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There are a lot of elements involved in a successful marketing campaign, and each element must be analyzed for insights that will help you optimize your campaign. When we’re preparing a campaign for ourselves or our clients we perform the following 9 steps:

Use a tool like SEMRush to audit your website to find anything that might be wrong with it, and to identify potential improvements. Website audits look at the following:

• Missing pages.

• Missing meta descriptions.

• Broken links.

• Issues with content.

• Issues with images.

• Speed and other performance issues.

• Site Security.

Once you’ve audited your website, you'll likely have a list of problems to fix and optimizations to try. These might be simple fixes such as adding header text to pages, or more complex performance-related issues that require more time, analysis, and effort. Your website is your public face to the world, so invest the time and fix any problems. In the end, your site should be clean, uncluttered, and deliver a focused message that will drive visitors to become leads, and assist in turning them into customers.

Use tools like BuzzSumo or Social Animal to review the content published on your site pages, blog, and social media channels. Identify your primary content topics and categories and see how your audience has responded. This will help you see if the content you've already published is effective. This audit should examine the following:

• Messaging consistency about your brand, products, and services.

• Topics covered in relation to marketing and sales initiatives and other business goals.

• Keywords and hashtags use and consistency.

• Social engagement, mentions, and other metrics.

• Traffic, leads, and customers generated.

Figure out which topics your target audience is most interested in, and what type of content (blog posts, videos, infographics, etc) they engage with the most. Then take it a step further and see what content has generated the most leads and customers. That’s the content you want to make more of!

SEO is always evolving, but keywords are still essential for driving traffic to your content and website. Keywords are how people find companies, products, and services. Use a tool like SEMRush to research the keywords you’ll use for your campaign.

Focus on two things:

• Discovering the best keywords for your business and campaign.

• Making sure they are used correctly on your website, social channels, and in content.

Identify keywords you use now, as well as keywords commonly used in your industry, local area, and by competitors. From this list, select the best keywords for your campaign.

Find keywords that have a good monthly search volume and that illuminate the unique value a business offers. Once you’ve determined the best keywords, you can start using them on your website, social profiles, and content.

Use tools like SEMRush or Fan Page Karma to research your competitors so that you can learn from what they’re doing and differentiate your brand.

Look at your competitor’s:

• Keywords (there are even articles written about how to steal your competitor's keywords)!

• Social channels and promotion strategies.

• Content topics, posting time, and online engagement with their audience.

• Positioning and messaging.

Looking at how your competitors are positioning their products and services, can help refine your positioning and campaign strategy.

Now it’s time to apply everything you’ve learned to create a strategy with goals attached and key performance indicators (KPIs) you can measure. Remember that marketing activities should help achieve your brand goals such as growing revenue, or penetrating a new market segment. Your goals and KPI should reflect that.

The goals should also be SMART goals. That is to say, they should be:

• Specific because discrete goals are easier to understand and focus on.

• Measurable so that you can track KPIs to see if you're on track and adjust course if need be to hit the goals.

• Attainable so that your team has a realistic chance of hitting the goals.

• Relevant to those business goals so that your digital marketing efforts are meaningful to your business.

• Time-bound so that there's a defined period that you have to achieve the goal.

These types of goals are more meaningful to your business and will help your team focus on execution, and make tracking performance easier. You can even download a template to make SMART goal setting easier.

Take everything you’re learned about your customers and create or refine your buyer personas. These are detailed portraits of your ideal customer or customers that can be used by marketing team members to create relevant content for prospects at all stages of their buyer's journey. Buyer personas can also be used by salespeople to personalize outreach.

We're not going to cover the fundamentals of creating buyer personas here. Suffice it to say that having buyer personas is a must because it gets your marketing and sales teams on the same page, and focuses content, engagement, and outreach so that your messages reach and resonate with the people most likely to buy your products and services.

Remember that content marketing campaigns are about getting results. Your content should not only drive traffic to your website, but help your SEO, generate leads and sales.

To boost SEO, your content should focus on a pillar topic related to the products and services you offer. The content you create can then become your pillar content, and, through back-linking and content distribution, can boost SEO for those topics.

Whether running a traditional content campaign or creating a pillar page, start by defining content offers such as ebooks, whitepapers, strategy guides, checklists, and so forth that your audience wants. This is your gated content. Content offers should be deep and detailed, going beyond what you'd normally publish on your blog, and valuable enough to your target audience that they're willing to share their contact information to get it.

Once you've defined your content offers, plan blog posts and other content with topics related to each offer. To bring visitors in, publish your content to your blog, and surround that content with calls-to-action that lead to landing pages where visitors can opt-in to your content offers.

By now you should have a good idea of where your ideal customers are hanging out online. Those are the social networks, forums, and other online locations where you need to publish and promote your content. Plan to promote your content across all those channels. More than that, you need to promote each piece of content several times.

Mix your content with content curated from other sources. That will attract more prospects to your social channels as they will start seeing your company as a thought leader in the industry, and will see your online channels as a valuable resource for awareness and education. They'll keep coming back for more, and begin sharing your content, and content you curate.

An editorial calendar puts your content promotion strategy down on paper (digitally speaking). It documents what content is being created, when it's due, what channels it will be published on, and when. Editorial calendars are essential for keeping the content strategy portion of your inbound marketing on track.

The rest of this page goes into each of these steps in more detail, breaking the steps down by tasks, providing recommendations for tools, describing the information you should collect, and insights you should try to discover.

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There is more than one way to run a content marketing campaign and one of the decisions you must make early on when planning a content campaign, is the type of content plan you're going to run, a traditional content plan, or a pillar page content plan. The type of plan determines when campaign content should be created and published, how promotion will be performed, and the content offers that will accompany it. It’s important to examine the difference between the two strategies to decide if a traditional or pillar content plan is right for your marketing campaign.

The content plan is part of your content strategy, specifically its the written, visual, and video assets that you’re going to publish and promote as part of your campaign to raise awareness, drive website traffic, and generate leads. There’s lots to talk about when developing a content strategy, but that’s beyond the scope of this article. This article assumes you have the content strategy. Once you do, the content plan documents when each asset will be created, published, and promoted, and documents responsible parties at each step in the process.

What we’re calling a traditional content plan documents several pieces of content as well as other assets to be created and published during the campaign. To support inbound lead generation, a traditional content plan also includes landing pages with content or service offers for visitors to download or sign up for. These might include white papers, ebooks, lists, webinar registrations, newsletter sign ups or service registrations.

Typically, several articles and assets are created prior to the start of the campaign so that there’s a battery of content to promote from the start of the campaign. Additional content is created as the campaign progresses and adds to the content driving traffic to landing pages and offers.

