How We Accelerate Your Growth Using Content Marketing

This article will take you through the process that we use at BWD Advertising when we help you with your content marketing. It covers strategy, tactics, types of content, distribution platforms, and analytics (amongst other things). As such, it might take you approximately 15 minutes to read.

If you have been working on growth strategies to expand your audience reach, and content marketing is not a part of it, then you need to go back to the drawing board. Content marketing is all about creating and sharing material online with the purpose of enticing your target audience.

Content Marketing Strategy

Vison

The purpose is to have in place, a strategy that is specific to the company, and will speak to Johannesburg based law firm KlR Incorporated’s the target audience. In 3 – 5 years time, through content marketing, KR Incorporated will grow as a provider of legal services.

Target Audience

When we speak of target audience, we are referring to:

• Males and females (ages 18 – 55)
• Corporates looking for legal representation
• Social Media Presence ( Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn users)
• Entities or individuals with disputes or in need of legal representation.

Content Audit

Step 1 : Inventory Existing

KR Incorporated needs to have a strong online presence

• Fully functional Website
• Blogs
• Videos
• Social Media ( Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn)

Step 2 : Organise and tag your content

The website covers services offered such as:

• Litigation
• Municipal law
• Medico Legal
• Conveyancing
• Advisory Services

LENGTH

The Length of information provided is sufficient for anyone browsing the website to discover all services offered at KR Incorporated.

TONE

There is no legal Jargon used on the website. The tone is professional and content is easy to comprehend.

RELEVANCE

The content covers services offered by KR Incorporated. This is relevant to the audience as it provides information that can help them make an informed decision.

DATEDNESS:

Content on the website should stay relevant. The longer the lifespan of a post, the better it is for the firm. Content that remains relevant for a while adds a cost benefit.

FEATURES:

There is a need for diversity in KR Incorporated’s content. There’s a need for:

• Videos
• Illustrative imagery
• Infographics
• Proper Mark up
• Title Tags
• Meta Descriptions
• Headings

Step 3: Add success metrics

Measures should be put in place to track the success of online content. The following metrics should be accounted for:

• Traffic
• Engagement Metrics
• Social Shares
• Assisted Conversions

Traffic: On the web

• Google Analytics Results
• MOZ

Step 4: Analyze the data for patterns and gaps

Although KR Incorporated has an established footprint, there is so much more content that can be created which could help improve the current patterns. There is a large gap for videos, which KR Incorporated could capitalise on.

Setting Goals

• Create Videos
• Start Blogging
• Create Social Media Accounts
• Regularly monitor site performance
• Increase ranking
• Increase brand awareness

Align style with brand’s personality

Strategy document is a good place to record your brand, style and voice guideline. Depending on the size of your operation, this could be one sheet. It is recommended that you document as much as you need in these guidelines.

The documentation of guidelines for legal advisors needs to be details and specific. Style and personality needs to speak to corporates to avoid confusing the audience and straying away from the brand’s image.

Content and Funnel Marketing

The funnel consists of three parts:

1.   The Top: here a large number of people will become aware of your brand
2.   The Middle: here a few people will consider paying for your offering
3.   The Bottom: Here the number of people is even smaller. Here the people   consider paying for your offering but end up deciding not too.

The funnel speaks to three kinds of people in the audience- those who know nothing about KR Incorporated but are yet to discover, those who know about KR Incorporated but are only still considering paying for legal services and those who after considering KR Incorporated decide not to make use of KR Incorporated legal services.

Discovery: The Top of The Funnel

Goals: Indirect Customer Acquisition; Brand Awareness

Tactic: Educational Content, Viral Content

This is where you work at generating awareness for your band amongst potential customers and educating them about your offering.

Content marketing at this stage is used to spark an interest. People need to be enticed, drawn towards your brand. KR Incorporated is working at getting people to know about the legal services offered. The more they see and hear about it, the more they move it onto their list of trusted brands.

At the top of the funnel you need content that will work towards conversion, such as:

• Blog posts
• Webinars
• Big Content
• Comprehensive guides
• Videos
• Email Newsletters

Consideration: Direct Customer Acquisition

Tactic: Solution to Use- Case Challenges

At this stage, you are now associated with the solutions you offer. The audience targeted here is one that stands to gain from the legal services offered by KR Incorporated. Trust has not yet been developed so it would not be advisable to be aggressive with sales yet. Consideration content which may work to your favour includes:

• Case Studies
• How-to content (showcasing your products)
• Demo Videos
• Product descriptions and data sheets

Conversions: The Bottom of the Funnel

Goal: Transactions with Customers

Tactic: Product Descriptions and Unique Value Proposition

Here visitors are willing and ready to become customers. This is the final pitch stage, the point of transaction. The content here is more direct and straightforward. Products descriptions are clearer.

The best content to use to blow your audience away is:

• Testimonials
• Reviews
• A Streamlined, Comprehensible and Trustworth Sales Process

Retention: Beyond the Funnel

Goal: Retention of existing customers; advocacy

Tactic: Help, support and onboarding

The goal for KR Incorporated is to keep the existing clients, where all their clients will refer to them for their need for legal advice and representation.

