-form
• Blog post: curated
• eBook
• SlideShare
• Webinar (PowerPoint presentation)

A significant part of any content marketing strategy is your blog. Don’t have one or need help boosting its impact on your pipeline? Check out what the blogging 10K club are up to in this survey of 428 marketers: Business Blogging Secrets Revealed.

4. Status

Track the progress of a content item through the content marketing supply chain. The “pitching,” “submitted,” and “accepted” descriptors are useful for when your team is creating syndicated content for another company’s editor to publish on their blog.

Status levels:

• Not started
• Work in progress/process (WIP)
• Pitching
• Submitted
• Accepted
• Scheduled
• Posted/Published

5. Media Type

Your digital content may live in many locations across the Internet. Therefore the best multi-channel content marketing strategies include content publication across three different media types: Owned, Earned, and Paid. Build your owned media as the foundational element of your content marketing strategy, and tap into the power of earned and paid media as on-ramps into your owned media.

Types of media:

• Owned = your corporate blog, corporate website, corporate microsite.
• Earned = press pick-up, guest posts on other companies’ blogs.
• Paid = Taboola, Outbrain, Vocus, Shareaholic, media properties.

6. Media Entity

Put simply, the publishing destination of your content. Examples include:

• [your company] blog
• [your company] web site
• [your company] microsite (including name of microsite)
• [your company] LinkedIn Page
• [profile name] LinkedIn post
• other companies’ blogs
• media entities: Boston.com; Content Marketing Institute; MarketingProfs.com

7. Writer

The person responsible for writing the content, such as an internal writer, freelancer, or agency.

8. Author

The person whose name is formally attributed to the content. The writer may be different to the author when a ghostwriter is used and/or when a writer is basing content on thought leadership or content assets originated by the author, such as a company executive or product marketer.

9. Owner

The person with ultimate accountability for completion and publishing of the content. In some situations, the owner may also be the author and writer of a specific piece of content, e.g., a content marketing editor.

10. Pyramid

Curata uses the Content Marketing Pyramid framework pictured above to address two of content marketers’ greatest challenges:

1. Facilitating the execution of a well planned content strategy.
2. Optimizing the reuse and repurposing of content into multiple formats and through multiple distribution channels. Only 22% of companies have a specific process in place to ensure optimal content reuse and repurposing.

The top part of each Pyramid represents primary research, secondary research and/or thought leadership for a gated content asset such as an eBook. The remaining parts of the Pyramid are derivatives of this core content asset, consisting of reused and repurposed core content for different formats and channels.

Examples of Pyramids executed by Curata’s content marketing team include:

• 2015 Content Marketing Tactics and Technology Study
  • Gated: 2015 Content Marketing Tactics and Technology Planner
  • Long-form blog post: Content Marketing Benchmarks: A 2015 Roadmap
  • Infographic: Content Marketing Strategy: 6 Stats and Tips to Survive and Thrive
• The Ultimate Guide to Content Curation
  • Gated: The Ultimate Guide to Content Curation
  • Long-form blog post: The Definitive Guide to Content Curation

The high level bullets above are what Curata enters into the field “Pyramid” within its editorial calendar in Curata CMP. Attributing an individual piece of content to a specific pyramid enables you to analyze the pipeline impact of all pieces of content within that pyramid. For example, the marketing leads generated per pyramid. (To see these analytics for Curata’s content marketing process in action, feel free to schedule a demo with our content marketing experts.)

11. Persona

Content strategy should identify and develop personas that represent audience segments to give you a better understanding of who you’re talking to when crafting communications. Key parts of each persona include:

• Persona Name: This name is entered into the editorial calendar under the “Persona” field for each piece of content.  Examples of what Curata includes in this field include: Digital Marketing Darla; Editor Elaine; and Marketing Operations Michael.
• Title: Typical title of this individual.
• Background: A description of the individual, such as their role, field, or study, and other personal and/or professional background about the persona.
• Goals: What motivates people for this persona? How is their success measured in an organization? What are their objectives?
• Frustration and Pain Points
• Organizational Structure: Where their role typically sits within an organization, i.e., the reporting structure.
• Narrative: Informal descriptions or stories of the individual’s professional life. These narratives are a great way to help your content marketing team truly understand the persona, enabling them to create more relevant content.
• Sample individuals: It’s always great to include pictures, names, and titles of real people.

Similar to a pyramid, attributing an individual piece of content to a specific persona enables you to analyze the pipeline impact of all pieces of content within that persona. You can even use this attribute to complete an audit of which content you have (or don’t have) for specific personas. Such insights are great for your regular content strategy development and content gap analysis.

12. Buying Stage

Another important part of content strategy is identifying audience buying stages. In fact, 50% of the best content marketing teams create content according to stages in the buying cycle. Work with your demand generation team to identify and understand these stages.

Creating content for a specific buyer stage helps ensure content is relevant to its intended audience and increases the conversion rate of buyers in your pipeline. Attributing an individual piece of content to a specific buying stage also enables you to complete an audit of which content you have (or lack) for specific buying stages. Such insights are extremely useful for your regular content strategy development and content gap analysis.

Buying stage examples include:

• TOFU: Top of Funnel
• MOFU: Middle of Funnel
• BOFU: Bottom of Funnel

OR

• Awareness
• Consideration
• Purchase
• Retention
• Advocacy

Not only do these editorial calendar fields help streamline your content production process, they enable better analysis of your content to determine what is and isn’t working. Finally, please do add any additional fields you may be using in the comments section below.

Looking for a calendar template already loaded with the above attributes? Download Curata’s free editorial calendar template below.

This blog post has an overview of interview questions and responses. For a full list of interview questions, the ideal responses, and evaluation criteria, download Curata’s Content Marketing Interview Template.

Growth in Content Marketing Jobs

In the past three years there has been an uptick in content marketing related positions available at all levels, from interns to executives. Perusing the available openings on job boards, the most common titles include:

• Content Marketing Specialist
• Content Marketing Manager
• Content Marketing Strategist
• Content Marketing Intern
• Vice President of Content Marketing
• Chief Content Officer (rare)
• Content Marketing Associate

Looking at job trends on Indeed.com reinforces this: the inclusion of “content marketing” in job descriptions has skyrocketed nearly 400% in recent years.

Must Have Content Marketing Competencies

Below are some of the must-have competencies to identify in your next content marketer. These may vary slightly depending upon your organization and what level individual you’re looking to hire.

• Passion and Talent for Content Marketing (and writing). This is number one on my list.  You need to be a great writer and editor, highly creative, able to tell a story, and most importantly—love doing content marketing. Although more detailed questions are provided below, you need to understand if your candidate really loves content marketing, and if they will take the initiative to develop and grow in the role.
• Aligning Content with Market/Customer Needs. Content marketing is the process for developing, executing, and delivering the content and related assets needed to create, nurture and grow a company’s customer base. If you don’t have the capability to understand a market (e.g., be able to listen to customers and influencers, and identify their communicated and latent needs), you simply won’t be able to deliver great, engaging content.
• Understanding What Drives Successful Content. Some of the best writers in the world will never be successful content marketers. A superstar content marketer must understand what drives success in their market and within their organization (e.g., understanding Google search, measuring performance, translating data into insight).
• Maintaining a Consistent Supply of Quality Content. This competency deals a lot more with operations than simply content creation. Producing and delivering great content on time on a regular basis is no easy feat.
• Action-Oriented. Being a content marketer requires working with many people that don’t report to you, and getting them to deliver a product or service that can make or break your own success. This can include content from a product marketer, SEO insight from the digital team, and promotion by the social media team. Your content marketer should have the drive and creativity to do what it takes to get the product (i.e., content) out the door, optimize its promotion, and be prepared to do things differently when required. They need to be able to take a risk when necessary.
• Multi-Tasking. This is the ability to manage many activities and prioritize deliverables in a demanding, fast-paced environment. No doubt there’s some overlap here with being action-oriented, however, the need to be a great project manager cannot be under-estimated—especially for more senior staff.
• Desire and Ability to Work in a [Small/Large] Company. Select which version is best for your organization. There are significant differences between the two environments.
• Understanding and Use of Technology. Take a look at this Content Marketing Tools map and you’ll quickly understand the opportunity and challenge that exists for today’s marketer to tap into the power of new software.

