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Taking Your Content Creation Plan to the Max with Just One Killer Asset


Whenever we go deep into planning mode about our forthcoming marketing content – the question of how to optimize limited resources for content creation is always top of mind.

As marketers, we’re all looking to create and distribute marketing content that is relevant and valuable, that will attract and engage our target audience, and will ultimately result in action on the part of our buyer persona.

So where do we start? The first step, as with any other activity really – is to define our objective. Are we looking to bolster our thought leadership position? Generate new leads? Cross-sell/upsell into an existing database of contacts?

The answers to these questions will greatly impact the what (we create) and the how much (we’ll need to budget for it). If you’re super limited on budget you can focus (but not exclusively) on content curation, social sharing of 3rd party, valuable content with insights. And – if you are really strapped for time, don’t over-engineer what you your're going say about the content. Rather, as the CRO-centric saying goes - “spend 50% of your time on the headline, and the other 50% on the CTA.”

Some thoughts for the headline:

As for CTAs, check out the thoughts and stats I shared in this blog post on "What’s the Best Call-to-Action for Your Killer Marketing Asset?"

But, it can’t be all curation. Original content creation is critical for building credibility as a domain expert, even if you’re not going specifically for thought leadership.

The first step in the original marketing content creation plan is the content audit. Map all your assets and dump them into a spread-sheet. Your columns can have qualifiers such as:

  • Asset name

  • Type (e.g. brochure, infographic, video, etc.)

  • Funnel phase (i.e. does it support the top of the funnel, middle, bottom)

  • Persona (i.e. does it target IT vs. business, CXO vs. mid-level manager)

  • Messaging pillar (i.e. which of your main messages does it promote)

Once you have all of your assets mapped – you can know whether you have mostly top of the funnel content (e.g. short videos and infographics), and not enough bottom of the funnel content (e.g. white papers and ROI calculators), and plan your creation accordingly.

Similarly, you can do this for the rest of the qualifiers, e.g. too many assets targeted at IT and not enough at business?

Any content you create that has the potential to be sliced and diced into many other pieces of content should be prioritized. For example, if you run a survey (of as many of your persona’s peers as possible), you can create a data rich white paper, which you can then turn into an eBook, a SlideShare, an infographic, and blog post series, for example. And, of course – you will be able to share each of these assets with your followers and connections on all the social channels where you are active.

This way you’re hitting the funnel from top to bottom, you’re feeding your thought leadership position, and you can generate leads by gating the white paper. This can be your killer asset, and a killer asset is very important for meeting your content marketing KPIs – both for engagement and for lead generation.

Want to squeeze the most out of your marketing content? Get in touch and let’s do great marketing together >>

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