While this approach isn’t by any means the same for all campaigns, it’s common because content takes a lot of time to produce. Even more so if you’re relying on people outside the marketing team, such as internal subject matter experts to create some of the assets. This approach provides the flexibility to launch the campaign, drive traffic to your website, and generate leads before all the content is completed. This approach is just fine for long running campaigns that span multiple quarters that focus on core products and services.

The idea of pillar content has been around for a while, but it started gaining more conversation in May of 2017 when HubSpot started releasing content about Topic Clusters and pillar pages driving SEO rank. Later that year, Jay Baer confirmed that “search was responsible for more website traffic than social.”

This was a seismic shift for search engines as they indexed content and parsed search queries to map search results to user intent.

HubSpot summarized the change in approach:

“Nowadays, most [people] are comfortable posing complex questions to search engines, and they expect an accurate and timely result. Searchers who want a specific answer also use many different phrases in their queries. And now search engines are smart enough to recognize the connections across queries. Algorithms have evolved to the point where they can understand the topical context behind the search -- [the searchers intent]. [Search engines] tie [those searches] back to similar searches they have encountered in the past, and deliver web pages that best answer the query.”

Simply put, search intent is key and search engines are becoming better at interpreting what people are looking for. This is where content pillars, or pillar pages come into play. A pillar page is a single web page that comprehensively covers a core topic. The pillar page content is built from related subtopics. Taken together, these subtopics form topic clusters around the core pillar page topic.

Within the pillar page are links to content pages that are related to that same topic. The subtopics published as part of the topic clusters link back to the pillar page and each other. This linking action signals to search engines that the pillar page is an authority on the core topic being covered.

See our pillar page on creating pillar pages to boost SEO for more information.

You can create two common types of pillar pages to boost SEO:

A resource pillar page which organizes links to internal and external links on a core topic into sections that are easy to navigate. This creates a helpful resource on a given topic by linking to the most relevant content. This type of pillar page improves SEO, even though many of the links may send people off your site which is not optimal for your business. You can, however, generate inbound links from the sources you include on the page.

The 10x content pillar page. This is the more common type of pillar page, and it’s the type of pillar page we prefer for ourselves and our clients. It’s a single page with comprehensive information about a core topic. The page is made up of your original content; you’re owned media. The best way to explain a 10x pillar page is that it’s an ungated content offer. What’s the quickest way to make a pillar page? Take an ebook you’ve written, deconstruct it and rewrite it so that it works as a single web page.

The key is to offer the content as a gated download in addition to the pillar page content. The ebook content is the same as the pillar page content.

“HubSpot did a study and found that 90% of website visitors prefer to read lengthy content in a PDF as opposed to a website page.”

So, even though a pillar page has all of the same information, you will still capture lots of leads from visitors who choose to download it!

In addition to leads, search engines will index the page, and see the links to it from your other published content improving your rankings and allowing your content to become the featured snippet for specific search queries. This will increase the number of people who find your pillar page, brand, and services.

A pillar page content plan is similar in many ways to a traditional content plan:

• The plan documents the content and assets to be created and promoted as part of the campaign.

• It includes content and other offers to capture leads and sign ups.

There are four major differences in a pillar page content plan:

• All the content is created at the start of the campaign.

• That content is offered in ungated form on the pillar page.

• That content is also packaged as an ebook for download so the content itself becomes one of the key offers and drivers of lead generation.

• The separate pillar page subtopics are published at the same time as the pillar page as individual blog posts with links back to the pillar page. These links will help improve your SEO rank for the topics and subtopics covered in the pillar page.

Even though all the content is created ahead of time, each individual article should be launched separately at some point in the campaign, with heavy promotion at first before moving into the standard rotation of campaign content. In this way, from a content promotion perspective, each subtopic gets its own time in the spotlight and provides a cadence to the larger story you’re telling on the pillar page. You can integrate this approach into other aspects of the campaign by publishing other assets and coordinating article promotion with other related campaign events.

So the key difference between a pillar page and traditional content plan is when the content is created.

With a pillar page content plan, all the content is created up front. Creating eight to 20 separate pieces of content prior to campaign launch is a heavy lift. You should also review content you already have to see if you can use it for the pillar page. We feel the SEO benefits your brand gets from the pillar page justify the lift. We also feel there are many more advantages to the pillar page approach.

When developing the content plan for your campaign, consider the pros and cons of a traditional content plan versus a pillar page content plan and choose the strategy that will deliver the best results for your brand. Once you’ve decided, it’s time to start collecting information and optimizing your online presence and channels for your campaign.

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As stated earlier, you should audit your website ahead of a campaign to identify and fix any potential problems, and to optimize your website and campaign specific landing pages for the campaign. Look for:

• Missing pages.

• Missing or incorrect headers.

• Missing meta descriptions.

• Broken links.

• Issues with content.

• Issues with images.

• Keyword usage.

• Speed and other performance issues.

• Security issues.

There are lots of tools out there you can use to do this including SEMRush, AHrefs, Moz, Raven Tools, WooRank, and SERanking.

It’s important to audit your site because these issues impact your brand in a number of ways. Some will harm your search rankings, making your products and services harder to find. Some will make your site slower, impacting on user experience. Poor user experience means lost prospects, lost leads, and lost customers. In fact, 88% of online consumers are less likely to return to a site after a bad experience.​ 

We audit client sites at the start of a new campaign and some of the common problems we find are detailed below.

You have to use keywords effectively, in the right places on your pages or your pages won’t rank well on search engines.

You can’t overuse keywords either. A tactic called keyword stuffing started years ago when sites inundated their text with keywords to manipulate rank. Search engines algorithms recognize this tactic now and will penalize you for it. Keywords make up less than 2% of your page text.

Search engines rank relevant content higher, and search engines don’t consider pages with low amounts of text to be relevant. One study found 600-700 words per page is optimal for SEO, a different study indicated 2000 words was the sweet spot. Other studies have shown the content’s association with backlinks plays heavily into the ranking factor. The more links to a page the better it ranks. Other studies have shown long form content gets more links. So, longer is better, but when will search engines penalize your rank due to length of text? Most sources indicate that pages with less than 300 words per page are considered “thin” by Google's standards and that may negatively impact rank.

Simply put, crawl depth is how many clicks it takes to get to a page on your site. Crawl depth comes from your site’s structure and navigation. Your home page, for example, has a crawl depth of 1, it takes one click to get to that page. Pages with a craw depth of more than 3 tend to rank lower in search engine results pages.

It’s simple: Broken links bad! Find ‘em, fix ‘em, delete ‘em.

And remember, broken links not only harm SEO, the hurt user experience!

Issues with Javascript and CSS that cause pages to be slow include:

• Uncompressed JavaScript and CSS: Fix it by enabling compression for these files on your server and files hosted on external sites.

• Unminified JavaScript and CSS: Fix it by removing unnecessary lines, white-space, and comments from source code.

Backlinks are important to SEO. When another site links to your site, a backlink is created. If, for example, a brand finds one of your blog posts that’s helpful for their customers, they might link to it. That backlink, as Moz puts it, is “vote of confidence” in your content.