Must Ask Content Marketing Interview Questions

Below are some of the must ask interview questions for any content marketing position, aligned with the competencies described above. Many of the questions are low level and tactical rather than strategic in nature—and more appropriate for a content marketing specialist than a Vice President of Content Marketing.

My philosophy however, is that in order to run a content team and create a content strategy, you need to know how to perform the duties of the team you manage. So I also ask senior level hires these same interview questions. Refer to the Content Marketing Interview Template for a more comprehensive list of interview questions as well as examples of poor, mediocre, and great responses to these interview questions.

Passion and Talent for Content Marketing (and Writing)

What do you enjoy about writing?

• Why it’s important to ask this: Content marketing is a lot more than writing; however, I consider this talent to be a foundational element of a superstar content marketer. You have to love what you do.
• What to look out for: Look for indicators that they have a passion for writing. Understand what drives their passion, what outlets they’ve used to express this passion, and what personal benefits they get out of creating content.

Describe how you determined the style, tone, and voice for a specific piece of content you recently completed.

• Why it’s important to ask this: Your content marketer will need to express a unique voice and opinion in their work. However, they also need to adapt their own style as a function of your company’s needs, the audience, format of the content, person they’re writing for, and so on.
• What to look out for: Look and ask for specific examples of how they modified their style, as well as asking them to identify why this is important.

Provide a specific example of content you created that entertained and/or educated your readers.

• Why it’s important to ask this: Content marketing is about adding value to your readers, such as providing an infographic that educates about their industry, or creating an entertaining video that helps them with their job or career. Your team needs to create content that provides entertainment such as through story-telling or comedy in order to stand out from the crowd, and to capture and sustain their attention.
• What to look out for: Look for examples of their content that told a story, used humor, and/or educated their audience about something other than a company’s products. Bonus points if the candidate has delivered more unique formats of content, such as infographics, podcasts or interactive content. Ask for examples of where they’ve used visual content, including why they were or weren’t successful.

What content marketing blogs do you read?

• Why it’s important to ask this: Is the candidate really interested in content marketing? Do they take personal initiative to educate themselves and grow as a content marketer? Or will they only grow solely through your mentorship on the job?
• What to look out for: See if they mention specific blogs. If they just say, “you know, all of them,” or “the usual ones,” they are likely not reading any.

Describe a situation in which you were given feedback on a content piece.

• Why it’s important to ask this: I certainly want a content marketer to have an opinion about what works and what doesn’t work. However, it’s also important that they can accept critiques about their work and make changes as necessary.
• What to look out for: Understand what type of feedback they received, how it made them feel—and most importantly—what they did with that feedback.

What process do you use when proofreading?

• Why it’s important to ask this: I certainly want a content marketer to have an opinion about what works and what doesn’t work. however, it’s also important that they are able to accept critique about their work and make changes as necessary.
• What to look out for: Attention to to detail and an understanding of proper usage of the english language is key elements of quality content. (Did you catch the three mistakes?) Follow-up questions could include:
  • What are some of your greatest “pet peeves” when editing someone else’s writing?
  • Which style guide(s) do you depend upon? See “Great Responses” in the Content Marketing Interview template.

Aligning Content with Market and Customer Needs

How do you decide which content topics to focus on and what format that content should take?

• Why it’s important to ask this: What drives a person to invest their time and effort into creating content? Is it anecdotal insight such as a hallway conversation with a sales person—which may be a good place to begin investigating an idea, but not the final driver for its execution? Or is creation more data-driven, such as through Google Analytics or insight from a content marketing platform?
• What to look out for: Be wary if your candidate indicates their past content development was primarily driven by what their boss told them to write about; or they have no understanding of what goes into content strategy. A follow-up question could be: “Describe your company’s content strategy, including key steps in its development.”

It’s your first day on the job. Walk me through the steps you’d take to develop a content strategy for our organization.

This is more of a case study type of question, better suited for senior hires. Check out the following eBook as a resource to best understand responses for this question: How to Create a Content Strategy: The Content Marketing Pyramid.

Understanding What Drives Successful Content

What makes content “successful”?

• Why it’s important to ask this: In order to create great content, you have to know how to discern which content is doing well in the first place.
• What to look out for: There are many answers to this question, so this helps tease out what type of content marketer the candidate is. Here are some possible answers:
  • “Traffic”
  • “Repeat visitors”
  • “Retweets and likes”
  • “Search engine ranking”
  • “Comments”
  • “Leads and sales”
  • “It depends”

The more they name off and can sensibly explain the importance of, the better.

Walk me through how you create a blog post.

• Why it’s important to ask this: This is a good question to tease out which parts of the content lifecycle the candidate is familiar with. Do they only have experience with copywriting, or can they come up with blog ideas themselves? Do they stop at writing the blog post, or do they keep promotion on social media in mind as well?
• What to look out for: You should look for a response that captures the whole process from start to finish, from ideation to production to distribution to analytics. A great answer will include specific tools and details. Here’s an example of great and mediocre responses.

How do to decide what to content create?

• Mediocre Responses:
  • My manager tells me what I should write about and gives me an outline.
  • I look at what’s trending and pick an interesting topic.
• Great Responses:
  • I keep a backlog of keywords that people are searching for in Google related to my target topic, and create posts based on the backlog.
  • I set up Google News alerts and a feed reader to look at which topics are trending in the news that relate to my topic area. I come up with spins on those topics to newsjack those stories.
  • I regularly ask the sales team what questions their prospects are asking, and use the responses as fodder for my next post.

What steps do you take when you actually create your content?

• Mediocre Responses:
  • I write my blog post in Word and then post it when it’s ready.
• Great Responses:
  • I write my blog post in Word, add hyperlinks to at least three other pieces of content on our site that we’ve published, and add at least one hyperlink to a third party resource.
  • I ensure there’s an associated featured image for the post by going to a stock image site.
  • I always make sure there’s a clear call to action at the end of each post.
  • For quality control, I make sure at least one other person has proofread it before publishing.
  • I optimize the title for a target keyword by looking at what terms people are searching for in Google.

After you have published your content, how do you promote it?

• Mediocre Responses:
  • I publish my content on WordPress, and then tweet it out as well.
• Great Responses:
  • I publish the post on our blog using WordPress.
  • I then schedule a minimum of four tweets at different times of the day in HootSuite.
  • I email coworkers to retweet and share my post as well.
  • I ask the demand generation team to include it in the next email newsletter to our database.

How do you know if your content has performed well or not?

• Mediocre Response:
  • Usually I just know if it’s done well or not.
• Great Response:
  • I look at Google Analytics after a few days to see how many page views it has received.
  • I search on Google for the target keyword I was optimizing for to see if it ranked in the first page.
  • I look at the Twitter counter on the post to see how many tweets cite this post.

How does Google rank content?

• Why it’s important to ask this: I am always surprised by how few marketers at any level understand how Google really ranks content. Though you’re not interviewing for an SEO position, content marketing is intrinsically tied to search engine optimization; everyone should know the basics when creating content.
• What to look for: You don’t need a candidate to know the PageRank formula, but rather the basic premise behind Google’s ranking algorithm, along with other auxiliary factors that help with SEO. For example, many naive marketers think Google ranks content largely on meta tags and keyword stuffing. In reality, Google primarily ranks content on inbound links, and the authority of the sites doing the linking. It’s a bonus if a candidate can mention other contributing factors such as the text of the hyperlink, the title tag, keywords in the URL, and others.

