To make an impact in today’s digital space, building a cross-channel content strategy team is critical. Brands are now having to become their own content publishers in order to reach their audiences in a way that is genuine and informational. If organizations fail to be these two things, it will make reaching their business goals not only difficult, but expensive and practically impossible.
In other words, we’re in a critical stage of a digital marketing evolution; it’s time (once again) to adapt or die. This is why brands are building their own “digital newsrooms,” pulling in digital talents, skill sets and technologies to ensure they are creating experiences consumers will embrace. Building an internal operation such as this requires knowing how to effectively and efficiently integrate the roles of SEO, content creation, digital promotion, and analysts.
Here’s who you’ll need to bring together your content marketing dream team:
SEO
Every great team has a group of key role players that act as its foundation. The Search Engine Optimization (SEO) team acts as this foundation. These are experienced members who can be relied upon to do key research to help the rest of the team operate. The SEO begins the content marketing journey by researching a content’s topic and subtopics. Search engines use a complex algorithm that interprets the arrangement of words and phrases that make up the anatomy of a web page to determine the relevancy to a given search query. SEOs study the relationship of these words and provide optimizations to improve the on-page topical context. This optimization includes both a technical and algorithmic perspective. SEO also provides insights to the rest of your content marketing team, including search trends, keywords and content recommendations associated with those seeking to find information about the company and its offerings. The data obtained from this research will drive the formation of your full digital strategy.
Content
The content team essentially sets up your digital content marketing strategy. In order to be successful, it is imperative that this person or group thinks from a data-driven perspective, taking key outputs from the rest of the team’s members (such as the search trends surfaced by SEO) to make informed decisions.
A full content strategy should lead prospects and consumers through the stages of the marketing funnel, providing valuable information and reaching the correct people at each stage in their purchase process.
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Awareness: Reaching and inspiring a broad target audience with informational content who may not yet be familiar with the brand
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Consideration: Providing resources to help consumers choose your product in a crowded landscape
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Conversion: Using targeted messaging strategies and content pieces to help consumers make a decision at this stage in the funnel
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Advocacy: Creating avenues for current customers and brand advocates to share their stories
It’s also important this team also takes into account how to create and deliver this information in a creative and effective way that will engage consumers appropriately on each channel.
Learn more about what are experts at Red Door Interactive have to say in regards to creating and executing a content marketing strategy.
Social
A good social media person or team is great at community building and, above all, connecting with an audience. This typically includes the day-to-day operations of social media content creation, community management, interaction with users, monitoring online media performance, and developing relationship with digital media influencers. This team can also conduct empirical research based on content performance and make quick strategic decisions to increase success. Often times, this team can contain more junior staff members serving as coordinators, who provide a fresh perspective to your outreach efforts. This is often the case because as social specialists become more experienced in their subject matter area, they tend to move into a Content Strategist role where they either manage, or work closely with Social Community Coordinators.
Paid Media
Paid media is a very specialized group that is largely responsible for helping drive and promote your content – if you read our previous article, you’ll remember that a piece of content is only as good as your audience’s reaction. If no one saw or interactive with a piece of content, did it even exist?
Paid media is responsible for researching a wide variety of topics including pay-per-click campaigns, display ads, social media ads, retargeting and the like. As a result of their in-depth knowledge of the paid search industry, this team can also provide valuable insights and direction to your organization’s SEO and content teams in the form of top-performing keywords, CTAs, and content messaging.
Analytics
This team’s role is to give you a play-by-play of how your organization’s content strategy is performing from an objective, data-driven perspective. However, not all analytics are created equal, the key to an effective content strategy is cutting through the clutter and determining what metrics really matter. Only then, can you truly harness measurement’s true power and apply the findings to inform your ongoing planning and content strategy.
So, are you wondering how all these teams come together? Picture something like the below – your content marketing team working together to provide the inputs to a content strategy which leads to a variety of outputs to put your brand’s content directly in front of the right consumer.
In today’s ever-expanding digital world, brands need to prioritize budgets and resources to build their foundational teams to successfully reaching their consumers. Having an effective, multi-faceted, content strategy group does require investing in the talent. However, the return on innovation will directly translate into a winning product, increasing revenues and leading to greater profitability.