Backlinks are important to SEO because search engines see all of those votes of confidence as evidence that your content is valuable. If lots of sites link back to yours, search engines are more likely to surface your content in search results, improving your ranking for the topics linked to. 

Earning backlinks is an essential part of off-site SEO and obtaining more backlinks is called link building. But like so many aspects of SEO optimization, link building is not straightforward. Most backlinks are good, some are great, and others are toxic. Too many toxic backlinks can harm your ranking.

While each backlink may be a vote of confidence in your site, links from trustworthy sites with high-authority are the best. They tell search engines that a trusted authority vouches for your content. Even a no-follow link from a strong site can give your rank a boost.

On the other end of the spectrum, links from sites with low authority, or ‘spammy’ sites may not help your rank. Toxic backlinks may not only harm you rank, but may lead to penalties from search engines.

What are toxic backlinks? Google states it like this:

AHRefs has a simplified explanation of link quality:

What Makes a Backlink Toxic?

There are several things the increase the toxicity of a backlink in from a search engines perspective including:

• Low domain trust score. This is based on the number of backlinks from trusted domains to the domain providing the backlink. A low rank means the site’s domain score may be artificially inflated. 

• Mirrored pages. If similar pages on multiple sites are linking to you from the same anchor text, search engines may see this is a link building scheme.

• Page layout. If the ratio of visible text to HTML is low, the linking page may be seen as poor quality.

So what’s the impact of bad links?

If you get penalized, it reduces your page rank, decreasing the chance your content will be found, or, if the penalties are bad enough, you’ll be removed from the search index altogether.

Penalties are assigned in two ways. Google introduced its Penguin algorithm in 2012 which targeted low quality links. Sites using link building schemes saw rankings plummet. Since then Google has refined the algorithm making it better at catching and penalizing bad links.

If Penguin sees a link toxic link, it will apply a penalty based on your link profile. No human reviews this.

In addition to Penguin, Google has added more human resources to their spam team who can manually penalize sites that have toxic backlinks. According to a Search Engine Watch article, Google initiates over 400,000 manual actions a month. 

Manual link reviews and penalties might be triggered by:

• A spam report from a competitor

• Algorithmic activity from Penguin triggers a manual review.

• You’re in a niche that Google’s spam team activity monitors.

You can request reconsideration for manual penalties, but we’ll talk more about that later.

How can you determine if you have toxic backlinks?

There’s not much you can do about algorithmic link penalties, you just have to improve your site’s overall link profile. Manually applied penalties will show up in Google Search Console under Security and Manual Actions > Manual Actions.

If a manual action, it will appear here with a generic description of the issue, a link to learn more, and a button that allows you to request a review.

It’s often easier to use an SEO site audit tool to find toxic backlinks. This may be especially true if you haven’t checked for toxic links in a while (or ever). Tools like SEMRush, AHRefs can provide this information. The following screenshot is from a SEMRush site audit report:

You can drill into each link listed as toxic to get more information:

How can you fix toxic backlinks?

There are many ways to address toxic backlinks. You can contact the administrator of the linking site and ask that the link be removed. 

If the link is valid, and the penalty has been manually activated, you can request a review. According to a Search Engine Watch article, Google processes about 20,000 reconsideration requests a month of the 400,000 manual penalties applied. It takes about 30 days to get a response.

If the backlink isn’t important to you, and you don’t want to perform the manual outreach to have links removed, you can use the Disavow Links tool. 

Follow the steps from Google Search Console Help:

Make a list of links you wish to disavow following the formatting listed in the help article. 

And Upload your file.

Making sure backlinks to your site are high quality and follow Google’s rules is an essential aspect of website administration for SEO. Audit your backlinks every six months at a minimum, and prior to each campaign. If you get a link related notice of manual action on your site in Google Search Console, follow the tips above to resolve the issue or disavow the link. 

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Great content, published the right way, on the right channels can bring high quality prospects to your website that you can convert into customers. The key phrase is well-executed. Content has to resonate with the feelings of your target audience, reach prospects in their preferred online hangouts, and be optimized for SEO so it gets discovered in the first place. That’s why we perform a content audit when preparing for any campaign. A content audit looks at the content, how it’s published, and the interaction and engagement it generates from their community and prospects.

Tools like SEMRush, Fan Page Karma and others will show you your best and worst posts, keyword data, hashtag use and provide easy-to-use reports. You can also get much of the information we’ll look at from Google Analytics, and social network analytics such as Facebook Analytics and Twitter Analytics. Your social media management tool also likely has analytic data that you can use as part of your content audit.

Finding your best and worst posts allows you to see what content has performed the best for you, and which posts haven’t done well. In Google Analytics use the Behavior > Site Content > Content Drilldown and select the path for your blog or landing pages.

We’re firm believers in using pillar pages to boost SEO rank for your core services, but many brands don’t know about this or understand how pillar content can boost SEO.

The concept is straightforward, create content on a single web page broken into sections by topic and subtopic. Publish the page, then publish each subtopic as a separate article. Each article should link back to the pillar page. It’s essentially an ungated ebook, published online, with portions of the ebook published on your blog or other media outlets that link back to the pillar page.

A tool like Fan Page Karma can also show information by how popular your posts are on your social channels. You can then select your most popular posts to see the content.

How to use this information:

The advice about this information is simple, create more posts like your best content, and fewer like your worse content. But the analysis and execution of that simple advice is more nuanced.

Look at everything about both types of posts. Determine the topics covered, the type of content your audience engages with, the length of content, what channels it’s published on, keywords and hashtags used, and how it was promoted. Find the similarities to determine: 

• The topics your audience is most interested in.

• The channels and promotion that generates the best results.

Troubleshoot your weak posts. Look at the same information and see if you can figure out why your audience isn’t engaging with this content. Maybe the topics aren’t compelling, or the type of content isn’t engaging enough, or is just too long.

• Look at the length of text content? If long posts aren’t getting traction, try splitting them into shorter posts.

• If your text content contains a lot of statistics, consider presenting the information as an infographic. 

• Look at ways to incorporate video, it gets more views and engagement.

• Compare how content is promoted including the networks published to, times of day, day of the week. We found longer content does well on LinkedIn, but less well on other platforms. We also find many clients don’t do enough continuous promotion. Republishing content links or highlights from your content at different times on different days is a great way to keep your content top of mind on your social channels.

Sometimes people confuse tagging post with @mentions. Most social networks prefer you to tag people you are with at events, in images and posts, and to use @mentions to talk about someone, a topic, solicit feedback, or ask for action. You can usually only tag personal profiles, but can mention personal profiles and brand or business pages and accounts. 

The benefits of using @mentions is that the mentioned person gets a notification, which is an invitation to engage online. You’re also potentially putting your content in front of their fans and followers. When done correctly, it can be a savvy way to increase reach, and engagements, and build influencer relationships.

