Where to get started with content marketing

People always say that the hardest part of writing is getting started. So my advice to you is: don’t.

This isn’t an excuse to get me out of doing my day job, by the way. (Although?). It’s just that when it comes to content marketing, copywriting is only about 10% of the work. There are a whole bunch of other ducks you need to get in a row before you start writing, and more to follow up on once you’ve finished.

That advice is hard for startup marketing teams to swallow, I grant you. The urge (and probably the pressure) to start producing stuff is strong. And that’s the whole startup mantra, right? Fail fast, iterate, go again. It’s a completely valid approach, and actually, one that I strongly recommend young content teams take. But there’s a difference between that, and getting sucked into a cycle of churning out low-impact content reactively. 

So how do you avoid it? And if you’re not writing stuff, what are you meant to be doing instead?

Content marketing quick start guide

Unfortunately for you (and me) the answer is: loads of things. ‘Waiting for inspiration to strike’ isn’t one of them, in case you thought you were going to get off that easy. For startup teams making their first foray into content marketing, I suggest breaking your to-do list down into three sets of activities: whys, hows and whats. And I’m going to start sounding like a broken record here, but you have to start with the whys.

WHY activities

1. Decide your why

We covered this in the last post, so hopefully you’ve already started giving it a bit of thought. If you can’t be bothered to go back and read that, the gist is: pick one goal, make sure it’s aligned with your overarching marketing objectives, and backburner everything else.

If you’ve already read that, sorry for the repetition but it’s a) really important and b) really satisfying to start a to-do list with something you’ve already done. Delicious brain hack.

2. Engage your internal stakeholders

Say it with me: content isn’t finished until it’s communicated! Let this be your mantra. If you create something ace but nobody knows it’s there, it won’t perform. The same goes for all the non-production stuff that makes up the other 90% content marketing.

It’s a truth universally acknowledged that the majority of internal stakeholders probably don’t get what you’re doing. So you need to educate them. They’re going to be annoyed if, when you do start producing things, it’s not stuff that works for them – or if it’s not even about what they think it should be about. Get everyone on board early about what content is and isn’t, and about what you’re trying to achieve with it. It’ll save you a lot of stress (and edit time) later.

HOW activities

3. Define your messaging 

You know why you want to do content. Now you need to figure out what it is you want to say. Developing your brand messaging is how you do that.

Your content is basically a vehicle for articulating all the good stuff about your brand. It wraps story and narrative around who you are, what you do and why that’s good. Strong content marketing isn’t just stuff you think is interesting, or even stuff your audience thinks is interesting. It’s stuff that’s interesting and why they should care about hearing it from you, articulated in a way that showcases your strong points as a brand. You need to start with nailing how you talk about yourself before you can layer your content strategy on top.

4. Develop your strategy

Your content strategy is your North Star document for detailing how you turn those messages into content that meets your goals. Apparently, 65% of the most successful content marketers have a documented strategy vs 14% of the least successful, so it’s worth doing.

It can be a bit overwhelming trying to work out exactly what needs to go in your strategy, and it will probably end up linking out to loads of other satellite documents. Broadly, I think it needs to cover four things, which I call THE FOUR Ps OF CONTENT STRATEGY, even though one of them starts with an I:

Planning: What’s your goal, who are your targets, what do you want to talk to them about?

Production: What are the individual pieces of content you’re going to produce? Think about topics and formats.

Performance: Where are you putting it, and how will you know it’s done well? Think about distribution channels and metrics.

Improvement: Then what? That can (and should) change depending on performance, but it’s good to think about long-term goals and get people excited about your vision.

5. Build out your key processes: 

Nuts and bolts stuff this, but it needs doing. Content doesn’t just magically appear and because it usually involves a lot of stakeholders, takes pretty skillful management to get it out the door on time.

A few things you’ll want to think about will be briefing processes, tone of voice guides, collaborative content calendars, constructive feedback channels, review processes, ways of working with design, metrics trackers, audits, access, storage, tools and team incentivisation to share, contribute to and create their own content.

6. Engage your internal stakeholders

Do it again!

WHAT activities

7. Develop content ideas

At this point, you should have a good idea of what you’re trying to communicate, why and to whom. Now you can crack on with wrapping some narrative around it.

This is the hard part. In some cases, a laundry list of what your business does is appropriate. But in most, it isn’t. You need to find a way to abstract those messages and insert them into conversations that are already happening in the market. The good news is, it’s not just on you. This is a group activity: loop in as many people from across the business as possible to work out which ideas will have the most impact.

8. Write

You have my permission.

9. Publish your content

This is oversimplified because what I mean is: run all your other processes. Getting content out the door can take as long (or longer) than writing it, and feel like a very arduous checkbox exercise if you consider yourself a ~wordsmith~ at heart. But if you’re not rigorous about following your own processes, you’ll be setting yourself up to fail. Your content will lack impact, be hard to measure and almost impossible to scale.

10. Engage your internal stakeholders

No but seriously. Tracking your own metrics is grand, but talking to other team-members will help you understand how content is landing, if it’s pushing towards your other marketing goals, and ways you can iterate and improve. 

Which is critical, because step 11 is: start all over again.

I realise that saying ‘define your messaging!’ is only half-helpful and don’t worry, I’ll share deep-dives into how you actually do all of this stuff in due course. But for now…step away from the blog.