Transcript: Planning a Long-Term

Content Strategy

Video 1: Why is long-term content planning important?

Hi there, I’m AJ with HubSpot’s marketing team.

So you’re looking to create a long-term content strategy for your business. You’ve come to the right place. By the end of
this video, you’ll understand the importance of taking the time to plan a well thought-out content roadmap. You may be
eager to get started with creating content, but if you don’t have a strategy in place, then you shouldn’t expect to be
successful in the long run. Knowing how to plan and organize your content initiatives will set you and your business up
for long term success with your content strategy efforts.

To start, planning provides a roadmap for your content. You’ll be making confident and more tactical decisions regarding
what topic you’ll be talking about, what format your content will take, and when you’ll be publishing it.

With a content plan, you and your team can stay organized and even factor in ad-hoc content requests like company
initiatives or other on-demand marketing tasks.

To get the most out of your content planning efforts, think of your long-term content plan like a savings account. If your
goal is to retire someday, then you need a plan. In order for that plan to be successful, you need to be dedicated to
putting away a certain amount of money on an ongoing basis. The more consistent you are with contributions, the
better your return on investment.

The same can be said about your content. If you make a plan and are consistent in executing, then you’re giving yourself
the best chance at achieving a positive return on investment from your content creation efforts. Think of each piece of
content you create as an installment towards a growing library of helpful, educational content. The more content you
create, the stronger your authority and relevance, turning you and your business into thought leaders within your
industry.

It’s important to note that obstacles and roadblocks will come up along the way. It happens to everyone. But having a
plan will make it that much easier to regain alignment, as well as understand your team’s bandwidth and priorities for
what needs to get done and when.

And speaking of priorities, a long-term content plan helps you stay organized.

Most often, marketing teams place a focus on more than one content initiative at any given time. A long-term plan
accounts for all upcoming initiatives and allows for an agile content creation process.

When you're organized, you can align your content marketing goals with the overall goals of the business. In essence, it
gets the marketing team in-line with the current initiatives of the entire organization.

Content is not just about supporting the marketing team; it should be about supporting the sales team, customer service
team, product and services team, and so on.

By aligning your content marketing goals to the overall goals of the organization, you can rest assured, knowing that
your focus will provide an immediate impact to where it matters most — creating the best end-to-end experience
possible for your audience and customers. How do you do this? Tell a story. Content is the fuel that keeps the inbound
methodology running. The inbound methodology is composed of three stages: attract, engage, and delight. Inbound
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Content Strategy

businesses use this methodology to build trust, credibility, and momentum. It’s about adding value at every stage in
your customer's journey with you.

If you want to learn more about the inbound methodology, then check out the resources section below.

With this inbound approach, you'll grow a well-informed audience. And when this audience is ready to make a
purchasing decision, they’ll likely consider your products and services. And even if they don’t become a customer, by
you taking the time to educate them, it’s possible they’ll share your content with someone else who may find it helpful,
another opportunity for you to convert this person into a lead, customer, and promoter of your brand.

Video 2: How to create a long-term content plan

Let’s review three things you need to do to set yourself up for success; setting marketing goals, auditing or assessing
your organization's initiatives and assets, and identifying the buyer’s journey for your buyer personas. A buyer persona is
a semi-fictional representation of your ideal customer based on real data and some select educated speculation about
customer demographics, behavior patterns, motivations, and goals. The buyer’s journey is the active research process
someone goes through leading up to a purchase.

To learn more about buyer personas and the buyer’s journey, check out the resources section below. I’ve included a link
to HubSpot’s free Make My Persona tool.

The ultimate objective here is to have a unifying document you can use to keep track of your long-term content
marketing initiatives.

First, let’s talk about setting your marketing goals.

Setting marketing goals provides you long-term vision and short-term motivation. It helps you organize your time and
resources so that you can make the most of your content creation efforts.

Each piece of content created for a marketing initiative should be tied to a goal that is also directly related to the
overarching goals of the organization. Alignment like this creates purpose and focus with each piece of content you
create.

Let’s take a second to think about this. Assume your company’s quarterly customer goal is 100 new customers. You
know the number of leads needed to generate 100 new customers is 250 website leads, and that the number of unique
website visits needed to generate 250 website leads is 1,500. Now, you need to take into consideration what content
you need to create to hit your unique website visits goal.

Each goal you set should be a SMART goal. SMART stands for specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and timely.

