Content Marketing Basics: 10 Lessons from Joe Pulizzi, Part II

Once you’ve established the core elements of your content marketing strategy it’s time to put them into action. Here are five more insights from content marketing guru Joe Pulizzi to get you up and running, all wrapped up and waiting under the tree.

In the first post in this two-part series we stuffed our stockings with five tips from Content Marketing Institute founder Joe Pulizzi on laying the foundation for a solid content marketing strategy. In these five videos, Pulizzi builds on the content marketing basics by explaining how best to fuel your strategy with quality content, measure its effectiveness with the right metrics, and boost your discoverability with SEO.

To wrap up the series, Pulizzi even channels the ghost of Content Marketing Future, and provides a prediction of the challenges and opportunities to come.

Happy Holidays from OpenView!

The Case for Outsourcing

One of the most common ways to sink your content marketing strategy before you really start gaining traction is to keep it strictly in-house. Not only do you run the risk being quickly overwhelmed, starting out it’s also incredibly difficult for your in-house staff to avoid creating content that’s salesy.

“It’s just natural,” Pulizzi says. “Marketing and sales people want to talk about all the great products and services they have…. But your customers don’t care about that. They care about themselves.”

By outsourcing at least a portion of your content creation to freelancers you benefit from an outside perspective that can approximate where your customers are coming from and can keep the focus on addressing their pain points rather than getting bogged down in product pitches and specs.

Finding Great Freelancers

Every content marketing strategy needs talented writers to execute it. No matter how well-planned or comprehensive the content plan may be, it comes down to them to turn vision into reality.

That’s why, in this short video, Pulizzi recommends building up a stable of reliable freelancers as a great way to ensure your content creation is consistent and sustainable. But where do you find them? Pulizzi suggests your first stop should be some of the content outlets you regard.

In addition, content marketing becoming more and more prevalent and the demand for writers going up, numerous freelance content marketing services have sprung up that make hiring freelancers on a regular or assignment-by-assignment basis incredibly easy.

Key Metrics

If you’re not actively measuring the impact of your content marketing strategy you’re essentially flying blind. Monitoring the right metrics to translate your efforts into quantifiable results, and that’s crucial to knowing what content is working and what’s not.

At the bare minimum, marketers should be monitoring Google Analytics, Pulizzi explains in this video, but they shouldn’t stop there. Tracking social media shares and other measures of engagement such as newsletter subscriptions and downloads will provide evidence as to whether your content is hitting the mark with your audience or coming up short.

SEO

Your content marketing strategy will have a significant impact on your SEO efforts, and vice versa. With the latest updates to Google’s search ranking algorithm indicating that more and more emphasis is being placed on quality content, a solid content strategy clearly gives you a leg up on your search ranking competition.

But in order to take full advantage, it’s important to make sure you’re targeting the right keywords and that your content and your SEO campaigns are in alignment.

The Future of Content Marketing

What does the future hold for content marketing? It’s hard to say, but one thing we can be relatively sure of is that with more and more companies producing more and more high-quality content, competition is only going to get more intense. At what point do we reach saturation?

Pulizzi believes that marketers are years away from having to comprehensively reexamine their content marketing strategies. Technology, he says, is adding variables to the equation on an almost daily basis. As a result, even the short-term future is tough to accurately predict.

What is certain is that content marketing a year from now won’t look the same as content marketing today, and the companies at the forefront of experimenting with and adopting new tactics are going to be the ones standing out from the crowd.

We want to hear from you!

What are your content marketing predictions for 2013?