You can @mention on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Instagram and you should be including some @mentions in your posts, although many brands don’t. Use them to:

• Engage experts and influencers by @mentioning them on articles and posts about topics they are interested in. This can help you build relationships with and reach their followers.

• Invite customers and followers to share their experiences and stories to create conversations and user generated content.

• Promote events asking attendees and restaurants to share their experiences and by @mentioning attendees when sharing images about events. 

• Run contests and name winners with @mentions, or require @mentions to claim prizes.

You should be using hashtags to related the content you publish to topics, trends, an events important to your brand, industry, and audience, and to coin catchy phrases as part of a marketing campaigns. People search for hashtags find content, and when hashtags inspire people they get reused, start to trend and can help content go viral. 

People tend to think of using hashtags on Twitter and Instagram, we also include them on Facebook and LinkedIn posts as those platforms track them as well.

Hashtags are about more than the chance of going viral, they should be an essential part of your brand identity. Brands on Twitter see a 50 percent increase in engagement versus brands that don’t and tweets that include hashtags are 55 percent more likely to be retweeted.  

Hashtags can be used in various ways from tagging keywords related to you content, topic, or industry, to coining catchy phrases as part of a marketing campaign. Hashtags are used by various tools to find content, and can when they catch on and start to trend on platforms can help content go viral. 

Some think hashtags are only for Twitter and Instagram, we also include them on FB and LI as those platforms track them as well.

Content audits often identify the following issues with hashtag use:

• No use of hashtags. Astonishingly, this is still a problem. 

• Inconsistent use of hashtags commonly used of their topic or industry.

• No use of branded hashtags for campaigns and events.

• No coordinated hashtag plan across all of their content and channels.

Hashtags are an essential digital marketing component that requires research and a thoughtful strategy for use:

• Identify hashtags, and hashtag variants for your industry, niche, or topic. 

• Find keywords that are trending and include them in relevant content to piggyback off of the trend.

• Find keywords used by influencers to establish a synergy with them.

• Create catchy brand-specific hashtags for campaigns, contests, events, and products. 

• Turn campaigns into online communities by continuing to use branded hashtags to connect, communicate, and chat with your community.

Use tools like Keyhole or Hashtagify.me can help you find keywords for your content, show trending keywords, and track specific keywords for your brand.

Pick a tool, do your research, and select a set of hashtags for your common topics, and create brand-specific hashtags for each campaign. Use them across all your channels consistently. Use as many hashtags as you like on Instagram, but limit them to 4 or fewer on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.

Media outlets and many blogs publish best time to post articles to let you know when the posts get the most engagement on social networks, and they’re all wrong. We’ll maybe not wrong so much as not very right. Those posts are based on generic data across all topics and industries. You can only find the best time for your brand’s posts by analyzing your brand’s data.

Social content audit tools can show you when your fans and followers users are online providing better information about when you should publish content.

Use tools like FanPage Karma to view performance of competitors social channels.

Develop posting schedules for each of your channels based on when your audience engages the most!

We’re firm believers in using pillar pages to boost SEO rank for your core services, but many brands don’t know about this or understand how pillar content can boost SEO. 

The concept is straightforward, create content on a single web page broken into sections by topic and subtopic. Publish the page, then publish each subtopic as a separate article. Each article should link back to the pillar page. It’s essentially an ungated ebook, published online, with portions of the ebook published on your blog or other media outlets that link back to the pillar page.

You have to do it right. You have to do keyword research to find topic and subtopic keywords that have good search volume and then create the content. If you want to know how to do the research, see our pillar page on creating pillar pages. The hard part is often the content creation, what many brands don’t realize is they may have already created content which can be refactored into pillar pages. Ebooks you’ve created are great candidates for conversion to pillar pages. 

If you don’t have ebooks, your content audit is where to look next. Take the itemized list of the content, and organize it by topic and subtopic. They do your keyword research to find related keywords that matter to your audience, and update the content using those keywords and generally refreshing it. Viola, you’ve got a pillar page!

Content audits help brands see what types of posts get the most traction and can improve the publication and promotion process by identifying the need for using @mentions, and hashtags consistently. An audit can tell you the best times to post on each social channel, and help you identify content that can be grouped into pillar pages. Performing a content audit provides you with valuable insights that can help you create more content your audience likes, achieve better reach, drive more traffic, and generate more leads.

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By this point, you know that performing a digital self-examination can improve your digital marketing and sales performance, and can help you optimize your campaign strategy. Looking at the same information about your competitors can also provide valuable insights by helping you see your audience and industry challenges through a different set of eyes.

That’s what a competitor analysis does, it examines how your competitors’ addressed the same marketing challenges you have, and what worked and what didn’t. Looking at your competitors can help you position your products and services in a specific niche, or compete head-to-head with messaging that plays to your strengths. We believe performing a competitor analysis is essential when launching a new product or entering into a new market space, industry, or vertical.  

To analyze your competitors' digital marketing performance you should:

• Examine website traffic, traffic growth, backlinks and their most popular pages.

• Content on their website, blog, and published on social channels.

• Advertising content on both search engines and social networks. 

• Keywords on their website, in their content, and used with their campaigns.

We recommend the same tools to analyze your competitors that you use to analyze yourself:

• SEMRush: For SEO and website audit, backlink, and keyword research. SEMRush offers some traffic analysis and competitive intelligence add-ons that allow you to perform much deeper research, but we believe these tools can provide great insights into how your competitors are marketing and positioning their products and services, and, more importantly, what’s working with their audience. Other good tools are Ahrefs and Raven Tools. 

• BuzzSumo: For content research. BuzzSumo can help you identify how your competitors’ content has performed, and how they’re taking part in digital question and answer sites.

• Fan Page Karma: For finding content and engagement information about your competitors, including which content has been most popular with their audience, what channels and posting times get the most engagement, what topics have been most popular, and identifying questions and issues their audience has which may provide opportunities for your brand.

Analyze the traffic to competitor websites to discover how many visitors they have, unique visitors, pages per visit, visit duration, and bounce rate which tells you how much traffic your competitors are getting, if visitors are finding the site content useful enough to stay on the site, and which content is most popular.

You can also see how visitors are finding their way to your competitor’s website.

One of the most important things you can learn is which of your competitor's website pages are most popular.

Seeing which landing pages are working best for your competitor can tell you which products and services have a successful online presence, and which don’t. That can inform your approach to marketing products and services, and to how to run your campaigns.

Backlinks help build your domain authority and improve rank for topics linked to by authoritative sites. Your brand’s SEO efforts should include a link building component. Tools like SEMRush and AHRefs allow you to perform a backlink gap analysis to domains linking to your competitors, but not to you. This will inform and improve your link building efforts.

