4 Steps to creating a content marketing plan

A new free content planning template developed by Smart Insights and Hubspot

Regular readers may remember that, earlier in the year, we published some joint research with Hubspot to explore best practices in managing content marketing. Content marketing is still comfortably rated as the most commercially important marketing tactic for 2015 in my recent post exploring digital marketing technology options.

Although content marketing is still seen as important by many businesses, our earlier research suggested that how to develop a content marketing strategy or plan is less clear. The chart below shows that the majority of businesses surveyed didn’t have a plan, but kudos to the 44% of businesses who do have a defined strategy!

The 4 Steps to creating a content marketing plan

To help develop a content marketing plan or review existing methods, I thought it could be helpful to apply some of the planning techniques applied in our Digital planning workbook. So we again teamed up with Hubspot to create a simple 4 Step process you can follow in the Content Marketing Planning Template published today and free for download via Hubspot – it also links through to the research we completed earlier in the year.

The 4 steps that are explained in the new guide, with worked examples of templates are:

• Step 1 Review current use of content marketing. This is a classic SWOT analysis where we have given examples of problems with content marketing programmes that are often forgotten.


• Step 2 Content marketing objectives and KPIs This uses an efficient planning table I have developed for summarising digital plans on one page. Here, as the example shows, it links objectives, strategies and KPIs across the customer lifecycle shown as the RACE Planning approach.


• Step 3 Content Gap analysis This uses a new visualisation of the Content Marketing Matrix that you may have seen before developed by Dan Bosomworth of First 10 and Smart Insights.


• Step 4. Create a content plan timeline. This example template links different content assets with content distribution or promotion options (look out for a new Content Distribution Matrix infographic we’re publishing soon to prioritise these). I was keen to show the options for repurposing content assets during a campaign since often opportunities are missed where there is one central asset in a campaign such as a whitepaper, but it is not repurposed to give the campaign more momentum.

So, we hope that’s useful – do take a look at the free download and tell us what you think. If you have other methods of planning or visualising content marketing we’d love to hear about them in the comments or even in a blog post. For example, Chris Pile shared the Farm Digital ABC Content planning prioritisation approach.

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6 Email Marketing Best Practice Tips

What are your recommended Email Marketing techniques?

That’s the question we posed in our recent email marketing tips competition. Thanks if you contributed a tip or shared the suggestions!

We had lots of great suggestions, so it’s a pity we don’t have a prize for all, but we have now selected 3 winners and there are 3 “highly commended” tips.

I asked our judges Chad White who offered up 3 copies of his new book Email Marketing Rules and Tim Watson, Email consultant at Zettasphere and regular Expert commentator on Smart Insights to each choose 3 tips and explain why they liked them. I then decided on a winning three based on the depth of the contributor’s insight and those who gave a specific example of a test.

Three winning Email marketing tips

Here are the “lucky winners”:

1. Alan Moir on Personalisation.

In one word: Personalisation.

“Companies gather some quite useful information when getting people to sign up for a free download, receive product updates or make a purchase – name, post code, date of birth, etc. but don’t put it to good use. It still annoys me when I open an email and it says ‘Dear subscriber’ or just ‘Hello’.

On the other side of the coin, I’ve found that email open rates and interaction (in terms of replies) have increased when emails are sent from ‘a person’ and not the company. Since sending emails from alan@abc.co instead of info@abc.co, open rates have gone up at least +5%. I now always receive replies from email campaigns, and subscribers really like that I personally respond to their questions/feedback instead of getting a message saying ‘this inbox is unmanned’ or an email from ‘do-not-reply@abc.co’”

Chad White commented:

“Brands definitely collect and have access to information that they don’t put to good use serving subscribers. And while B2B brands can definitely see a boost from using the sender name of a rep, his advice to monitor and respond to replies is what turns this from a gimmick into a strategic move. Sadly, very few brands monitor and respond to replies to their promotional emails”.

2. Tarvinder. Minimalistic Text format HTML

“We tested sending the same content in two formats.

1) Standard templated HTML email

2) HTML email which appears as a text email with no formatting or graphics.

We wanted to test which format resonates better for response rates.

The same test was run three times and we found there was a marked increase in click-through when sent a ‘HTML email which appears as a text email with no formatting or graphics’“.

Tim Watson says:

“This is a great tactic from Tarvinder that’s easy to implement. A classic case of just because HTML can carry bright graphics and images it doesn’t mean to say it should. Nothing screams louder ‘this is a marketing email (that can be deleted)’ than a highly graphical design. Graphics are right for consumers who signed up for product emails, say fashion, when product images are essential. But in many other verticals and particularly B2B, simple and clean copy, written like any other business email can engage far better”.

3. Stephen Parker on Testing

“We’ve tested a lot of variables in our email campaigns. For us, as a B2B company representing some major electronics companies, our most successful emails were:

• 1. Personalized


• 2. Targeted


• 3. Written with Compelling yet Short Subject-line copy


• 4. Incorporated a great visual image above the fold


• 5. Provided relevant yet various microcopy toward the bottom
  

However, by far our highest CTRs came from including an image of a video link (we’ve seen as much at a 3x increase versus non-video images).

Chad White says:

“A focus on personalization and targeting is a must. “Compelling yet short” is definitely the sweet spot for subject lines, in general. And his advice on using images and, in particular, video content is smart. Marketing has become highly visual so don’t ignore images and video content”.

