Content and design work together. Content goes first.
Content marketing systems break away from traditional marketing and website design. It’s not about a pretty picture or some deep coded functional site. It is about getting out there quickly and immediately into a publishing schedule and cadence.
Growing your audience does take time and one of the most important aspects of your content marketing is ensuring that content is created with an integrated and substantive way.
When we service our customers as marketing partners, we assume the role of a publisher. We try to get launched quickly and get into a cadence to drive the rest of the systems that come online.
Approaching Content Marketing With Agile Development
As we work through understanding our clients’ industries and what is important to them, we get working on various systems. Our team manages everything according to a deliverables and milestones schedule in our project management system. We do the heavy lifting of strategy and execution within an inbound marketing process. Here are some of the first things we knock out:
- Interview our customers. We have a recorded teleconference call to understand the philosophy, personality and industry approach for our clients. This also helps our copywriters and copyeditors to understand the tonality of the business leader we work with.
- Design a call to action. We get working right away on a central call to action that adds value to readers and allows them to opt in with their email address. This includes writing, graphic design and web programming skills.
- Research. We start researching industry content and submerging ourselves in the details of problems that our client’s customer is trying to solve or think about.
- Copywriting. We write articles that are remarkable and able to be engaged deeply and shared. These are typically one thousand words long and designed to engage readers deeply and encourage them to share.
- Copyediting. All the content we create undergoes a copyediting process to ensure a high level of quality with grammar, spelling and fact checking.
- Optimization. We optimize content to get found online by Google search and shared easily on social networks. We also integrate the articles within the content marketing system to other articles to encourage further reading by readers.
- Publishing. There is a deadline to post the article online and ensured that it is indexed by Google. In the beginning we keep a simple and clean design and focus attention on the content with a simple call to action with integrated web forms. We also publicize content on social media platforms that point back to your articles.
- Databases and reporting. Our goal is to grow a subscriber list of people that care about what you have to say as a thought leader. We build the systems that gather, track and report the progress of your second most important asset – your subscriber list. These are your virtual pipeline of customers.
We know the importance of content and creating a process and momentum. Thus, we don’t waste time on anything else until we start publishing right away. The design elements start to evolve over time around the important and engaging stuff – remarkable content.
Refining Design Over Time
There is a lot of work, strategy and collaboration put into content development and distribution. As we get the momentum going right away and our team manages your publications much like a world-class magazine would, we start working on your design elements. These come online in stages to augment and focus your audience.
This part of our servicing varies based on what our clients opt for. There are typically two approaches;
- Standard design. If our clients need a minimal amount of functionality and have a simple call to action process, we design the content system to look world-class and clean.
- Custom design. If there is a large amount of functional requirements, then we scope out the costs for all the design and complex marketing automation and nurturing requirements.
Each of these approaches comes online over weeks as we build up content and grow subscribers. We report on metrics and help our clients understand what is happening with sales qualified leads and how deeply they are engaging their content.
We live in a world where the content matters greatly, even more so than selling people with a pretty picture. They go hand-in-hand but we have found that we put in the important stuff first and grow trust through a virtual relationship over time with this approach.
If you would like to discuss what such a system would look like for you, feel free to contact us.
