Content Marketing Channel Management and Promotion

In the fourth step of the old content marketing planning process, I asked budding content marketers, “How will you structure and manage your operations to activate your plans?”

I answered my rhetorical question about “process” by urging them to create “an operational plan that enables your team or department to function as a media company.”

Then, I told them to look at content marketing as a sustainable, ongoing operation, not as yet another form of campaign‐based marketing. As they looked to structure those operations, I also recommended constructing the appropriate guidelines or “playbook” by including the following:

• The steps involved in your content marketing process and the order in which they should be executed
• The owner of each of those tasks and the other players who should be involved
• The brand and quality standards you have established and guidelines on how they should be maintained
• The primary content format and media channel you will concentrate on and the best practices that should be followed in their use
• Who your content creators/contributors are and how your team will be expected to support/manage their efforts
• What other resources you can access to facilitate your efforts (both internally and externally)

The vast majority of the budding content marketers that I taught had never worked in media companies, although many had worked in marketing communications (marcom) departments, where they’d learned how to produce sales brochures. Some of them used this playbook to crank out what could charitably be described as “brochureware.”

And most didn’t read Rebecca Lieb’s book, Content Marketing: Think Like a Publisher—How to Use Content to Market Online and in Social Media (2011).

So most didn’t learn what Lieb was also trying to teach: “Content marketing is no longer a nice‐to‐have. It’s a must‐have. It’s imperative that businesses create content on an ongoing basis. They can’t create just any old content, of course. It must be relevant and high quality. It also must be valuable and drive profitable customer interactions. And it must be about customer needs and customer interests, not ad‐speak, which is all about the ‘me.’”

Things slowly got better. A growing number of content marketers had started to “think like publishers” and were beginning to “function as media companies” before the World Health Organization (WHO) declared COVID‐19 to be a global pandemic on March 11, 2020.

And you already know what happened next.

As a short article in the McKinsey Quarterly Five Fifty newsletter entitled, “The Quickening,” which was published in July 2020, noted, “If you’re feeling whiplash, it might be the ten years forward we just jumped in 90 days’ time. How fast is the world moving around us? Consider how quickly ecommerce has replaced physical channels in three months. Or how consumers are reconsidering brand loyalties and the stores and websites where they shop.”

Microsoft read the memo. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said on quarterly earnings call that month, “We’ve seen two years’ worth of digital transformation in two months.”

Adjust the Editorial Calendar

In response to the pandemic, 64 percent of B2B and 54 percent of B2C marketers in North America adjusted their editorial calendar. Hopefully, they did this after they’d changed their targeting/messaging strategy. Why? Because your editorial calendar is not your targeting/messaging strategy.

So, if they adjusted their editorial calendars without changing their targeting/messaging strategies first, then this was just a sad example of what the British call “panic stations,” which is a short period in which there is a lot of confused activity because people feel anxious.

If you’ve never created an editorial calendar before, read the article entitled, “7 Steps to a More Strategic Editorial Calendar,” which was written by Kelsey Raymond, the co‐founder and CEO of Influence & Co., and published by CMI on Jan. 6, 2022.

She says, “Too many companies focus on the logistics of their editorial calendar—what days content is publishing, at what times, and at what cadence—and ignore the strategic elements. Anyone can schedule blog posts regularly, but the best content marketers create robust, strategic editorial calendars.”

Her seven‐step guide details how to build an effective editorial calendar:

• Determine who needs to be included.
• Identify goals for the quarter.
• Decide the content mix and publishing cadence to support those goals.
• Document your mix and cadence decisions on the editorial calendar.
• Brainstorm topics.
• Plan for flexibility.
• Measure results to determine the success of your plan.

She concludes, “Following a strategic approach to your editorial calendar is a never‐ending process. But that ongoing work should be affected by your evaluation process. Review your key metrics toward the end of the quarter as you begin to plan for your next three months. It gets easier each time you plan the editorial calendar for the next quarter because you’re simply tweaking your previous plan rather than starting from scratch.”

The overwhelming majority of content marketers say that video has become more important to their organizations over the last 2 years. And future investments into video are expected to climb even further.

To up your video investment and make it the backbone of your overall marketing approach—like a lot of your peers are planning to do—you need a video content calendar.

You can start by borrowing a page out of the YouTube creator playbook for brands. In the section entitled, “Schedule your content,” the playbook recommends building a channel calendar to map your programming strategy over the year. It advocates producing three types of complementary content in the following framework: help, hub, and hero content.

• Help content: What is your audience actively searching for regarding your brand or industry? What can serve as your 365‐day‐relevant, always‐on, content programming (e.g., product tutorials, how‐to content, customer service)?
• Hub content: The content you develop on a regular basis to give a fresh perspective on your target audience’s passion points (e.g., verticalized content about a product line). This is often staggered throughout the year.
• Hero content: What content do you want to push to a big, broad audience? What would be your Super Bowl moment? A brand may have only a few hero moments in a year, such as product launch events or industry tent‐poles.

This playbook was published in October 2015. I would argue that brands have added a fourth type of content to this framework in the past two years: hygiene content.

• Hygiene content: This is the Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR), Corporate Social Advocacy (CSA), Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG), and Public Service Announcement (PSA) content that you create on an occasional basis.

If you would like some examples of each these four types of content, check out this very small sample of the 754 videos that YouTube uploaded to the brand’s 10 channels in 2021.