Analyzing your competitor’s social media activity can tell you which channels they use for promotion, how they’re positioning their products and services, and what content and messages have received the best reception from their audience. It can also help you find gaps in their promotion strategy which can provide an opportunity for your brand.

Tools like Fan Page Karma can provide competitive intelligence on competitors’ social media activity.

You can see the channels they’re using for promotion, how active they are, the growth in their presence on the channel, and how actively they’re engaging with their audience.

You can also see the content they’re publishing, the topics they’re talking about, and which of those topics is of most interest to their audience.

One of the most important things you can learn from your competitors are what keywords they’re using and which they’re ranking for. Your website and campaign content should be focused around a core set of keywords that will help your target audience find your site and content when looking for the solutions you’re selling.

Your competitors will also be using and trying to rank for relevant keywords.

Another great feature offered by SEMRush and other tools is the ability to report frequently asked questions related to keywords and domains.

Analyzing your competitors advertising information can save you a lot of time researching and formulating critical campaign elements like keywords and ad copy, and help you position your products and services more effectively.

A tool like SEMRush can show you traffic estimates, keywords, and cost estimates for paid search traffic, display advertising, and product listing ads.

You can see position changes for keywords used by your competitors.

You can even see competitor’s ad copy.

In a different article we discussed how analyzing your own content can boost your digital marketing performance and in that article we talk about identifying your best and worst posts and determining the best time to post on social networks. You can find the same information about your competitors.

While you should look at the stats about your competitors content, the best value will come from close examination of the content itself. When looking at your competitors best content, you can see if similar topics are a good fit for your brand, and see the type of content their audience likes to consume. You can also discover gaps in content coverage, and frequently asked questions which your brand and address in it’s content campaign. Look at their poor performing content to try and determine why it didn’t resonate.

We do a competitor analysis for any new campaign and you should too because it’s like looking at the other team’s playbook before you go out onto the field. It allows you to develop a campaign strategy and messaging that differentiates your products and services, accentuates your strengths, and positions you to win against the competition.

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Keywords are an important part of any campaign. Moz has perhaps the best succinct definition of what keywords are and what they do:

Keywords are ideas and topics that define what your content is about. In terms of SEO, they're the words and phrases that searchers enter into search engines, also called "search queries." If you boil everything on your page — all the images, video, copy, etc. — down to simple words and phrases, those are your primary keywords.

As a website owner and content creator, you want the keywords on your page to be relevant to what people are searching for so they have a better chance of finding your content among the results.

The key part of that definition is the last two clauses, “you want the keywords on your page to be relevant to what people are searching for so they have a better chance of finding your content among the results.” You need keywords that your prospects use, that apply to the topics your content covers, and that you can rank for. We’ll discuss how to find your keywords in a minute, but first we need to talk about another consideration - pillar pages.

As stated earlier, pillar pages cover a topic in-depth with 8-20 articles. We prefer pillar page content campaigns because they drive traffic, and boost SEO for your core services. A pillar page is the ultimate in SEO optimized long form content and before your keyword selection is tied to the topic and subtopics that your pillar page will cover.

When brainstorming pillar page topics consider selecting a core topic around:

• Services you provide. What services do you provide or products do you sell? Look at your website's 'solutions' or 'services' page for inspiration.

• Problems you solve or opportunities you provide. How do your services solve problems or create opportunities for your customers? Look at customer evidence like case studies, customer quotes, and recommendations for inspiration.

• Specific industries, verticals, or niches you serve. What specific segment do you serve and how do you differentiate yourself from your competitors? Look at your website's 'industries' or 'clients served' page or your list of clients for inspiration.

• Emerging industry needs or shifts. Is there a change that's happening or about to happen in your industry? Getting out in front of changes with great content and information to educate your audience will bring in leads and customers. Look at trending topics on news sites for your industry or use tools like Buzzsumo to find emerging trends.

If nothing is jumping out at you, leverage your internal staff and customers to brainstorm potential topics. Get help from:

• The sales team. Get a list of the top questions they answer. These answers may help you create a 'benefits' pillar page.

• The helpdesk team. Get a list of the most common problems they help customers solve. This also might be used as part of a 'solutions' pillar page.

• Ask your top clients. Ask why they chose you, or continue to work with you. These answers may help you build a 'why customers love us' pillar page.

• Ask executives about company focus. Executives usually have a clear idea of why the company is going in a certain direction or investing in specific technologies. Ask them what and why. Their answers may be a jumping off point for creating either a 'solutions' or a 'how we’re different from our competitors' pillar page.

• Poll Employees. Employees talk to people. Ask them how they explain the unique value your brand brings to the table. Again, the answers may serve as a starting point for either a 'solutions' or a 'differentiation' pillar page.

If you're doing it right, the topic will be something your subject matter experts, marketers, and salespeople talk about frequently and love to talk about. That will make content creation easier. It will also provide a number of additional benefits while you’re team is developing content for the pillar page and after it goes live.

Once you have those topics, you have to return to keyword analysis. This is where boosting SEO with topic clusters connects with old-school keyword research. You want to find the best keywords that map to your core topic candidates. The best keywords will have a good monthly search volume and be relevant to your business and the personas being targeted. Beyond that, you need to define related subtopics that are extensions of the core topic.

Research Key Metrics for Core Topic Candidates

Start by looking at the following metrics for your topics:

• Domain Authority: Domain Authority (DA) is a search engine ranking score that predicts how well a website will rank on search engine result pages (SERPs). Scores range from 1 to 100, with higher scores being better. To learn more see this Moz article.

• Monthly Search Volume: This is a measure of the total number of searches through search engines over a given time period, often the previous 12-months. The more search volume the better, but, remember, you want long tail keywords. You won’t be able to rank for keywords like “marketing,” but you might rank for “boost marketing with pillar pages.”

There are several tools that can help with this:

• Small SEO Tools Domain Authority Checker will show the domain authority for your domain, and domains you're linking to.

• Searchvolume.io tells you the search volume for any keyword (Google Keyword Planner will also do this if you have an AdWords account).

• SEMRush will tell you search volume as well, and also has a number of other features to help you find similar keywords, and to research keywords used by your competitors.

Compare your core topic candidates to see which your domain ranks better for, and which has higher monthly search volume. Use a robust keyword tool such as the Google Keyword Planner or SEMRush to help you find similar search terms. These other search terms may be more commonly used and have better monthly search volume than your original keyword candidates.

For example, if one of your core topic candidates was ‘cloud computing training,’ you may find that the term ‘cloud training’ has a much higher monthly search volume.

Choose the best performing candidates to be your core topic and subtopics. Find a keyword or phrase your target audience uses regularly, and that has good search volume that your domain can rank for.

