WORKWEEK

There are 4 main priorities across most content marketing or content strategy teams. At any given time, you may be focused more on one than another, but all 4 are important for building and scaling a highly successful content program. 

Here is what they are––and I’m curious, which are you most focused on right now?

Discoverability

In many ways, the vast majority of a content marketer’s time lives in this bucket. Discoverability includes both external and internal channels. After all, if no one can find your content, does it even exist? 

Discoverability encompasses:

• Distribution
  • SEO
  • Organic social media 
  • Paid social media 
  • Content syndication
  • Newsletter sponsorships 
  • The list goes on. In fact, here is Kevan Lee’s 2023 growth channel menu to give you a full view of just how many options there are in this bucket. 
• On-site UX 
  • Navigation
  • Search & filtering capabilities 
  • Interlinking 
• Library maintenance 
  • This is your internal library for team members to quickly and easily find all content published, categorized as needed by the team searching. You may have one library––or multiple. These often live in:
    • Google sheets
    • Brandfolder (or Dropbox, or something similar) 
    • Monday (or another project management software)
    • Seismic (or another sales enablement CMS) 
• Internal comms 
  • This is how you communicate what you publish: where you say it, to whom, how often, etc. 
  • It is also how you get folks excited about the content, and get their help to share it. This could include employee social share tools. 

Repurposing

A good content strategist takes the needs of the organization and looks to their library for what already exists––so that you can prune your content garden for the new season, rather than starting anew. 

A great content strategist enables the entire organization to do this for their needs, so that every piece of content produced is endlessly impactful for all the various needs of an organization. Content is the lifeblood, after all. Content shouldn’t gatekeep it. 

[Personal note: This is a place where I’m personally trying to get better. The enabling of content far and wide. It’s tough, but a problem worth solving and skill very much worth cultivating]. 

Idea generation 

Idea generation isn’t just who has the loudest voice in the room. Ideas should be vetted against:

• What already exists (and where are there gaps)
• What is already working (topic and format wise) 
• What are our competitors doing (topically, and where are there gaps?) 
• What are the publications / influencers our audience cares about talking about (topically, and where are there gaps?) 

The bigger your content library, the more your idea generation should be based on the above. There’s no need to keep throwing spaghetti at the wall to see what sticks. You’ve found what sticks. Now, you need to make the wall bigger. 

AI can be wildly helpful here. I’ve built a tool, for instance, that summarizes and pulls the top 3 themes for all of your content (and all of your competitor’s, too). I’ll do a Loom on that tool in a few weeks so you can see how it works, and then how you can combine that with GA data to understand all of the above. I know I’m not the only one doing this, though. 

ROI 

Content ROI is hard. And it isn’t because content is wildly hard to track back to revenue. It isn’t. Sure, content creates a halo effect when done right, but you should still be able to track content back to revenue in one way or another––often through lead generation and/or MQLs created on site (i.e. sign ups or demos).

What is hard about content ROI is that the better you get at all of the above, the more likely it is that a larger team is using your content to hit their goals. And that you aren’t able to measure the full impact on revenue as a result. This can mean that you can’t make the proper case for more resources, for instance, or for a promotion. That’s a real issue. 

This is when a lot of content teams turn into service organizations, creating content for their distributing arms. And that’s ok! 

But you still want to tie your efforts back to metrics of some kind. Here is what I’d recommend:

Pull the below data by all-up and by channel (you can choose your top 3-4 channels if you wish, often organic, lifecycle, paid, and social). 

• Sessions
• New users
• Average engagement time per session 
• A goaled event (Typically housed under Key events…like sign up, MQL, content download, newsletter sign up, etc.) 

Every piece of content you produce should have these metrics tracked and tied to it, so that at the very least you can use it for content repurposing and idea generation tasks. 

For lead gen assets (i.e. gated pieces of content), you also want to track:

• Leads 
• Opportunities 
• Closed / won 
• Closed / won amount 

It’s crucial you document the distribution channels, too. A piece driving leads and revenue via organic search only, for instance, has a different story to tell than one that was used across your full go-to-market distribution channels. The nuances matter here. 

You aren’t responsible for it all 

Finally, remember that while all of these are priorities for content marketing teams, especially their leaders, not all of it falls on your shoulders. If it does, you need to find a way to delegate more. It is rare that any content marketer will be an expert in all of the above. You often need to work with SEO managers, web marketers and CRO specialists, paid media managers and demand generation specialists, lifecycle marketers and social media marketing, etc. 

But if you want to build and scale a program, these are the 4 pillars you need to think about––because their sturdiness is what gives you the power to move faster or slower as things ramp up.