What are some good ways to get other people to link to your content?

• Why it’s important to ask this: The candidate may understand Google ranks content based on inbound links, but they also need to know how to accumulate inbound links.
• What to look for: A good content marketer knows how to get links by producing great link worthy content, and promoting it in a clever manner. Here are some good responses to the questions:
  • I interview influencers, not only because they have good things to say, but because they promote the resulting content to a large audience as well—and some of those people will end up linking back to my interview.
  • I include content others can reuse. For example, I may create a quick infographic that other bloggers may want to curate or include in their own posts, with a link back to mine.
  • I write long form content so I have the most comprehensive and authoritative post on a particular subject, which tempts others to link to me as the reference source.

Take Home Assignment: Produce an original writing sample

• Why it’s important to ask this: Many candidates may come in with writing samples from the past, but they may not accurately reflect the candidate’s capabilities. For example, the sample may have been proofed by a manager. Furthermore, it doesn’t accurately assess whether the candidate can create content that relates to your specific industry and topics.
• What to look for: I typically ask candidates to download one of our eBooks and summarize them in a 400 word blog post to bring to the second round interview. Things I look for from the resulting sample are:
  • Grammar, spelling, and attention to detail. Did they care enough about the job to proofread the post?
  • Title of the post. Did they come up with a creative title for the post? Is it SEO optimized? Or did they just copy the title of the eBook?
  • Call to Action. Did they include a call to action to the full eBook at the end of the post?
  • Paragraphs and structure. Is the post quickly skimmable? Or is it a wall of words?

Similar to interviews for other positions where candidates are asked riddles, the candidate may not use these skills every day on the job, but all of the above interview questions help tease out if they are cut out to be a well rounded content marketer.

The Interview: Where to Go From Here

Even if they make it through all the above interview questions with flying colors, it does not necessarily mean they’re a fit. It’s important to screen for cultural fit, and to make sure they have a good work ethic.

If they are a strong candidate on these fronts, as a hiring manager it’s your turn to answer some of the candidate’s interview questions: Why should they work at your company? How is your vision for content marketing any different to any other marketing department out there?

Employers: What do You Think?

Since being a professional “content marketer” is a relatively new role, we would love to hear which interview questions you have found to be effective. Please let us know in the comments below.

Content Marketers: Come Work at Curata

If you think you are cut out to be a content marketer, come work at Curata! There’s no better place to be a content marketer than at a company that serves content marketing departments of all sizes, big and small. Apply now to be our next content marketing superstar. 

We look forward to meeting you and grilling you on the above interview questions (although you now know the answers we’re looking for). For a full list of interview questions, ideal responses, and evaluation criteria, download Curata’s Content Marketing Interview Template.

Although marketers have been practicing content marketing for decades, digital marketing coupled with a new, buyer 2.0 environment has created a whole new set of opportunities and challenges in the content marketing realm. This next generation of content marketing is producing significant dividends for marketers as they continue to invest in this effort to further drive leads and revenue. [source]

• 75% of marketers are increasing investment in content marketing
• 42% of companies have an executive responsible for content marketing, reaching 49% in 2017
• Key process areas are being established such as content strategy, production (with an editorial calendar and workflow management), distribution and analytics.
• 57% of leading marketers predict an increase in marketing analytics spending.

There has been a mind-numbing proliferation of technology vendors and solutions to address the needs of content and digital marketers. Curata’s content marketing tools map has increased from 40 vendors to over 130 vendors in its most recent version.

What is a Content Marketing Platform?

Regardless of which market studies you look at, content marketers have the following evergreen challenges:

• Limited budget for staff and program spend.
• Creating enough quality content on a regular basis, whether in-house or externally sourced.
• Distributing content across multiple channels, including publication and promotion.
• Measuring the impact of content, i.e., what works and what doesn’t work to drive awareness, leads and sales enablement.

Content Marketing Platforms (CMPs) help marketers solve these challenges. A definition of a Content Marketing Platform is as follows:

A Content Marketing Platform is a software solution that helps marketers be more successful in driving awareness, leads and revenue from their content. This platform enables a data-driven, scalable, and multi-channel approach across four process areas: strategy, production, distribution (publication and promotion) and analytics. 

A Vision for the Content Marketing Platform

The below framework provides additional details about the four key process areas addressed by a CMP. Ultimately, a CMP helps content marketers develop and execute an effective and efficient content marketing strategy.

The following frameworks offer additional perspectives as to what processes and related tactics are addressed by a Content Marketing Platform.

• CMI’s Content Marketing Framework:
  

  Joe Pulizzi and Robert Rose assembled the framework based upon their own success at the Content Marketing Institute. These areas represent common elements of a high impact content marketing practice.

• Content Marketing Framework for Startups:
  

  Lee Odden, a thought leader in the content marketing space and CEO of TopRank Online Marketing, put together this simple to follow, yet powerful, framework for successful content marketing.

• Content Marketing Use Cases & Subcategories:
  

  Rebecca Lieb of Altimeter did a very thorough job identifying the more tactical areas required to fulfill three key use cases for content marketing: Feed the Beast, Refine (including content analytics, segmentation, and promotion), and Govern.     

• Content Marketing in 7 Steps:
  

  Jay Baer of Convince and Convert put this framework together using the knowledge gained from helping many big brands form their own content marketing strategy. His seven-step approach helps kickstart the process of formulating a content strategy, a process he says can take up to 60 days.

• 8 Steps to Fast-Track Your Content Marketing Plan:
  

  Content marketing expert and consultant Barry Feldman created a comprehensive post outlining this eight-step content marketing plan to quadruple your leads.

• 13 Step Content Marketing Plan:
  

  Heidi Cohen, content marketing expert and President of Riverside Marketing Strategies, provides these 13 steps to successfully establishing a content marketing strategy:

• Determine the goals for your content marketing plan.
• Know your content marketing audience.
• Incorporate your brand into your content.
• Determine what information your audience seeks.
• Tell your firm’s “once upon a time.”
• Use different content formats.
• Build an editorial calendar.
• Make your content attractive to prospective readers.
• Make your content findable.
• Allocate sufficient resources.
• Distribute content.
• Promote content.
• Measure content marketing results.

What a Content Marketing Platform Is—and What it Isn’t

There are countless tools available to help marketers work their way through each of the process areas and tactics described above. Only a small fraction of them however, have the mission of addressing most, or all of these areas in one solution. To help marketers navigate the sea of vendors across the content marketing technology space, here are some clarifications of what a CMP solution is and isn’t:

A content management system (CMS) for the web is NOT a Content Marketing Platform.

A CMS is designed to run web sites (e.g., corporate web sites, blogs, content repositories), and to avoid the need for manual coding. Their main function is to “store and organize files, and provide version-controlled access to their data.” [source] CMPs are designed to orchestrate the development, delivery, and analysis of content to CMSs, as well as many other types of digital media entities. A foundational element of a Content Marketing Platform is its ability to interact within an ecosystem of marketing teams, processes, and technologies, without being the sole hub for content delivery. Examples of CMSs include WordPress, Drupal, Joomla!, Percussion and Uberflip.

• The value enabled by a CMP cannot be provided by a marketing automation platform (MAP) such as Marketo, Eloqua, Pardot, Act-On, etc. MAPs are designed to plan, execute, and measure demand generation campaigns and the interaction with leads from these campaigns. MAPs are lead-focused, not content-focused. However, MAP data is a key component of the value provided by a CMP, as detailed below.