Content here is:

• Customer Support and Help Documentation
• Special Offers
• Insider How-Tos
• Email Outreach and Follow-up
• Effective Product UX

Building a framework and a content team

One other very important aspect which contributes to the success of your entity is getting the right team on board. You will need:

How will the team change as it grows

With time there can be additions onto the team.

Choosing a Content Management System (CMS)

The is the interface you use to draft, publish and edit the content on your site. The following questions are relevant when making this decision:

• Who KR Incorporated stakeholders?
• How much KR Incorporated’s site will be managed by this CMS?
• What types of Media are supported?
• How much can KR Incorporated afford?

There are a lot of questions to ask and these are also influenced by the type of entity you are and the services you offer. As soon as you’re able to answer all these questions, you’ll be on your way to finding the best of solutions for your team.

Establish a framework for your analysis

The first thing to do before creating content is to ensure a framework for the analysis has been created. This involves setting up tracking analytics prior to getting started. This includes the likes of Google analytics which is very effective when used to track growth.

It is highly beneficial to measure other things as you monitor your new content. Aspects such as, traffic, bounce rate, time spent on site, shares and conversions.

Content Ideation

At the heart of a fantastic content campaign lies a brilliant idea. This translates to likes and shares by your audience. KR Incorporated ensures that time and resources are not wasted on bad ideas. The risk of having audience lose interest keeps the creative team on their toes.

Where Ideas come from:

The KR Incorporated creative team is aware that ideas are all around, the trick is channeling more focus to find the ideas. There are a few tricks to help make the process a lot easier:

Source 1: Swipe The File

Keeping a file of ideas that inspire you comes highly recommended, this file could contain images, approaches, technologies, to name a few. As soon as your file loses depth, revisit past ideas and work on recreating them. This has a great impact on your brainstorming sessions.

KR Incorporated makes use of various swipe files, in the form of emails, apps and even physical files. Pinterest, Trello and Evernote are some of the programs used to collect ideas. The best way is to find a way that convenient for you and suits your preferences.

Source 2: Successful brainstorms

Brainstorming is a common practice, however, not everyone who does it gets it right. Below are a few guidelines to help improve your brainstorm sessions:

• Avoid group thinking
• Be mindful of your brainstorming space
• Avoid questioning practicality during brainstorm
• Remember all ideas are good ideas at this stage

Participants

Brainstorming session first and foremost must be amongst two or more people who share a common goal. The less number of participants in one group, the more effective the session. In order to get fresh ideas, it would be advised to mix up the group of experienced brains with inexperienced brains. Members form completely different teams are likely to come up with preconceived notions.

Parameters

Outline all the important parameters from the start, yet do not continuously emphasise constraints.

Important things to remember:

• Unlock your creativity
• Keep an open mind
• Locate the spark
• Keep record of ideas

Source 3: Competitive research: Find out what’s working for your competitors

An important part of research is understanding what exactly it is that legal advisors are looking for. The key is asking the right questions like:

• What’s trending?
• What’s getting links?
• What keywords are the top traffic earners?
• Who follows whom and what do they share?
• What type of content are the Top brands writing?

Source 4: Horizontal Thinking

This may be known by some artists as tangential or lateral thinking. This often helps when in pursuit of a fresh take. A tactic that often works is using a keyword to get the creative juices flowing.

Content Freshness

While evergreen content is safe to utilise, the best way to manage the timeliness of content is to consider when the content will go live and what might be happening at that time.

Evergreen content might work for legal advisers as not much of the law changes.

Inspiration for boring/difficult Industries.

Law is understood to be one of the known difficult topics to write about. The truth is, there is no topic that’s difficult to write about if you understand the exciting thing about the topic. Everything is interesting to a specific audience.

Recognize the right idea

Selection of ideas from a long list can be tricky. You need to outline the specific information you’re looking for. This means you need to ask yourself the right questions:

• What bores you? Cross if off
• What fits within your parameters?
• What ideas speak to you clearly?
• Does this idea work for one piece of content or a series?
• Which ideas are impactful and relevant?

Target and provide value for an audience:

In order for you to give our audience value,you need to research and understand them. After narrowing your list of useful ideas, use the information about your audience to further select more relevant and brilliant ideas which could work.

Understand who needs legal advice, when and why. The more you know about your audience, the more you might be able to come up with brilliant ideas.

Build Personas

This entails creating a set of typical people to represent your target audience. To start you can collect basic demographic information. The point here is to understand the audience better.

Based on past and present experience, gather information around the common KR Inc. clientele and identify the pattern.

Understand your audience needs

Just knowing that a topic interests your audience isn’t enough. You have to understand their intent- what information do they want to gather from the topic.

Random Affinities

As soon as KR Incorporated is sure about their audience, the next step is finding content that will engage them. This helps build and strengthen the relationship you have with clients.

Avoid content Fatigue:

Content is published every single day. Choose your content wisely and avoid ideas which have been overused.

What makes good content and why content fails:

• Recent and relevant
• Long form
• Specifically targeted to a persona
• Evergreen
• Customizable
• Persona;
• Not created from the standard article

Content Creation

Editorial Calendar

A concrete schedule gives time and space for creativity. There are various templates to choose from, you can just select one that is suitable for your team.