Once you choose your core topic, quickly make a list of 8-20 subtopics that support the core topic. Subtopics don’t need to include the core topic words but should include synonyms and closely-related words. For example, if the core topic is cloud training, then your subtopics might be:

• Cloud migration training

• AWS training

• Azure training

• Google cloud training

• Cloud security training

• Cloud administration training

• Cloud automation training

• Cloud adoption barriers

As with core topic keywords, you’re looking for keywords and phrases your target audience will use when searching for your products and services.

Before you finalize your core topic and subtopics, take your research a step further and return to your competitor audit and find the keywords your competitors are using, and the topics they’re talking about, this may inform the keywords you’ll use for topic and subtopics, and for your campaign.

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Now that you’ve audited your site and content, completed your competitor analysis, and done keyword research, it’s time to take the information learned about the audience you’re targeting and their buyer’s journey and document it by creating new buyer personas for use with your campaign, or updating the buyer personas used across all your campaigns. What is a buyer persona? We like Hubspot’s definition:

A buyer persona is a semi-fictional representation of your ideal customer based on market research and real data about your existing customers.

When creating your buyer persona(s), consider including customer demographics, behavior patterns, motivations, and goals. The more detailed you are, the better.

Collecting and documenting this information about your ideal customers provides structure and consistency to both marketing and sales outreach. It allows you to deliver the best leads to sales, and the best messages and content to prospects to close more business. When combined with lifecycle stages, knowing where prospect leads are in their buying journey (how far down your sales funnel they are), buyer personas also allow you to map out and create highly targeted content. Taking this to the next level, you can create even more detailed Funnel Stage Personas that include extra detail about your leads, beyond common goals and objections. This can include common decision making criteria, and competitor information that can make your content, and communications very effective at every stage of engagement.

The data you’ve already collected is important to fleshing out your buyer personas, but you’ll also want to talk to salespeople who will have valuable insights about why their customers buy, and to the customers themselves to discover their perceptions about your brand’s products and services and how you stand out from the competition. We will touch on the fundamentals of creating buyer personas here, if you want more detailed information, step-by-step guides, and templates get our ebook: The Essential Guide to Creating Buyer Personas.

Creating good buyer personas takes time and research, but the results you’ll see are worth the effort. Create or update buyer personas activity prior to launching any marketing campaign, especially content focused campaigns. We do it for every new retainer client, and at the start of every campaign.

A well put together buyer persona will contain the following information:

• Background, including job, career path, and family information.

• Demographic information.

• Identifiers such as demeanor, and communication preferences.

• Real quotes from people who fit the persona.

• Marketing messages and elevator pitches for each stage of the buyer’s journey.

• Common objections and responses.

• Funnel stage evaluation criteria, how to position your products and services to win.

• Funnel stage decision criteria, how to get them to buy.

You should also create negative personas, prospects who aren’t a good fit to buy your products and services so that you can disqualify these candidates early in the sales funnel. This will help those prospects moving onto products and services that are a better fit, and let your sales team focus on prospects that are more likely to buy.

Four tools that we use to discover information about our ideal clients are:

Google Analytics

Use Google Analytics to discover the following about how your customers are using your website:

• See visitor demographics, interests, and geographic data.

• See traffic sources, to figure out how your customers are finding your website and the sites that are referring customers to you.

• Identify the social networks that are driving customers to your site, publish your content on these channels to reach prospects.

• See which pages perform the best and drive the most conversions, this shows the type of content your ideal prospects find most compelling.

SEMRush

• Find referring domains to see where your prospects hang out online.

• Monitor for brand and keyword mentions and see how prospects interact with you online.

Fan Page Karma

• See the topics, content, and challenges that interest your prospects the most so you craft content that speaks to them.

BuzzSumo

• See popular content topics and types of content, outside of your channels and your competitors’ channels. Discover where this engagement takes place, and plan outreach on those channels.

• Find common points of interest and gaps in knowledge for prospects.

• Find influencers your prospects engage with and establish relationships with them.

When working with clients, we find that the personas in use sometimes come up short. They might be good at informing top-of-funnel (TOFU) content. However, they do a poorer job informing middle-of-funnel (MOFU), and bottom-of-funnel (BOFU) content. MOFU and BOFU content, and content offers are critical to turning leads into opportunities and opportunities into customers. We like to create what we call funnel stage personas that help you create the right content for each stage of your sales funnel.

If you're thinking about how to generate leads with inbound marketing, we have lots of free resources to help you get started! 

Some sales funnel fundamentals are in order at this point:

 There are different stages of the funnel, and each maps to different types of content:

• Top-of-Funnel (TOFU). Content at this stage educates users about problems (those challenges faced by your personas) and solutions. In this awareness stage, prospects are doing research and looking for answers and insights.

• Middle-of-funnel (MOFU). Content at this stage needs to explain your unique value proposition. How your service solves your persona's problem, and why your solution is better than your competitors. At this stage, your leads are evaluating solutions to figure out which is the best for them.

• Bottom-of-funnel (BOFU). Content at this stage is more interactive and may not even be content. It may be a coupon, a demo, or a free consultation. At this stage, your opportunities are making the decision to buy services.

There are lots of great articles on the types of content that work well for each stage of the funnel. Hubspot's Amanda Sellers wrote an excellent article with content ideas for each stage of the funnel. Juan Mendez wrote a good article on how to create video content for each stage of the funnel. Barry Feldman also wrote a good article on the types of content that work well as lead magnets (content offers) as part of a content marketing process. 

The bottom line is, the content you create has to map to what your personas are looking for at each stage of their buyer’s journey. That's where we find that traditional personas and how they're typically used, fall short. 

Personas can fail to properly guide middle and bottom of stage content due to a number of reasons. One common reason we've found is that personas contain a lot of information about content that will attract visitors to your website, such as challenges and pain points. They often contain less information about how prospects evaluate and select products and services. There’s often even less information about what compels them to buy. This leads to content that attracts lots of visitors but doesn’t convert very many to leads, and fewer still to paying customers.

Let's be clear, messaging is the key to creating middle and bottom of funnel content that converts leads to customers.

For example, if your persona evaluates solutions based on price, and sees price as a barrier to buying the services, that information needs to be included in the persona. It needs to be included in such a way that your content team recognizes it as a critical piece of information for middle-of-funnel offers. In the case of the cost conscious consumer, if your services are on the lower end of the pricing spectrum compared to competitors, providing "bang for the buck" messaging might keep your services in contention for an eventual purchase. If your services are on the higher end of the pricing spectrum, your content had better make the argument as to why paying more now, provides better value and ROI later. 

One way to address this issue is to create what we call Funnel Stage Personas. They are similar to the standard type of personas described above, with three important differences:

• We take the time to research additional information about what's important to each persona in the evaluation (MOFU), and decision making (BOFU) stages.

• We break out the information within the persona, to make it clear what key issues content must address at each stage.

• We also validate content against persona stage information to make sure it's meeting those key issues prior to release.