• A CMP provides interoperability with the various software systems that make up the marketing technology ecosystem, such as:
  • Multiple CMSs
  • Social channels or Social Media Management Systems
  • Marketing Automation
  • Sales Force Automation
  • Content repositories: Ask anyone that has attempted to stop the use of SharePoint systems how likely it is you’ll get everyone to use only one content storage area. Therefore a CMP should—either today or as part of its roadmap—interoperate with different content repositories.
  • Email as a method of collaboration amongst internal and external teams will not be replaced anytime soon. Attempting to get all parties involved in content marketing onto one system only reduces the potential for technology adoption. Therefore a CMP should interoperate with email applications, and be able to track communication about specific content pieces as part of orchestrating the content production process.

• A CMP enables orchestration of the content production process in a minimally invasive manner.
  • Team alignment: A high impact content marketing strategy requires alignment and interaction with many functions across marketing. For example, content marketers may have to interact with product marketing for content creation, social media for promotion, or marketing operations for analytics. A CMP enables collaboration across these different teams without requiring all of them log into the CMP, increasing its adoption and impact.
  • Content creation tool: Some CMP vendors require content creation within their own platform, necessitating all content creators to be trained on system usage and to interact with it on a regular basis. Other CMP vendors track content creation progress in a less process-invasive manner, enabling the continued use of industry standard creation tools such as Microsoft Word, Google Docs, Microsoft PowerPoint, Google Spreadsheets, Photoshop, and WordPress.

• CMPs are not limited to a specific content type or publishing environment, working with any:
  • content format, e.g., video, text, images.
  • type of content, e.g., ebooks, white papers, infographics, blog posts.
  • source, e.g., created, curated, licensed, outsourced, crowdsourced content.
  • distribution channels, e.g., paid, earned, owned.
  • content internal to or external to the CMP.

A CMP enables the measurement of your content’s impact across awareness building (such as social channels, Google Analytics), demand generation (such as leads generated and influenced), and sales pipeline impact (such as sales opportunities generated and influenced). This is only possible if a CMP is capable of aggregating data from many applications, both within and external to your company. Even better is if a CMP can measure the pipeline impact of content published off-site on someone else’s blog or media property.

Where Should a Content Marketing Platform Sit in Your Marketing & Sales Technology Stack?

To understand how a CMP fits into your technology stack, begin with a basic question: What are the ultimate objectives of marketing and sales technologies? The bottom line—or should I say the top line, is REVENUE. That’s where our story begins.

The Advent of Sales Force Automation

Right around at the turn of the millennium there was a shift from the expensive, outbound sales model to inbound telephone and Internet-enabled sales. This change was driven by the advent of the Internet and the resulting online presentation tools such as WebEx, which effectively enabled salespeople to perform demonstrations of software and presentations—and ultimately close deals—without ever meeting their customers in person.

But the growth of insides sales teams was chaotic. Unlike outside sales people who each carry their own physical rolodexes, inside sales teams manage their leads in spreadsheets.

While this was a large advancement over the prior generation, it presented a host of new problems such as:

• How are leads and territories assigned across a sales team?
• Sales managers need to keep tabs on sales activities being performed by their teams.
• A sales account executive needs to know what prior interactions a company has had with an account.
• How can sales management easily report and predict their pipeline revenue across large and sometimes geographically distributed sales teams?

The solution to the above challenges was Sales Force Automation (SFA) platforms (often misidentified as Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems) such as Salesforce, Oracle, Siebel, and Microsoft Dynamics among others. These systems:

• Let sales managers hold their teams accountable in terms of their sales activities.
• Offer transparency for reporting.
• Provide a means to scale sales teams.

Most importantly, they provide value for the everyday sales representative: convenience, efficiency and a single unified interface as a source of leads, activities, and deals.

The Rise of Marketing Automation Platforms

With the growth of inside sales teams, there was increased demand for leads, particularly online-sourced leads, to feed these teams. Pressure rapidly shifted to marketing teams to create more and more leads.

Demand generation teams stepped in to help address this challenge, employing a variety of techniques such as email, newsletters, and events. Over the next few years, demand generation teams and related marketing disciplines faced a similar set of scaling challenges as the sales teams once had:

• How do demand generation teams effectively manage marketing-generated leads?
• How can marketing operations have a single unified view of all marketing leads and associated marketing activities against those leads?
• What’s the best way for marketing to measure the effectiveness of their demand generation campaigns?

About seven years later in 2007 or so came another type of platform in the emerging stack: Marketing Automation Platforms (MAP) from vendors such as Eloqua, Marketo, Pardot, Act-On and to some extent, HubSpot, amongst many others.

These platforms allowed marketers to:

• Keep a single unified repository of all leads.
• Track all digital marketing activities associated with those leads, be it on a website, via email, or through pay-per-click campaigns.
• Easily push qualified leads into Sales Force Automation systems.

Suddenly, marketers now had insight, visibility and self-accountability for their lead generation and nurturing campaigns.

The Emergence of the Content Marketing Platform

SFA platforms fuel revenue by tracking and supplying sales opportunities and leads. Marketing Automation Platforms drive SFA by supplying marketing qualified leads. But what drives the marketing activities and leads of Marketing Automation Platforms? Content!

Content is the fundamental currency for marketing automation.

Like a car without gas, marketing automation can’t get very far without content.

Content is needed for everything from a website (which is tracked by marketing automation), to email campaigns, to even pay-per-click landing page offers.

If not for content, many of marketing automation’s key components would cease to function. Drip campaigns come to a halt if there is no content to drip to leads. Lead scoring would stop without content for a lead to browse on a site. With no content, many demand generation campaigns would come to a halt because there would be no enticing offers for many lead capture landing pages.

Content is crucial to the customer acquisition process—so what tools and technologies can support this? There are myriad content marketing tools out there. But there’s still a need for a Content Marketing Platform (CMP) that sits on top of the Marketing Automation Platform and Sales Force Automation system. A CMP needs to supply content downstream to generate and nurture leads, that are then converted to opportunities and revenue by sales.

Similar to the pains that demand generation and sales teams have gone through in the past, many of today’s content marketers have little accountability and transparency in terms of how their content is performing. Their content and the associated metadata is often warehoused and stored in multiple disparate systems and spreadsheets.

Much like its predecessors, a CMP enables content marketers to:

• Have a unified, consolidated view of their entire content supply chain from ideation to production to promotion.
• Have top-down visibility on how their content is impacting lead generation and marketing pipeline, and sales pipeline and revenue generation.

With a CMP, content marketing managers suddenly have a data-driven and scalable way of managing their content supply chain and understanding their contribution to business growth.

Where Does a Content Marketing Platform Sit in the Marketing Technology Ecosystem?

The following figure depicts the location of a CMP in the marketing technology ecosystem. There are certainly many other categories and vendors within this ecosystem. However, these are the most important integrations and/or handoffs that need to occur for effective implementation of content marketing.

Who Sells a Content Marketing Platform?

You can find a lot of companies that may appear to have Content Marketing Platforms from a cursory view of their website. However, many offer point solutions and are more aptly described as content marketing “software” vendors, and/or don’t meet the broader definition provided at the beginning of this post.

We have assembled a list of the current vendors who have begun to solidify the vision of a Content Marketing Platform. Each of the following companies is further defined according to different categories to make it easier to distinguish each company’s area of expertise.

B2B Content Marketing Platforms:

Curata CMP
The Curata CMP Content Marketing Platform is designed specifically for B2B marketers to help drive leads and revenue from content. Key components to find in Curata CMP include strategy, production (e.g., calendaring, workflow) and analytics.

• Sample customers: Xerox, Lionbridge, RingLead, Yesler, Alcatel-Lucent
• Pricing: Starting at $999/month

Kapost
Kapost’s Content Marketing Platform allows marketers to collaborate, distribute, and analyze all content types within a single platform.