A potential SMART goal example could be, “Increase monthly unique website visitors from 1,000 to 1,500 by the end of
the year.”

The second step in creating a long-term content plan is auditing or assessing your organization's initiatives and assets.

Your audit will consist of two parts. First, a content audit to organize and evaluate your current assets, and second, and
event-based audit to account for upcoming activities or events your business plans to host.
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Content Strategy

Let’s begin with the content audit.

Your goal with the content audit is to identify all the assets your business uses to attract and engage your audience. Your
goal here is to identify gaps or opportunities in the content your business is currently using to help turn your audience
into customers. And while your entire business may be creating and using this content, understanding and organizing it
is generally a function of your marketing department.

There comes a point for every marketer who has been generating content for a while when they realize they have no
idea where all of their content is or how much they actually have.

Content has likely been created by you or your predecessors for a long time. However it’s possible content has also been
created by other individuals in the marketing department, or subject matter experts from other departments, and is
scattered just about everywhere.

By doing your content audit, you’ll be able to identify resources that you already have, which could save you hours of
content creation time in the future. No use in duplicating your efforts.

And don't forget to stay organized when conducting your content audit. To keep things streamlined, organize your
content audit by these categories: content title, buyer’s journey stage, lifecycle stage, content format, targeted buyer
persona, topic, and any additional notes that provide value or context.

Now, it’s time to do some digging for content assets such as guides, worksheets, or sales collateral. I recommend
systematically combing through the following dark corners where content can typically hide, like that old file manager or
marketing folder on your computer. Ask your sales team what type of collateral they use. Check in with the more
tenured employees (you’ll be surprised at the wealth of knowledge here). And pore through your customer relationship
management system, also known as a CRM, and your content management system, also known as a CMS.

Okay, I think you get the picture here. Let’s take a look at a content audit from a company called Kids Talk, created by
Maren Schmidt. Maren offers advice and resources backed by 30 years of experience working with young children.

Notice how Maren already has content spanning the awareness, consideration, and decision stage of the buyer’s journey
for multiple buyer personas. Additionally, each piece of content corresponds to a specific lifecycle stage. Moreover,
Maren has many different types of content formats to offer her buyer personas, like an ebook, a study guide, and a
webinar. Notice how Maren uses the “Notes” field to explain the contents of her content offer, though she may not
need this for each piece of content in her audit.

Now that Maren has documented her assets, she’ll be able to refer to this audit in the future to pinpoint what content
she already has as well as easily identify gaps for future content creation projects.

The second part to completing your audit is to conduct an audit on your event-based initiatives. This means you’ll need
to take into account any upcoming projects, priorities, or events that would involve content creation.

By doing this exercise, you'll identify content that could support each initiative. Additionally, it will give you the
opportunity to see how you can connect this content back to the buyer’s journey through an inbound marketing
campaign.
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Content Strategy

An event-based audit should be organized by the following areas: upcoming monthly priorities, initiative overview,
theme or topic, prospective blog post topics based on buyer personas, and an inbound marketing campaign that ties
your efforts together.

Take a look at what Maren did for her event-based audit.

You can see that Maren has a few events and workshops she may need content for. You can also see that the content is
grouped into an overall theme for the next three months with associated blog post topics that integrate with an inbound
marketing campaign called “Preparing Your Home the Montessori Way,” which is an ebook.

Try and imagine for a minute if Maren only planned the month, initiative overview, and theme without topics for blog
posts that associate with a relevant inbound marketing campaign.

Yes, she would have noted there are a series of events coming up in the next few months, but she would have missed
out on the opportunity to tie everything together with a series of blog posts that could connect to a relevant content
offer and provide value to her marketing offer library.

There’s one last important step needed to create a sustainable long-term content plan, and that’s identifying the buyer’s
journey for your buyer personas.

Remember, you’re creating content that’s meant to attract and engage your buyer personas through their buyer’s
journey: from the awareness stage where this person has a problem or a list of questions that they’re trying to learn
more about, through the consideration stage where you’re discussing possible solutions to their problem or list of
questions, and ending in the decision stage where you’re recommending next steps. The consideration and decision
stage is generally where you’re talking about what your organization’s products and services have to offer, while the
awareness stage is more industry-level education. Identifying this content will help give you content ideas to work with
in the future.

But before you can identify the buyer’s journey, you first need to know your buyer personas.

Keeping this in mind, let’s take a look at one of Maren’s buyer persona’s, Montessori Mom Meena.