To do this you have to research and understand your persona's entire buyer’s journey. In the persona information targeting marketing services to a CIO it might look like this:

Buyer Stages:

• Awareness: Challenges include goals not being set, doing social media for the sake of social media. Activities aren't tracked, measured, or reported. Activities are not aligned with other marketing or sales activities. Unsure of the correct audience, platform, persona usage. Wants to have better rich media content. Needs help with content curation and content ideas.

• Evaluation: Needs to be educated in the difference between content creation and an inbound marketing process. Has to justify the budget, so any solution must show good value. It helps if ROI can be mapped to head-count, and improved capability to reach common goals such as lead generation.

• Decision: Evidence is key for this buyer to move. Case studies and testimonials can compel action. Mapping concerns such as initial cost or retainer based services to reduced costs and better performance overall can help compel action.

With this information broken out, we find it's easier to create content that speaks to the prospect’s mindset at the stage they’re in. It’s also easier for content creators and reviewers to know what each piece of content is supposed to do so that messaging is appropriate.

How do you find out about what personas are thinking when they're evaluating different solutions, or deciding which solution to buy? There are lots of places:

• Interview your current clients and ask them how they evaluated your products and services to other vendors, and why you won. Then ask them what made them actually decide to buy.

• Run focus groups with people who match your personas is another great way to get information on the buyer's journey.

• Look at discussions in LinkedIn and Facebook groups, as well as published case studies.

A fundamental goal of your social media marketing efforts beyond attracting visitors should be to keep leads moving down your funnel. To do that, you have to fine-tune content to match the different stages of your prospect’s buyers journey. Funnel stage personas break out key information, by stage, and can help your content team produce content with messages that speak to needs while educating at the awareness stage, address barriers and concerns in the evaluation stage, and compel action in the decision stage.

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Once you’ve solidified your personas you’re well positioned to create great content that targets the audience you’re trying to reach with messages that will drive action. After that, promotion is the most important part of a content campaign. A strong promotion strategy will keep your campaign top of mind for your audience, and generate more traffic and leads.

Promotion involves publishing, monitoring content for engagement by your community, and engaging with the community to answer questions and build relationships.

We have a separate article about how and where to promote your content, but one daunting issue for many marketing teams is that content promotion, monitoring, and community engagement are three tasks that can take a lot of time. We encourage our clients to create a plan that works for them and their team.

There are lots of tools that can save you time. Many of the tools that do this well cost money, some can be very costly at $100 per month or more. These tools automate publication, promotion and monitoring. Some also help you automate engagement, which we don’t recommend.

If you don’t feel you have enough time to perform the tasks in the promotion and engagement strategy you’re developing, look into tools that can help. We’ll list some we like in each of the sections below.

Publication is the most well- defined task in this mix. You post an article, infographic, or video to your blog, create posts for social media, send newsletters, campaign emails, and emails for influencer outreach. We usually create a mix of text and graphic content for promotion. This typically takes a few hours for each piece of content.

In our article on publishing and promoting content we recommend sharing a post frequently at the start of its promotion cycle, then moving it into a rotation with other campaign content. You can create an aggressive strategy to promote multiple times a day across several digital channels, or you can use a more focused strategy.

Consider the following when planning your promotion strategy:

• The channel marketing team and executives use. It’s usually easier to promote content and engage with users on channels you’re active on. That’s where you hang out, it’s a natural fit.

• Use the channels that drive traffic to your site. Use the Google Analytics Acquisition > Social > Network Referrals report to see which social networks actually drive traffic to your site. The networks that drive the most traffic are the ones you should focus on.

• The channels that generate leads and customers. If you’re tracking goal completions in Google Analytics, and you should, you can use the reports in Google Analytics under Conversions > Goals, and Conversions > Multi-channel Funnels to see which networks generate leads and customers. Specifically:

• Conversions > Goals > Reverse Goal Path to see the last three steps the user took in completing the goal. 

• Conversions > Multi-channel Funnels > Top Conversion Paths to see all the unique paths that led to conversions, the number of conversions from each, and the value of those conversions (if you’ve assigned values to your goals).

• How much time do you have to perform promotion tasks? This is perhaps the most important consideration. Consistency is key in promotion, you need to keep up the drumbeat to keep your campaign top of mind for your prospects. We figure promotion will take a minimum of two hours per week per campaign, and potentially much more depending on the types of assets you’re publishing, the number of channels you’re publishing to, and the more channels you publish on. Create a promotion plan that can be comfortably executed by the team in the hours available.

The following tools can save hours during promotion:

• Google Analytics to monitor traffic, sources, and network referrals generated by your campaign. 

• A UTM URL builder like Google’s Campaign URL Builder or UTM.io’s extension.

• A social media publishing tool that can schedule and automate promotion steps such as Buffer, Hootsuite, Sprout Social, Agorapulse or many others.

Engagement is the social part of social media, and it should be prioritized at all times, especially during digital marketing campaigns.

When people engage with your content, on your website, social media, or other channels by commenting, and sharing, it gives your brand the opportunity to:

• Showcase your brand’s knowledge, culture, and willingness to help.

• Turn the people who engage with you, and their connections, into leads and customers.

• Drive conversations about your brand and industry that provide more opportunities.

You should monitor:

• Social channels for comments, shares, likes and follows.

• Blog posts for comments.

• The internet for brand and campaign mentions including industry blogs and social channels, influencer blogs and social channels, and media outlets.

Engagement is a wildcard, it can take five minutes to review channels and tools for comments if there is no engagement, or five hours to respond to comments, answer questions, and work with the community you’re building through your campaign.

You have the following options for monitoring for mentions on channels you own:

• Use native apps to review notifications on social networks and blog posts. These apps are free, and do a good job of notifying you, but you have to access, and use each app independently which can be time-consuming, and doesn’t offer a unified way to assign response tasks or track responses.

• Use social media management tools such as Buffer, Hootsuite, Agorapulse, or Sprout Social and many others that provide a unified inbox that provides a single place for monitoring and responding to engagement. In addition, some tools allow you to assign response tasks.

These tools above work well to monitor the channels you own, but you need a different type of tool to monitor channels you don’t own. To track mentions of your brand, or keywords on industry, influencer, or media blogs you can use tools like Google Alerts for free, or paid tools like SEMRush and BuzzSumo that offer mention monitoring as part of their tool sets. You can also invest in dedicated brand monitoring tools like Mention and Brandwatch which offer more robust tracking of mentions and allow for response management, task assignment and follow up.

Remember that consistency is key for both promotion and engagement. You must keep your campaign messages top of mind for your audience, and respond when they engage with you. You must do this with the resources and hours you have available. If you have difficulty, use some of the tips we’ve mentioned to scale back promotion, or augment engagement resources.

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An editorial calendar is a tool used by bloggers and marketing teams to track steps in the content process from ideation to publication. Most online marketers agree that an editorial calendar is a must for any organization that's serious about content marketing.