• Sample customers: LeadMD, ThermoFisher Scientific, AT&T, Dun & Bradstreet
• Pricing: $3,500/month

Eloqua (formerly Compendium)
This was a startup company acquired by Oracle in 2013. It has now been absorbed into the Oracle Marketing Cloud under the product name Oracle Eloqua Content Marketing.

• Sample customers: Eaton, Bass Pro Shops, Indiana University
• Pricing: $2,000+/month

B2C Content Marketing Platforms:

Percolate
Percolate is a leading social relationship management platform that also offers unique content management capabilities for large B2C companies.

• Sample customers: GE, Unilever, Chobani, Mastercard, Amtrak
• Pricing: $5,000/month to $15,000/month

Newscred
NewsCred helps brands manage the entire content marketing process on one platform. By managing content creation, distribution and measurement, it enables vendors to scale and streamline the entire customer experience.

• Sample customers: Pepsi, The Hartford, ConAgra Foods, VISA
• Pricing:  $2,950/month to $10,500+/month

Services-Oriented Content Marketing Platforms:

These companies by contrast, have a core value with content creation services that they either deliver or field to a marketplace of professionals. On top of the services, they have built content marketing software.

Skyword
Skyword’s motto is “Moving Stories. Forward.” Skyword provides access to a community of thousands of freelance writers and videographers, an editorial team, and program managers. The Skyword Platform makes it easy to produce, optimize, and promote content to create meaningful, lasting relationships.

• Sample customers: New Balance, MasterCard, Stack, GMC
• Pricing: Dependent on the volume of writing services needed

Contently
Contently meanwhile, helps you “tell great stories.” It helps leading brands build loyal audiences through premium, original content, and also offers software that lets marketers orchestrate content creation, approval, distribution, and measurement.

• Sample customers: GE, American Express, IBM, Walmart
• Pricing: $3,000 – $25,000 a month

The Future of Content Marketing Technology

The modern practice of content marketing has only recently begun to reach the masses. Organizations are beginning to staff their teams with content marketing experts, and processes are beginning to take shape to better tap into the power of a common focus (and investment) around content. The proliferation of content marketing vendors is therefore due to the many challenges (and opportunities) for marketers. In the future, the Content Marketing Platform will sit in the center of this technology landscape.

This will enable marketers to streamline their processes, and ultimately better scale content operations.

So, where to start? Look within your own organization to pinpoint specific needs. Do you have someone in place to lead content marketing? Have you developed a content marketing strategy in alignment with other parts of your organization? Are you using an editorial calendar to facilitate alignment and to help execute your strategy? Are you quantifying the return on your content marketing investment through more advanced metrics?

To help answer these questions and many more, download our free checklist to start scaling your content operations. This checklist will help you:

• Define content marketing and build internal support
• Develop a content marketing supply chain
• Consolidate and integrate marketing applications

This post was co-written by Michael Gerard.

Researching Whether and How to Implement an ABM Strategy

The sales and marketing teams coordinated our goals to justify the effort and resources required to build an account based vertical approach. We had to determine if a unique, referenceable, and identifiable audience existed for our product. And we had to feel confident we could create a repeatable sales approach that would yield sales wins at or above our inbound conversion rates.

The aforementioned elements are important because:

• Unique: If the story is the same for everyone, mass marketing tactics may work more economically.
• Referenceable: Are the customers happy and wanting to share their win? This validates the product/market fit and is a good indicator we’ll be successful.
• Identifiable: To build an outbound/ABM strategy, we need identifiable attributes that allow us to find the right accounts and contacts online. If the profile is too general, again, we’d be better off using other marketing strategies.

We broke the research phase into two main parts:

Should We Do It?

1. Do the acquisition economics make sense?
2. Is the use case/story unique or does it apply broadly?
3. Do we have advocates? Which success stories can we tell?
4. Is the industry a driver of success and/or are there other success attributes at play?

How Do We Do It?

1. Do we deeply understand the customer—their needs/pains/successes?
2. What support does sales need?
3. How will we measure success?

The Economics of an Audience

Curata’s first year average sale price (ASP) for our curation software is half that of our content marketing platform. So we questioned the additional investment in human and dollar resources required to run an ABM campaign. However, we had an ace up our sleeve—nearly a decade’s worth of customer lifetime data. We set out to understand our high lifetime value customer segments, where a higher initial acquisition cost could be offset. We cleansed our industry data using out of the box reporting in Salesforce.com, then compared days of lifetime/contract length by industry.

From here, we determined the minimum number of customers per vertical required to confidently consider them in our outbound plans. For example, we had one vertical with CRAZY long renewal rates, but only a few customers. We ruled this vertical out. We wanted to narrow in on our best bets to start, knowing we could always expand later. This process helped us filter 28 industries down to seven, where customers renewed for multiple years. These high lifetime value (LTV) customers offset the higher cost of our ABM strategy.

Is There a Unique Story?

Next we analyzed whether the use case was unique across these industries. We assumed that the act of renewing multiple years meant a customer was having success curating. But we wanted to understand if a particular industry was an attribute of success, and/or if there were other factors making these customers stick around longer. For example, if the attributes were the same across high lifetime value segments, then we may not need to tell an industry specific story. Rather, we could target a broader group with the same value based messaging.

To figure this out, we went back to our customer list in Salesforce and identified two to three customers for each of the seven high LTV industries. We then interviewed the Customer Success Manager for each account. In 30 minutes with each manager we captured:

• Business overview
• Their curation use case
• Main users and job titles/role focus
• Referencability. Were they happy and willing to share their story?
• Whether we already had a documented case study for this vertical

Interviewing our in-house team closest to these customers was incredibly helpful. It allowed us to better understand the various segments and the variety of users and needs. It helped us identify gaps in our collective knowledge that we needed to fill in to deeply understand how to craft an experience that would resonate.

At the end of this process—which took roughly a week—we were able to eliminate two more industries where we felt the use cases weren’t different enough from our broader marketing messages. Now it was time for deeper profiling and to validate the critical success factors at play.

Hot Takes: Four Practitioners on ABM

‘Don’t hesitate to collaborate’ should be the ABM mantra. The biggest mistake ABM teams make is not setting specific, quantifiable goals by account that are aligned with sales goals. This makes everything else so much harder. A close second mistake is not tapping into all the internal resources that can help Account Based Marketers get their work done faster from content teams to customer advocacy to influencer/analyst relations, data and analytics and more.

Megan Heuer, SiriusDecisions VP of Research

The biggest mistake they make is to forget to include sales in the planning process. Sales doesn’t want marketing to swoop in at the end with a to-do list. If sales truly is your partner, treat them that way from the start.

Joe Chernov, VP of Marketing at InsightSquared

The biggest mistake [in ABM] is in assuming that all audiences within the account need the same content at the same part of their buyer’s journey.  Some personas need to be inspired at the same stage as others need to be informed and educated.  Truly knowing the nuances of the different audiences can make all the difference.

Robert Rose, Advising Content’s Chief Strategy Officer

The biggest mistake marketers can make when developing an ABM strategy is to not allow enough time to ensure the strategy is working. As marketers in today’s digital world, we’ve come to expect almost instant results. In traditional demand generation, we can quickly A/B test, optimize, and change. While it is imperative to apply these same tactics in an ABM strategy, you need to give the campaigns extra time to win over large accounts—it’s very tempting to change tactics when you’re not seeing immediate action from your audience. In these large accounts, there are most likely multiple people involved in making business decisions. If you don’t allow yourself enough time to reach all of these people, you’re not giving your campaign a fair chance.

Rebecah Wiegardt, Account-Based Marketing Manager at GoAnimate

The Profile of Success: Which Factors Are at Play?

At this point, I rallied the marketing troops to help with the research. We divided the five verticals amongst the team and created a list of questions we wanted answered about the customers in each vertical. We went after information that was accessible online from their website or other public profile listings.

