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Marketing Strategy: The foundational piece that is missing from the majority of small business and author marketing efforts.

Sometimes you just have to state the bleeding obvious…content that doesn’t support your marketing and sales strategy is a total waste of time and money. Seems pretty obvious, however do you have a methodology of avoiding this all to common trap?

Intertype’s 3 step formula will help you to keep your content on track

1. Create a Content Marketing Strategy Framework that all members of your team can follow

Before you start you need to answer just three basic strategic questions for your business:

1. Business Goals…What do you want to achieve?
2. Target Audience…Who is your ideal customer?
3. Target Audience Wants (desires)…Wants are a much more powerful customer motivator than needs.

Armed with these answers you only need to fill in the blanks of the following template:

The content we produce helps […your company…] to achieve […goal #1…] and […goal #2…] by providing […adjective…] and […adjective…] content that makes […target audience…] feel […emotion…] or […emotion…] so that they can […task…] and […task…].
Here is an example of what a completed strategy framework looks like:

The content we produce helps Acme Co to achieve 100 new subscribers a month and 10% revenue growth by providing informative and actionable content that makes business coaches feel empowered or motivated so that they can grow their coaching business and stop trading their time for money.

2. Use a Content Evaluation Matrix

This little tool will help you to decide if your content idea or topic is worthy of pursuing. I also use it to quickly evaluate my “back catalogue” of content…you know, the content we seem to accumulate and never really deploy.

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For each content idea of piece of existing content you simply evaluate it against your business goals and audience wants. Rank each element from 1-3 with “1” being low or misses the goals and “3” being bang on target. When the scores are added it becomes very obvious where you should be focusing your efforts. As a general rule I prefer not to use content that doesn’t have a total score of at least “3”.

3. Use an Editorial Checklist

All content should pass through an editorial checklist before it’s published. Eventually you may want to develop your own checklist however feel free to use mine for the time being.

1. Complies with the Content Strategy Framework
2. Scores at least 3 on the Content Evaluation Matrix
3. Provides or discuss information needs of your target audience
4. Contains a call to action
5. Only one key idea per paragraph
6. Subheads and bullet points make the content scannable for skim readers
7. The title and subheads clearly convey the main message
8. The content is free of jargon and overly intellectual language
9. Calls to action start with a clear directive (ie click to buy)
10. Links in text work and point to appropriate destinations

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