As the person responsible for content in my organization, my editorial calendar is the only tool that stresses me out when I don't look at it more than once a day, and the only tool that gives me that zen feeling about the content marketing pipeline for my company and our clients.

You can use a spreadsheet, Microsoft OneNote or Google Docs to manage your content process, but these options fall far short of what dedicated editorial calendar and project management tools offer. Speaking of tools, there are lots of dedicated tools out there for managing your content pipeline like CoSchedule, ContentDJ, and DivvyHQ. You can also use standard project management software, like Asana, which is what we use since all of our other projects are managed through Asana.

We put together this infographic to explain 5 key reasons why you need an editorial calendar to execute a great content strategy. Along the way, we'll show you the insights and capabilities that make it an indispensable tool for serious content marketers.

While an editorial calendar can help your team stay on track while executing a marketing campaign, things can go wrong. Marketing teams face competing priorities, between creating great content, keeping up promotion, and community engagement, some tasks may not get done. This can be especially true if you’re running a traditional content campaign and creating content as the campaign is being executed. Good content plans account for those missed deadlines. We’ve found that there are three key mistakes that your team should try to avoid when managing a content campaign.

Some content cannot be pushed out to a later date. If a product launch date is coming up, or a holiday sale, or an event that happens on a specific day, you’re going to have hard dates when content needs to be ready for publication.

That seems obvious, and it also seems obvious that core content would be prioritized first. The problem is that campaigns usually require many pieces of content, and even core content can get lost in the shuffle when this is the case.

How can core content get lost in the shuffle? The conversation goes something like this:

Manager: Friday we’ll go out with our new product features list blog post.

Team member: It’s not ready. We haven’t been able to complete interviews of three of the feature owners.

<Awkward silence>

Manager: Ok, then let’s go with our Slideshare of the new features.

Team member: We were basing the SlideShare on the blog post so that’s not done either.

<Yelling>

Manager: Then let’s publish the infographic on the new features.

<Awkward silence part deux>

Manager: Let me guess, the infographic is based on the SlideShare presentation isn’t it?

When planning content for a campaign, it is amazingly easy for pieces of content to get lost in the shuffle. Getting those core pieces of content identified, and making them a high priority so that key content gets done first is essential. For smaller campaigns, this can be done at the end of the brainstorming process by having the team identify those pieces that are core to the campaign. Make this prioritization an independent, and essential step in the planning process.

For more complex campaigns with a lot of content, we recommend a content flowchart. A content flowchart shows the dependencies between pieces of content. Taking the scenario stated above it would show that the infographic can’t be done until the SlideShare is done, and that the SlideShare can’t get done until the blog post is done.

That information would point to that blog post as a core piece of content that needed to be prioritized. Optionally, you can add any steps needed to complete the core content.

You can use dependencies in most project management tools, charting software like Visio, or even a spreadsheet to track content dependencies.

There are many types of campaigns that require deep, thorough, or technical content. It’s content that’s critical to showing product features, service benefits, and thought leadership. It also takes a long time to create.

This is where short content comes in. We’re talking about a single page blog post, a 2-minute video, an image with text overlay, or even a compelling tweet. This type of content serves a purpose too. They show your understanding of the problems faced by your audience, and can show empathy for the day-to-day problems they face.

It’s not just your content team that’s busy, so is everyone else and shorter content tends to get consumed when people don’t have time to engage with larger pieces of content. From a content development perspective, shorter content pieces can be created quickly and help you build up a repository of content that can keep your content channels full when your content plan is behind schedule.

Some organizations are challenged by short content pieces, this especially seems to be the case for organizations used to creating longer, complex, or technical content. They can’t seem to come up with good ideas for short content. When working with our clients on this we’ve found two key factors that make shorter content pieces challenging:

1. Planning: Some organizations assume short is easy so they don’t plan for them. They might put some ideas in a grab bag document, and that’s as far as it goes. Short content also requires planning. Goals for the content need to be identified, topics brainstormed and selected, and outlines discussed, feedback solicited, authors assigned, and so forth. If you follow the same process for planning short pieces of content as you do long pieces of content, both types of content should end up being high quality.

2. Ideas: Simply put, some organizations have difficulty coming up with topics that can be covered briefly. Fortunately, there are lots of places you can look for inspiration:

• Answer common customer questions. A good example is this short informational video by Home Depot.

• Show videos of how customers use your products.

• Create a tip of the day for a product or area of interest in your industry. Karen Yankovich publishes lots of short Quick Tips on Social Media Today.

• Comment on a published article from outside your organization. Provide your organization’s perspective on relevant articles published about your industry.

• Overlay a compelling quote from previously published content on top of a compelling image. See General Electric’s Instagram account for an example of a highly technical organization that knows how to create compelling, shareable images.

• Put industry stats in a short, simple stat graphic. See this article from Co.Design on digital posters (what we call stat graphics) versus infographics.

Look for inspiration from competitor’s other content sources. Let the topics and content you find from others inspire your own.

A great tool for finding content ideas, as well as influencers is Buzzsumo. With Buzzsumo you can search by keywords, domains, and other criteria to find content, see what topics are popular, and who’s sharing them.

It’s simple, if you are creating content to publish, some pieces will slip past their publication dates. It will happen. Someone will get sick. An interview will be rescheduled. The content will go down some unforeseen path, or the focus of the piece will get changed mid-development. Sometimes a piece of content just grows much larger in production than it looked in the outline.

The best way to mitigate the impact is to plan for it. No-one wants to miss a publication date, but a savvy social media manager anticipates it, and has other content completed and ready so that it can be published in its place. This is where the fix for mistake 2 becomes the fix for mistake 3 as those short content pieces are great for filling unforeseen gaps in your content execution.

Not only should you plan shorter content, but you should also set content developers to work creating shorter content in parallel with larger content pieces immediately so that you build a repository of content that can be published if something slips.

As we stated earlier, this doesn’t always work. Some content pieces need to be published on time - Core content is core for a reason. But, in a longer running campaign, there are often content pieces that aren’t tied to specific events, they’re designed to sustain campaign momentum. Having this content will allow you to continue the cadence of your campaign with fresh content.

Planning your marketing content has to be done with an awareness of the pitfalls inherent in the content development process. Prioritizing core content, ensuring that it gets done on time, including well planned short content pieces, and building a repository of completed content can help maintain your campaign’s publication schedule, and ensure your audience is engaged with new content.

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If you’re going to run a digital marketing campaign, prepare by getting your own site and SEO in order, and by collecting real data from your own channels, and your competitors to give your brand the best possible advantage, and the best chance of being successful. This 9 step guide is our blueprint for doing just that. It’s a lot of work, but it pays dividends. If you don’t have the time, resources our tools to do it in-house, check out our Inbound Growth Plan, and let us do the heavy lifting for you.

Download this content to share with your team and plan your campaign.