The relevant factors in our profile set included:

We set three research deadlines one week apart, followed by a group review of the profiles. At each review, a team member presented the profiles they had completed using Google Slides, and we discussed and documented trends and inconsistencies within our customer/vertical set.

We challenged ourselves to extrapolate the use cases and attributes we were uncovering, and to decide whether they applied consistently within the vertical. Or whether there was an even narrower sub-vertical or segmentation opportunity.

One instance of this was in Financial Services, where we felt the use cases and attributes we observed may not hold true in the majority of the industry. However, we found narrowing down to local branch banks, for example, could produce a more repeatable success model based on the other factors we observed. “Gut instinct and reasoning” may not be so popular in research these days, but in this case, blending brains, guts, and data—made sense.

At the end of the three week research process we had identified four industries with unique use cases and success attributes. We felt they represented solid candidates for our outbound/ABM strategy. Now we needed to determine:

• The appropriate scale of the initial pilot
• Which marketing and sales content already existed and/or was required
• Which tools and sales training was needed

How Will We Do It? Launching the Pilot

Taking a note from Curata advisor Mark Roberge, we knew to approach this test on a small enough scale that it wouldn’t interrupt other business functions. However, it also needed to be large and varied enough that we could collect the required data and rule out single-participant bias. I.e., if we only had one salesperson test it, whether they nailed it or failed it our results would be off.

The Initial (limited) Scope of the Pilot:

• One industry, reduced from four. We chose Trade Associations
• One marketing owner
• Three business development reps (BDRs)

We designated the marketing owner as the single source of feedback. And we created a rapid learn and optimize partnership with our BDR team. Then we had to coordinate sales training, identify target accounts, support contact discovery, provid email templates, listen to pitch calls, monitor performance data, and tweak and identify new content/messaging requirements for future phases of the pilot. Phew! Yes, even in limited scope, it was a lot of work!

Key Performance Indicators

To monitor progress, we planned to measure three KPIs:

1. Discovery calls: an in-depth conversation for both sides to learn more
2. Discovery call to opportunity creation
3. Opportunity win rate

The next step? Assess these KPIs against the historical performance of the same metrics within our inbound lead cohort and outbound/ABM cohort. We would deem this pilot a success if we could achieve higher conversion rates than our inbound channel, and similar results to our other ABM program (or better!). We calculated the funnel conversion rates using data from Salesforce, isolating for a set timeframe or cohort of leads.

Content, Tools, and Sales Enablement

Balancing a “pilot” approach with setting ourselves up for success was possibly the hardest part of the process. You don’t want to sink a disproportionate amount of resources into an ABM strategy without some indication it will be worthwhile. But if you under-resource—you could doom it from the start.

We did our best to balance this in real-time as we worked with the BDR team. We decided along the way what felt necessary versus nice-to-have, or to be developed later. From a content marketing perspective, we wanted to have at least one industry-specific item, and the ability to communicate with prospects in their “native tongue.” We did this with targeted emails and a targeted case study.

If things went well, we would create top of funnel blog posts aimed at trade associations and consider modifying top performing eBooks to include an excerpt for associations. (Here are some more account based content ideas.)

Here’s what we delivered as part of the pilot launch:

We leveraged our in-house tools for this exercise. These included Salesforce for account and contact management, SalesLoft to manage email and call activities, Engagio to observe target account activity, and ZoomInfo and LinkedIn Sales Navigator for prospecting.

Given their focus on B2B and tech, ZoomInfo and LinkedIn didn’t have enough contacts within our trade association target accounts. So we supplemented contact discovery with a specialized tool (free trial baby!) called Associationexecs.com. Using Google to identify our first set of accounts, we generated 300 targets and aimed to locate a minimum of two contacts each.

What We’ve Learned So Far

We’re a month into outreach and have already learned plenty about this industry:

• They actually answer the phone! We’re experiencing a higher than average call connect rate.
• Timing is key. Budgeting and purchase approval cycles happen annually and are quite rigid.
• Education is required. Content marketing and content curation tactics are relatively new concepts, so educational materials are helpful.
• Purchasing marketing software is new. Unlike B2B buyers, trade industry buyers don’t make many software purchases, especially for marketing. Making these buyers comfortable with the process is important.
• Locating contacts is difficult. Even with three different tools, it was hard to find appropriate contacts. The effort required was definitely higher than normal.

It’s still too early to call the final score, but if businessman, author and motivational speaker Nibo Qubein is right, we should be on the right track with our ABM strategy. As he eloquently puts it, “Nothing can add more power to your life than concentrating all your energies on a limited set of targets.” To measure how well you’re hitting those targets, download the Content marketing Metrics: Account Based Marketing Edition eBook.

Enter Curata’s Content Marketing Pyramid, a strategic framework enabling you to execute a content campaign, assuring optimal content consumption, reuse, and reach.

This hands-on guide teaches you what the Content Marketing Pyramid is, why it works, and how you can implement it within your organization.

Why Use the Content Marketing Pyramid?

In addition to providing a documented content strategy, the Content Marketing Pyramid:

• Improves your focus with an organized strategy that establishes clear goals and priorities
• Increases your production capacity by making more efficient use of valuable resources
• Creates a predictable stream of successful content to engage your buyers and drive pipeline activity for marketing and sales

DOUG KESSLER
Co-Founder and Creative Director, Velocity Partners  @dougkessler
“What happens when you create content without strategy? Usually, nothing. Content without strategy is like playing the lottery: who knows, you might win. Probably not. Ready, Fire, Aim!”

According to the 2017 CMI/MarketingProfs B2B Marketing Benchmark report, 60 percent of those with a documented strategy rate themselves highly in terms of content marketing effectiveness. This compares with 32 percent of those who have a verbal strategy. The Content Marketing Pyramid alleviates many headaches from ineffective content marketing. But if you operate without a smart framework it leaves you susceptible to the following consequences:

Chaos

You may be dealing with departments that operate in silos, a content strategy with no documented objectives, and a lack of communication between content creators.

How the Content Marketing Pyramid Can Help: This framework documents, centralizes, and coordinates all your content marketing efforts.

A Fractured Customer Experience

Readers experience inconsistent messaging and disconnected touch points. This leads to a lack of brand loyalty and dissatisfaction.

How the Content Marketing Pyramid Can Help: The Content Marketing Pyramid lends itself to cohesive messaging and centralized information.

NEIL PATEL
Co-founder of Crazy Egg, Hello Bar and KISSmetrics @neilpatel
“When you create content without a strategy you’ll find that you have tons of articles with little to no traffic. Roughly half of your time should be spent on strategy and marketing.” neilpatel.com

Waste

Because of the chaos and lack of communication, you’re constantly reinventing the wheel. When there’s little documentation, it’s easy to recreate similar pieces of content, instead of simply reusing or repurposing existing content.

How the Content Marketing Pyramid Can Help: This framework eliminates waste by streamlining the internal development process and ensuring every piece of content performs multiple roles across a variety of formats and channels.

Even if you aren’t experiencing any of the aforementioned consequences, content marketing is only about to get more competitive—and challenging. Take these stats for example:

• 70 percent of B2B marketers expect to create more content in 2017 versus last year, and 39 percent plan to increase their content marketing spend over the next 12 months. [CMI/MarketingProfs]
• In 2016, 42 percent of companies had an executive in their organization who was directly responsible for an overall content marketing strategy [Curata 2016 Content Marketing Tactics and Technology Study]

Since most marketers don’t have an unlimited budget, the best way to compete is to find ways to extend the budget and resources we already have. By implementing a strategic plan, you can create more effective content, enabling you to do more with less.

Start With Overall Content Strategy

Before we get down to the granular level of a content marketing pyramid—which is used to plan and execute a single content campaign—let’s zoom out a bit. Campaigns are byproducts of a larger strategy. We recommend developing your strategy on an annual basis and updating it quarterly to readjust for any changes in the marketplace or to your business.