You can ether go for the simple calendar

Alternatively, you can opt for the more complex calendar

Content Governance

This is vital to keep focused and on schedule. Governance outlines who is responsible for what- performance, updates, design, optimization and management of teams.

Finding Authors

This is someone who will write the content. You can either use in-house or outsourced authors.

Tools to help with content creation

• Editorial Calendars
• Ideation and research
• Format
• Illustration

Quality over Quantity

Mediocre content will hurt your cause

KR Incorporated needs to evaluate content. If the audience comes across poor quality on the site, this might affect the firm’s credibility, this resulting to loss of clients. To ensure quality, KR Incorporated needs to prioritize:

• Editing
• Proper Basic SEO

Working with design/development

Designers have different ways of doing things, this however doesn’t take away the importance of keeping track of the work they do. To do this successfully, you need to:

• Ask for feedback
• Check in
• Proofread
• Avoid conflict

Content Promotion

This is one of the most critical stages of marketing which not everyone gets right. Now that you’ve already built your audience, the following techniques will help strengthen this established relationship.

• Influence Marketing

Using the likes of Followerwonk, influence marketing is a good way to build your audience. This can be done by establishing relationships with expert influencers in the industry. Content marketing can even be included as part of the content creation process.

• Comment Marketing

This is a combination of relationship building and content promotion. The first step is scouring the internet for people who are writing content that’s related to content you’re covering.  Secondly, you engage in conversation with them in comments. You include links to articles you’ve written.

Guest Posting

If you guest posting, you need to find credible sites related to your industry. Make sure you write interesting content that will encourage people to seek out more content from your site.

Outreach/PR

This could include reaching out to media and bloggers to write about you.

Social Media

Your content and social teams should be closely aligned to your social teams.

Paid promotion

Covers a quite a few tactics which as a collective, are referred to as “pay-per-click” advertising. These include paid social, display ads, content distribution networks as well as paid search.

Syndication

To expand your audience, get your content syndicated by a more authoritative site with a larger audience. Making use of outreach channels also helps expand your audience.

Analysis and Reporting

Firstly, you need to identify what exactly it is that you’re analysing. Measure smart, combine the relevant metrics and understand them.

Core Metrics:

• Traffic Metrics
• Pageviews and Unique Pageviews
• Time on Page
• Bounce Rate
• Engagement Metrics
• Social Metrics

Creating Custom Metrics

A creative combination of standard metrics tell a more vivid story about your content.

• Average read depth
• Enthusiasm
• Applause, amplification, conversion rate

Conversion rates, ROI and the trouble with the funnel.

The chosen metrics should be able to tell you how well you’re meeting your goals.

To attribute conversions to content, individuals must be tracked from the top to the bottom of the funnel.

Reporting: Package your analysis for someone else

Reporting is a very common and effective way to convince people of the amazing work you’re doing.

Here’s how you create quality reports:

Step 1 : Know who you’re talking to

When compiling a report, bare in mind that different people will have different reactions to the final report. It is therefore important to be mindful of this and convey empathy and make the report specific to whoever will be reviewing it. Key questions to ask could be:

• What are their primary goals in business?
• How does your work affect their goals?
• How does what you’re reporting make them look good?

Step 2 : Ask them what they care about and would like to see

Draw a list of all the things they want. If some don’t have a clue what exactly matters, it is your responsibility to teach them.

Step 3 : Make sure you’re creating content that will help lead to those goals

Ensure that goals are aligned. When managers give you their list of items they look for in the report, make sure they are addressed.

Step 4 : Create a dashboard

It could be a dashboard in Google Analytics, An elaborate excel spreadsheet or any other tool you’ve found online. This dashboard must have your important metrics available.

Iteration, Maintenance and Growth

After you’ve gathered all the content and put it out there, now you need to build on the content for success.

Repurposing Content

This is more like using the same idea in more than one way. It works because you’re able to reach different audiences on different channels. Ensure that you customize your posts to suit every single platform you use. Take the following into consideration:

• Have original research that could be turned into a valuable.
• Plan for social during the design phase to create right-sized excerpts.
• If you have a visual how to guide, think of how you can also create a brochure or flipbook using the same artworks
• Document the “making of” process for your blogs so future clients can see what it’s like to work with you.

Evergreen Content

Content that stands the test of time is amazing because there’s less maintenance needed over time. However, it is important to keep reviewing content to keep up with the latest trends. You can also run keywords against Google Trends to track changes or replacements in phrases.

Social Listening

Social and content are a part of one ecosystem where social listening informs ideation, which improves content.

Scaling content marketing

Now that you know exactly what works for you and how to demonstrate ROI on your content, you’re ready to start scaling up your efforts. Work in the areas you’ve found to be successful but do not lose your sense of experimentation. Scaling is largely about improving your content and existing resources as well. If you’ve been neglecting other areas, it’s time to pay attention to:

• Fine-tuning your brand voice.
• Getting governance house in order.
• Hire more specialists than generalists
• Survey your content value