Here’s an overview of Meena as a buyer persona.

Meena’s a working professional, a married woman, and a devoted mother to at least one child under the age of six.

Meena generally skews female, is between the ages of 28 and 35, and lives in an urban environment. She also has a
bachelor's degree and earns around $60,000 per year.

Meena wants to understand child development and do what’s best for her children, understand how to set limits for
behavior, and have effective communication tools to use with her kids.

Meena’s challenges are her children won’t listen and she has to deal with tantrums, all of which overwhelm her as a
parent.
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Content Strategy

Maren knows that Meena looks to her friends for suggestions on solutions they use with their children. However,
Meena’s resourceful and uses Google to find answers to problems she’s looking to solve.

Great. Now that you know who Meena is, let’s take a look at what her buyer’s journey might look like in more detail.

To start, you know it’s important for Meena to do what’s best for her children. So what about an awareness stage ebook
which offers a list of parenting problems you can avoid? This is something that would bring value to Meena’s search.

Once Meena’s been educated on parenting problems to avoid, she’ll be looking for more content. What about following
up with consideration stage information like a questionnaire regarding family needs to better understand a possible
solution—in this case, Montessori? The questionnaire outlines both the needs of the child, as well as the parent.

But maybe Meena needs a little bit more information to progress into the decision stage— something that educates her
more on how to best prepare for Montessori. What about a free consideration stage workshop that explains how to
prepare your home the Montessori way? That could do the trick.

With a solution to her problem, now Meena’s ready to make a decision. What about offering Meena a one-hour strategy
consultation to discuss next steps for her child and Montessori? That could be a helpful service to offer Meena.

That’s an example of a complete buyer’s journey. It’s important to note that a buyer’s journey is ever-evolving. The
more you learn about your buyer personas, the more you’ll be able to refine and grow their buyer’s journey resources
over time. But it starts with first identifying content needed to complete the buyer’s journey, which you can then plan
out over the course of a year to keep your content creation sustainable.

If you’re interested in seeing how Maren organized and project managed her priorities in support of launching an
inbound marketing campaign, then check out the resources section below. I’ve included a link to Maren’s long-term
content planning worksheet. It’s in the form of a Google spreadsheet. This way you can use it as a template if you don’t
already have a solution for planning your long-term content creation efforts.

Video 3: Working with influencers to improve your content strategy efforts

Hi, this is Andy from Orbit Media and I want to explain how influencer marketing works together with content and
search engine optimization. Now, we all know that this is a big trend. Influencer marketing isn't going anywhere-- it's big
and it's getting bigger. Just put "influencer marketing" into Google trends and you will see a line going straight up.
There's a lot of people who are thinking about this and working on this and adding this to your skill set can do wonders
for your content and your search rankings.

We did some research and found that bloggers who use influencer marketing are more likely to report strong results
from their content than bloggers who use any other promotion channel. I'm going to define influencer marketing as
simply connecting with people who have already built that audience that you want to reach. And I'm really talking about
collaboration-- I'm not talking about paid influencer marketing. I know that's a big thing. I'm talking about content
collaboration as in organic influencer marketing.

Now, a lot of people, when they think about influencer marketing, they think about social media, they think about
Instagram, they think about celebrities and trying to get those people to share your stuff. I'm going to make the case
that that is not the best way to collaborate with influencers and not really the angle we should be looking for.
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Content Strategy

Now, I love to have a big famous account share my content. I'll give you an example. This is a screenshot of a tweet
where the official Google Analytics Twitter account shared an article that I wrote. I was thrilled. I still am thrilled.

Now, this is exactly the kind of thing that people are often trying to do when they do influencer marketing. But what do
you think the real impact of this was? I can measure the traffic from Twitter that day to that post, and it's not a lot of
visitors. About 160 visitors total from that channel that day to that content.

So maybe there's another way to look at this. Maybe social media is not the ideal outcome, the real benefit of doing
influencer marketing. Maybe SEO actually would have much bigger, more durable benefits than just social media shares.

So how do we collaborate with influencers to benefit our SEO and our search rankings? We want a lead-- ultimately,
that's what we're looking for is a lead. Now I'm going to back it all the way up. If you want a lead, you need two things--
you need a qualified visitor and you need to convert them. Traffic and a conversion rate equals leads.