DHARMESH SHAH
Entrepreneur, Author, HubSpot Founder and CTO @dharmesh
“A great strategy identifies who the content is being created for, why they’ll find it useful, how it will spread and what the goals are.”

It is important to remember your strategy is not driven by content: It’s driven by what you want to achieve with your content. The most successful teams ensure their content strategy aligns with their organization’s goals, and their CMO’s and related team’s goals. Here’s a helpful framework to form your strategy:

Corporate Objectives

Start with the top-level company goals your company’s leadership team defines. These serve as the basis of your marketing organization’s strategic direction.

Examples of top-level corporate objectives include:

• Increase share of mobile market
• Break into new geographic or demographic market
• Displace a competitor
• Establish [company] as a leader in [topic]

Marketing Themes

With the corporate objectives in place, set specific marketing themes to support them. Usually there are two to four global themes set by marketing leadership, each one focusing on key concepts, messages, and areas of corporate objectives.

For instance, if a corporate objective is to increase your company’s share of the mobile market, examples of marketing themes include:

• Empowering the mobile workforce
• Innovations in mobile
• Defining the mobile value proposition for businesses

Once you’ve established the themes, you can begin creating a content strategy through Content Marketing Pyramids. The next section is a deep dive into the anatomy and importance of these pyramids.

MARCUS SHERIDAN
Professional Speaker, Author, Founder of The Sales Lion  @TheSalesLion
“When it comes to content strategy, one of the biggest keys is that everyone in the organization, and not just the marketing department, can actually understand the darn thing. Too often in this space we use “marketing speak”—and the reality is marketing speak kills buy-in. It disinterests the Sales Team. It’s uninspiring to the organization as a whole. Words matter, and in this case, they need to be words everyone can get their arms around.”

What is the Content Marketing Pyramid?

Curata defines the Content Marketing Pyramid as:

The development of content and related assets intended to reinforces common messages/themes through multiple content formats, distribution methods and promotion channels across owned, earned, and paid media.

Each pyramid relies on Core Content. This is the heaviest, most valuable asset, consisting of thought leadership, primary research, and/or secondary research. The Core Content begats corresponding Derivative Assets and Promotional Micro-Content.

These highly intentional and focused content marketing activities and interactions help you move the needle on the big goals, from awareness building to lead generation to sales enablement.

The Content Marketing Pyramid: A Structural Overview

The Content Marketing Pyramid consists of five levels of content, organized into three main parts:

Level 1: Core Content

Core content is substantive, original content that involves research and/or deep insight. Use this primary research and thought leadership to create additional assets. These can include print books, eBooks, and guides that provide an in-depth exploration of the source material.

Such assets are the source material for the remaining assets in the Pyramid and are typically gated. All remaining assets in the Pyramid should drive your audience to this core asset and capture a lead.

CHRIS BROGAN
Best Selling Author, Journalist, Marketing Consultant; CEO, Owner Media Group @chrisbrogan
“People are suddenly drowning in “content.” What people need is helpful information that grows their business or life in some way. Great content serves the buyer and gently reminds them that you’re there to help.”

Level 2, 3 and 4: Derivative Assets

Assets derived from Core Content make up the middle of the pyramid. They take chunks of information from the Core Content to create more focused and precise pieces. They are more accessible and produced in a variety of formats, such as:

• Long form blog posts, presentations, infographics and SlideShares (Level 2 and Level 3)
  This content is usually not gated. Content from these levels should engage your audience and lead them to the gated, Level 1 content.

• Blog posts and contributed content (Level 4)
  Produce Level 4 content more frequently and routinely than Level 2 and 3 content. It should become a part of the weekly, if not daily, content production process. This content provides a different kind of anchor for your content strategy. It is the “bread and butter” of your content marketing. Blog posts are most common, but don’t ignore contributed content or bylines, a.k.a. guest posting on other blogs. Contributed content is key to spreading your message beyond the parameters of your owned media properties, improving your SEO ranking via backlinks, and to drive new readers back to your Core Content to generate leads.

DAVID MEERMAN SCOTT
Marketing and Sales Strategist, Bestselling Author, Keynote Speaker  @dmscott
“Don’t create content about your own products and services. Nobody cares about your products and services (except you). What people do care about are themselves and how you can solve their problems. People also like to be entertained and to share in something remarkable. In order to have people talk about you and your ideas, you must resist the urge to hype your products and services. Instead, create something interesting that will be talked about online. When you get people talking on the Web, people will line up to learn more and to buy what you have to offer.”

Level 5: Promotional Micro-Content

Finally, at the base of the Content Marketing Pyramid is promotional and conversational micro-content. Level 5 content helps build awareness for, increase consumption of, and facilitate conversation about all your other content. Level 5 includes social media posts and curated content. For more information on curating content, take a look at Curata’s Ultimate Guide to Content Curation.

Here’s a table further clarifying the differences and similarities between each level of the pyramid:

9 Benefits of the Content Marketing Pyramid

Not convinced yet by the Content Marketing Pyramid? Here are NINE benefits that will optimize the impact of your content marketing efforts, from awareness building to demand generation to sales enablement.

TODD WHEATLAND
Author, Speaker; Head of Strategy @ King Content  @ToddWheatland
“Creating content without a strategy is like building a house without a blueprint. The living room might be amazing, but it’s awkward when you forget to put in bathrooms.”

1. Unified Content Objectives.

One of the main purposes of the Content Marketing Pyramid is to align all content around corporate objectives and marketing themes. This framework helps share the strategy across all departments so everyone works towards the same goals and uses the same playbook for content creation.

2. Message Repetition

Marketing themes are most effective when they show the buyer a consistent message via multiple touch points. The Content Marketing Pyramid facilitates intentional repetition of key marketing messages across multiple channels.

3. Content Saturation

The most effective content marketing programs extend far beyond owned properties by distributing to earned and paid media channels. This framework allows you to repurpose existing content to fit these specific channels.

4. Format Diversity

While some people in your target audience may prefer learning by reading an in-depth blog post, others may be able to absorb content better via an interactive webinar or a podcast they can listen to on-the-go. The Pyramid encourages you to create multiple different content formats.

RAND FISHKIN
Author, Blogger, Founder of Moz and Inbound.org  @randfish
“When you have deep empathy for your audience (and their influencers), you can do a great job determining the list of tactics and channels. You’ll also have smart answers to the key question content creators must ask themselves to be successful: “Who will help amplify this? And why?”

5. Flexible Content Creation: Top to Bottom or Bottom to Top

Although the levels are the same across all Content Pyramids, which level you start from can vary depending on the specific circumstance. For example, you might begin your Pyramid with the development of a cornerstone research study (Level 1 Core Content) that you break down and repurpose into Derivative Assets and Promotional Micro-Content. Alternatively, some particularly insightful comments on a blog post or conversation on social media may inspire you to build up from the bottom of the Pyramid.

One of Curata’s most successful pyramids began as a long-form blog post and then expanded to cover all levels of the pyramid (The Comprehensive Guide to Content Marketing Analytics and Metrics). Of course, there are pros and cons to both the top-down and bottom-up methods:

6. On-the Fly Content Maneuvers

This framework allows you to take full advantage of unexpected content opportunities, such as newsjacking, event-related content, and jumping into spontaneous industry conversations. Such random acts can inspire entirely new Pyramids. You can also insert them into existing Pyramids.

