The Pandemic accelerated digital transformation as more interactions occur in virtual events and remote work. Most are stand-alone events and not yet connected to keep the conversation alive after the event.  Organizing the content to optimize engagement from our annual budget will be more critical as we head into bumpy economic times.

Think of the three most critical applications to engage with customers, prospects, employees and our community. Every business wants to retain customers, acquire new ones, and roll out new products. How well does your budget align the content with these three core goals as they cross over the different touch points people connect with us. Every employee’s voice can influence business prospects, not just sales. How do you build a customer first content experience that reflects your best foot forward? How do we provide the most valuable and relevant content at the best time, in the right channels with the greatest outcomes?

Here are the core elements taken from OpenView’s great guide to consider when building a Content Factory mindset.

  1. Create a personal connection to your customers fostering greater engagement with customers, promoting customer retention
    1. Establish your company as a thought leader
    2. Build brand awareness
    3. Drive relevant traffic to your website
    4. Enable customer support and sales with relevant information they need
  2. Define clear customer outcomes and how success is measured.
    1. Develop well-defined targets
    2. Get a deep contextual understanding of what they live for
    3. Set clear conversion goals
    4. Identify appropriate points of contact
    5. Develop a customer digital buyer journey and what content matters at each touch
  3. Develop an editorial calendar and identify a leader to own it
    1. Create and manage the company’s editorial calendar
    2. Oversee the creation of all content and ensuring that it is error free, optimized, and of the highest quality
    3. Manage other content team members to Align with company strategy, increase rev, new products, external internal
    4. Build and manage a stable of freelancers
    5. Ensure that all content is of the highest quality and delivered on time
    6. Track and analyze key metrics to help inform the strategy
  4. Define high impact content to increase conversions and how to repurpose your long-tail of content
    1. Optimize for search engines
    2. Reflect your deep understanding of your buyers
    3. Provide value to your audience
    4. Represent your company’s brand aspirations
    5. Drive conversions
    6. Promote virality and engagement
    7. Create how-to content that provides practical advice or step-by-step instructions
    8. Offer thought leadership about what’s going on in your industry rather than just information about your product or company
    9. Share proprietary research, analysis, and insights that people won’t get anywhere else
    10. Point people to valuable resources, even if they are not your own
    11. Develop online assessments and other tools that people can use to evaluate something and get feedback to help them improve
    12. Ultimately, the more actionable and utilitarian your content is, the more useful it will be. Content Activation. Not just to entertain but to share information and upskilling
  5. Prioritize content engagement touch points that keep the conversation alive in between events. How can existing content be leveraged to provide value for customers and prospects? Do these align with the core three priorities of retention, acquisition, and new product roll outs across all the content produced during the year.
  6. Create conversion journeys from first touch to conversion. It takes 7-10X to get attention, interest and activate action. Define 3-5 campaigns that promote what the best performers would do next to convert in a trusted communication.
    1. Clear headlines
    2. Align messaging to brand purpose and capabilities to bring value
    3. Capture testimonials, best practices, and other validation
    4. Blend in you call to action
    5. Extend the reach of your existing content to re-enforce messaging and keep simple
    6. Survey and share data
    7. Keep data transparent
  7. How will you measure success?
    1. Classic content consumption metrics for how frequent, how long, drop off rates and time impact.
    2. Measure conversion rates for business outcomes
    3. Measure best in class performance and rate of adoption
    4. Campaign budgets and points of success
    5. Productivity of annual content conversion per dollar.

This is an outline of what goes into a Content Factory mindset.

Who has bumped into us in a trusted valuable touch point that best serves our interests? A simple way to organize your approach is to have a look at what others are doing around Content Factories – the 21st Century information and communications road map.