Now, traffic in content marketing comes from three classic promotional channels-- search, social and email. But it's
really the search rankings that matter, because those are the visitors that have stronger intent. They've got their fingers
on their keyboard. They're looking for something. They need help that day.

So, we know from analytics and from research that it's really search that brings the visitors who are more likely to take
action, more likely to convert and become a lead. So, we're going to focus on search, which means we need to focus on
rankings. Now, there are two main search ranking factors-- links and content, as in authority and relevance.

So now we get to one of the most important questions in all of digital-- why do people link to things? It's actually quite
simple. There are two things you need to win a link. You need a relationship with people who create content, because
they make links, and you need to have content that is worthy of being linked to.

Now, we know from other research from Steve Rayson at BuzzSumo who analyzed a million articles to figure out what
kind of content attracts the links and shares. And what he discovered is, most content nobody links to. In fact, 75% of
the million articles he looked at had zero links to them. But there's one type of content that consistently wins more links
than any other, and that is original research. So, we're going to focus on that as the most link-worthy type of content.

The next thing we need is relationships with people who create content. Now, who are those people? This is called the
1% Rule. 1% of people make the internet, 99% of people just consume it.

When we are online and we are networking and building relationships, we want to pay attention to that tiny percentage
of people who actually create content. Content creators create links, links pass authority, authority has ranking
potential, and that's what we need in the long run to rank for that really valuable phrase.

There are five types of people who create content. Obviously, the big one is the bloggers and blog editors. They're not
the only ones-- also we could say journalists, researchers, podcasters, event producers.

There arelots of different people who make links, but we're going to focus on bloggers at first here. And this is going to
sound familiar to anybody who's been involved in PR-- this is simply blogger relations. Organic influencer marketing and
collaboration is basically modern-day digital PR.

So if we want to find these people first, there's lots of tools for this. This is easier than ever to find people to collaborate
with if you don't already know who they are. Just put your topic into a Twitter search tool such as Followerwonk, add a
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word that indicates that there are content creators, such as "blogger" or "editor," and you're going to find tons of
people on basically any topic who create content and you might be able to collaborate with.

BuzzSumo also happens to be a great tool for this. BuzzSumo has an influencer search tool where you can just check a
box for bloggers and journalists and put in your topic and you're going to find tons of people who are all content
creators and relevant for that topic. These are people you could build relationships with and collaborate with. Bottom
line, social media is the world's greatest phonebook. You can just imagine some super specific person and find them in
seconds and begin to start a conversation.

Now, there are basically five main ways to collaborate. The first one is simply mentioning someone as you make
something, and then when it goes live, you let them know it's live. Not really recommended. You're not really
networking. You're not really collaborating. That content is something where you just made it and told them later.
They're not really invested in the piece.

Far better is to reach out to someone while you're making the content and ask them for a contributor quote. Hey, I'm
making this thing. Would you like to be involved? Another way is to do that with lots of people. Now you've got an
expert roundup.

Guest blogging is, of course, a format for collaborative content, where you are reaching out to editors and writing for
these other websites. And then when you meet the hardcore expert on a topic, it's a good thing to ask them if they'd like
to be interviewed, and then you can build a good relationship that way. Virtually everybody wants to be interviewed.
Very few people will decline to give you a contributor quote. People wake up in the morning hoping to get a PR hit,
which is what you're doing when you reach out and offer to collaborate with them.

So, let's break down the contributor quote. This is one of my favorite content marketing tricks. It makes your content
better. It's going to help you get social media traffic, which is in our main goal. But when we collaborate with those
content creators, we've got a chance to later appear in their content, hopefully.

It works like this. I'm writing an article about social media profile pictures. I know Mark Schaefer is interested in this
topic, so I reach out to him while I'm writing it.

And I say, “Hey, Mark, would you like to contribute a quote to this article?” He responds with a quote that I can include
in the article and says, no problem, how does this sound? This is perfect. Thanks. I'll let you know when it's live.

Now, the actual piece-- I'll show you an example. I included a little bit of research in this. This is basically social media
profile picture tips. And as you scroll down, you can see I've got a little tip in here for background and color and different
things.

I'm including some of the other people's research. I've got some research of my own. And as you scroll down, you'll see
I've got that quote from Mark Schaefer. A journalist would never write an article without a source. Why would the
content marketer write an article without a contributor quote?