7. Balanced Content Mix

The Content Marketing Pyramid also makes it easy to adhere to best practices for balancing all the different types of content. Using this framework, you can efficiently plan the right ratio of:

• Created vs. curated content (65 percent created and 25 percent curated, according to Curata’s study)
• High effort vs. low effort
• Owned vs. earned vs. paid media

8. Operational Efficiency

Use this framework to streamline and empower your internal operations by:

• Aligning all your content marketing activities with clear corporate objectives
• Providing both a long-term road map and a short-term operational plan for content development and distribution
• Unifying all your efforts and teams around a central content strategy and process
• Reducing lags and inefficiencies in your workflow
• Requiring the identification of clear and measurable goals and objectives
• Giving you a way to assign value to and measure the performance of each piece of content within a campaign

9. The Ultimate Reward of the Pyramid: Pipeline Impact

When you build out your content campaigns according to this framework, you create an upside down funnel that draws people in and drive them up from Level 5 to Level 1. At Level 1 you ask for their contact information for them to gain access to key pieces of Core Content. This generates new leads and new opportunities for your sales pipeline.

RYAN SKINNER
Content Marketing Blogger, Senior Analyst @ Forrester @rskin11
“Content strategy isn’t about each piece of content, but rather the sum of it. For small organizations or those with very charismatic and communicative leaders, a strategy may not even be necessary. But for larger organizations with a lot of forces pulling in different directions, a content strategy brings a higher degree of cohesion, quality, and value to the sum of the output. A great content strategy must make clear choices—this, not that. If you work for a product that’s an impulse buy, you may choose not to put too much effort into your search strategy (because no one searches for it). You will need to limit the number of formats you expect to support to a sane number. These are just examples. ‘More is more’ is not the stuff of a great strategy.”

Getting Started with the Content Marketing Pyramid

Step 1: Appoint a Leader

Pyramids require many people to be involved, but it’s crucial that a single individual is responsible for developing overall strategy. Curata’s Content Marketing Tactics and Technology study says that only 42 percent of companies have a content marketing executive who would likely be a candidate for taking on this critical role. 

Step 2: Build Support for the Pyramid Across Your Organization

Once you’ve established a lead, you can solicit support and feedback from the key departments in your organization. This could include the CMO, product marketing team, digital marketing group, social media team and overall marketing operations leadership.

Step 3: Establish Your Content Marketing Pyramid Workflow

The Content Marketing Pyramid workflow is a four-part cycle including: Strategy, Production, Distribution and Analytics. Below is a high-level overview of each step. These steps can be completed across multiple applications or through a single content marketing platform such as Curata CMP.

LEE ODDEN
Author, Speaker and Consultant; CEO, Top Rank Marketing @leeodden
“According to CMI and MarketingProfs, 68 percent of B2B marketers do not have a documented content marketing strategy. I would speculate that even fewer are using data to inform their strategy. Data about customers, the market, the company, the competition, search, social, Web analytics, best and worst performing content, SEO and CRO all offer opportunities to inform a more effective content marketing strategy. And don’t get me started about all the data and insights available through predictive marketing platforms like Everstring (a client of ours) and 6sense. Lots of people like to gamble. But when it comes to content marketing, guessing rarely leads to great things except unexpected surprises. That’s why the one thing I would use to increase our odds of content marketing greatness isn’t luck. It’s data.”

Pyramid Measurement

Operational Metrics: Introducing Pyramid Points

One of the main goals of the Content Marketing Pyramid is to optimize how you reuse and repurpose your content. Why? To maximize the pipeline impact of your content.

However, determining when and if you’ve created enough derivative content within a pyramid can be difficult. You may be wondering if there’s more you can get out of a specific eBook. To solve this problem, Curata developed the concept of ‘Pyramid Points’ to track and optimize the execution of your pyramids.

Pyramid points are a set number of points that roughly represent the effort needed to complete each content asset. Using pyramid points ensures you extract the utmost use from each pyramid, and helps you keep track of the progress or status of each pyramid. Here is how we weight each of our assets:

A typical content marketing pyramid may run for three to six months. If you start one pyramid a quarter, you may have up to four pyramids running at once. Use the pyramid points above to help you track how well you’ve repurposed a pyramid’s original content.

This helps you decide which pyramids to allocate resources towards. Here is a template and example of how to measure pyramid points and determine the overall progress of your pyramid. (This pyramid is 73 percent complete. You could invest more resources in completing this pyramid.)

Performance Metrics: Pyramids in Action

Pyramid points aid in the execution of operational metrics. The real excitement begins when you can determine how well your overall pyramid performed.

Based on a framework from The Comprehensive Guide to Content Marketing Analytics and Metrics, you should evaluate your pyramid across three dimensions:

• Top of the Funnel (e.g. social media, page views, retention)
• Middle of the Funnel (e.g. leads generated and touched)
• Bottom of the Funnel (e.g. sales opportunities generated and touched; revenue influenced)

Analyzing the performance of different pyramids can help answer the following types of questions:

• What impact has a pyramid made on your company’s revenue pipeline? Website traffic? Social media efforts?
• Which types of pyramids (and related content) perform well at the top, middle and bottom of the funnel?
• Why is a particular pyramid underperforming (or outperforming) other pyramids?

IAN CLEARY
Tech Blogger, Speaker, Founder of RazorSocial @IanCleary
“What is the one thing that makes for a great content strategy? Your promotion strategy. There is an ever increasing amount of content out there so without a good promotion strategy your content will not be distributed nearly as effectively. It’s not always the best piece of content that gets the best reach.”

Where to Go From Here

Content marketing is a long-term play with the potential to deliver a substantial return on your investment if you can build a smart content strategy and execute against it efficiently. Start by forming your corporate objectives and marketing themes, then take a first stab at planning and executing a Content Marketing Pyramid. We believe it can help take your content marketing practice to the next level, with a sense of confidence and ease you never thought possible.

For an even more in-depth set of instructions, be sure to download the complete 70+ page eBook on content strategy, The Content Marketing Pyramid.

This post was co-written by Curata’s former CMO, Michael Gerard.

What is Content Curation?

Curata’s definition of content curation is as follows:

Content curation is when an individual (or team) consistently finds, organizes, annotates, and shares the most relevant and highest quality digital content on a specific topic for their target market.”

At its best, curation is:

• Performed by a person, not simply a computer algorithm.
• Being discerning, discriminative, and selective.
• Added value. You offer perspective, insight, guidance.
• Not a one-time event or activity.
• Informed by a laser focus on your audience.

How Can Curation Help Your Business?

According to Curata data, leading marketers use a mixture of 65 percent created content and 25 percent curated content.

Why? The path to purchase used to be a straightforward line from point A (buyer need) to point B (conversion). It was easy for marketers to guide and even control a prospect’s journey along this narrowly defined series of steps.

The world is different now.

Buyers are hyper-connected today. They use multiple devices and channels to access an inexhaustible avalanche of information in real time. This buyer isn’t waiting for you to tell them what to do next. In fact, according to SiriusDecisions, 70 percent of the buyer journey is now completed without any sales involvement.

So, how are buyers making their purchase decisions, and—more importantly—how can you influence those decisions?

Enter Content Marketing

Businesses use content marketing to respond to this consumer environment. It’s a process for developing, executing, and delivering the content and related assets needed to create, nurture, and grow a company’s customer base.

However, as more businesses jump onto the content marketing bandwagon, it becomes more difficult for marketers to maintain the frequency and quality of content required to compete.

Content curation helps you compete effectively and efficiently, and provides unique benefits critical in today’s market.

Take a look at the infographic below. You’ll discover some of the biggest benefits of content curation. And you’ll also see how curation can help marketers overcome some of their greatest challenges.

To develop and maintain an efficient, effective, and ethical curation practice requires five primary activities:

1. Define your objectives
2. Find your sources
3. Curate by organizing and editorializing
4. Share via a variety of channels and mediums
5. Analyze and optimize your content curation performance

To learn more about content curation, including the five step process for starting your own curation program, download the eBook, Curate Content Like a Boss: The Hands-on Guide.