Two bloggers, for example-- Blogger A, Blogger B. Blogger B reaches out to their network, socializes the topic, what do
you think of this headline, get some input from their community. As they write, they include people in the content.
Those people then, when the article goes live, are sort of invested in the piece. They're much more likely to share.
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Which of these two bloggers gets greater social traction? Not that social media traffic is our goal in this case, but we
need to build our content for promotion.

Everyone knows that content optimized for search includes keywords-- keywords in the title, the header, the subheads,
using related phrases. But what not everyone seems to realize is that content optimized for social media includes
people. You should have people in your content-- faces and names. It should be a little party in your post where people
are engaged with it already, that they're invested in the content. That is stuff ready for promotion in both channels.

The bottom line is we're answering the question, how many people are waiting for this article to go live? That number
should be greater than 0. If we have people invested in it, an ally in creating content is an ally in promoting that content.

Guest blogging and PR is another direct way to get SEO benefits from collaboration. There are two main search ranking
factors, as we said-- authority and relevance. Authority as in links, and relevance as in content and keywords. Guest
blogging directly leads to links to your content.

Blogger A writes two articles. Blogger B writes two articles and pitches one to an editor. They publish it-- that's that
yellow box there. That's going to link back to their content in the author bio, if not in the editorial, and in a collaborative
way they're inviting guest bloggers onto their platform. So that other blogger there is contributing an article so that
Blogger B has more content associated with their brand.

Round two, more links, more friends, more traction, more content. And round four, Blogger A, nice blog, buddy. But
Blogger B is building those relationships, those links, those social and search benefits, those collaborations, that
influencer marketing powered content strategy.

Now BuzzSumo again is a tool for this, because as you research people, it doesn't just show you the size of their
following, it shows you the domain authority of the site that they write for. The domain authority is a measure on the
scale of 1 to 100 the benefit of a link from that site to yours. Without doing a deep dive into SEO, paying attention to
who writes, but also what is the authority of the sites they write for, is one of the most important ways to measure the
possible influencer marketing, search optimization outcomes from that collaboration.

BuzzSumo is a paid tool, but you can do that research for free using MozBar, which is a Chrome extension. Install
MozBar in Chrome and go search for your topic, go search for blogs to write for. Put in the topic plus "write for us" in
quotes, and you're going to see all kinds of blogs who are accepting guest posts on that topic. And when MozBar's
turned on, it's going to overlay right onto search results the authority of that website, as in the value of a link from that
site to you.

To this day, one in three of my articles is a guest post. I don't know anybody who has a brand so big that they should
stop writing for other sites. Why would we ever stop doing PR?

11 years in content marketing, I'm still doing lots of guest posting. It's the most fun I've ever had in digital. I get to work
with expert editors who can make me a better writer. I get to reach a larger audience, and there's the search and social
benefits. So, it's useful to put out into the world as you interact with people online that you are open to these kinds of
collaborations.

One of the ways to remind people that you're open to writing for their site, or contributing a guest post to them, or
being interviewed in their content, it's helpful to put that little sentence out that says that you would love to collaborate
yourself. I've done this 1,000 times. I say this sentence so often that I actually have a text expander installed on Chrome
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so when I hit the same button three times it automatically expands into this line of text-- "If you'd ever like to
collaborate on anything at all, don't hesitate to reach out."

I love social media marketing, but what a lot of people do in social media is just trying to build a network on one
platform. What I'm suggesting here is to use social media for research and to start conversations and for networking.
Rather than build a big network on one platform, we want to connect with those key people on many platforms,
because it's those relationships that will lead to the long-term SEO benefits.

What we're doing here is basically solving the problem of bad SEO. You don't need to send cold email. You don't need to
send that a horrible form submission spam, that cold email that just says, "link to me now," or "pay me for these links,"
or "I write good article for you." I get these emails all the time.

"Take my infographic and link to me." "You have a broken link. Link to me." These are five examples of bad email
outreach and cold emails in a world where it's totally unnecessary to ever send a cold email.

Why not start the conversation, help them in some way? Include them in your content and then remind them that
you're open to be included in their content. This is really the key to making that connection between the relationships,
the links, the authority, the content, the rankings, the qualified visitors, and the lead generation. That is a much better
way to approach influencer marketing, in my experience.

Make stuff with people. Find interesting people who create things and work together with them to make content, better
content, better connections, better relationships. The benefits are much more durable for your brand.

Again, this is Andy from Orbit Media. We hope you found this useful. We'll keep making these. If you know anyone who
would find this helpful, feel free to share. We'd be grateful.