Three Highly commended tips

4. Guillaume Berube. Have a welcome email series!

We’ve tested the numbers of emails in the series and found that 5 was the most effective to maximize sales on a 3 months period“.

Chad White advises:

“Effective on-boarding is so important and a welcome email series can be super effective. I love that he emphasized the tested needed to determine optimal onboarding messaging, and it was also cool that he found that a 5-email series was best for his company. While a 2-email series may be good for some, others may find that a series of 4 or 5 or more is best. Don’t be afraid to think big”.

5. Alex Corzo on Personalization

“While personalization is great, I would strongly suggest campaigns adhere to content that is pertinent to the user’s initial request [for example, in lead generation initiatives] or the user’s historical behavior [for example, in eCommerce/transaction initiatives].”

Tim Watson comments:

“Sending the right content based on past user behavior is an advanced strategy that with ever improving technology is becoming within the grasp of more and more marketers. There really isn’t a better way than behavioural based targeting. Customers expect to get relevant content but without them having to explain what is relevant to them. Preference centres were once the only why to achieve relevance and are increasingly looking like dinosaurs. Well called Alex!”

6. Craig Swerdloff on inactives

Don’t remove seemingly inactive email subscribers unless you have to, and then only remove the least valuable subscribers first.

Tim Watson advises:

“This often cited best practice of removing inactive email subscribers seems like common sense. The only issue is the definition of inactive. It’s impossible to really divide a database into active and inactive. I’ve seen in real customer data a first purchase 835 days after sign-up. Was this person inactive? And it’s common to see an open from someone who hasn’t opened in 9 months. The ‘unless you have to’ bit Craig includes in his tip is spot on, there are specific cases when its’ the right thing to consider and manage carefully. Otherwise, just ignore the typically given best practice and spend your marketing effort on other areas”.

Thanks all for sharing! I’ve been in touch with the three winners and their books are now winging their way towards them.

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7 things marketers need to know about Twitter Digits [@SmartInsights alert]

Will Digits displace other user sign-in and authentication methods

Importance: ★★★★★

Recommended link: Twitter Blog Digits announcement

This is another interesting piece of new jargon and associated tech that marketers need to ‘get their heads around’. Here’s a summary of my understanding. I’ve also gone a bit beyond the ‘copy and paste’ summaries of the announcements by digging out a couple of case study examples which show how important this could be as part of the overall digital marketing ecosystem – which is why I have unusually rated its importance as 5/5!

• 1 Digits is a new method of signing on to mobile apps and websites developed by Twitter. Twitter says it will reduce ‘friction’, enabling users to sign in to apps more readily.


• 2 Digits is based on signing in with mobile numbers and confirming using an SMS . It’s similar to two-step authentication already introduced by Twitter and Google in 2013 to improve user security.


• 3 It was announced as part of Fabric at the Twitter developers conference on 22nd October 2014. Fabric is a platform of three modules that Twitter says:

“addresses some of the most common and pervasive challenges that all app developers face: stability, distribution, revenue and identity. It combines the services of Crashlytics, MoPub, Twitter and others to help you build more stable apps, generate revenue through the world’s largest mobile ad exchange and enable you to tap into Twitter’s sign-in systems and rich streams of real-time content for greater distribution and simpler identity”.

• 4 Twitter sees part of the value proposition of Digits as the lack of need for an email address. Could this be the “beginning of the end”” for email? One of the main reasons younger users are forced to adopt it is social sign-on.


• 5 The security risk of Digits is sure to get attention. Simply, put what happens if you lose your mobile. Other fallbacks will surely be needed.


• 6 Brands are already using Digits to extend their mobile apps. The McDonald’s Alarm App enables friends to share offers for McDonald’s food and beverages. In order to redeem the offer, a person must authenticate as a real user. Twitter says:

‘McDonald’s felt that social sign-ins put too much burden on a user to share personal details, and that email addresses and passwords were too often forgotten or onerous to manage. Digits enables McDonald’s to quickly authenticate real users and get them into the app with a minimum of friction’

Fitstar sees it as important in emerging markets.

• 7. You can find out more on a dedicated site. Digits.com has all the info – it’s a separate site.

That’s how I see it – how important do you think Digits will be?

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What’s New in Marketing? September 2014

Digital Marketing Trends 2015

Online marketers need to consider print

People still love print – sometimes more than digital – so enabling good printing is essential for online marketing success

Internet marketers live in a digital world, but they should not forget printed documents. In this article you will discover:

• Why print is psychologically important


• How to ensure your website is printable


• What printed documents are worth providing

Back in 1975, Business Week magazine predicted that we would soon have a “paperless office” thanks to all the new technology being introduced at that time. Of course, here we are almost 40 years later and the paperless office is still a distant dream.

Even in this age of instant digital information, where you are not short of things to read, the chances are you also have a pile of print to wade through. The notion that digital would replace print clearly hasn’t happened. Indeed, even though the sales of ebook readers have soared, printed book sales are still healthy. Ebook sales appear to have peaked back in 2012/3, yet in the same year some 184 million printed books were sold in the UK. True, that is a fall compared with the previous year – but that was a record year thanks to “50 Shades of Grey”.

Furthermore, a study by Pew Internet showed that significant numbers of young people still want to read printed books, in spite of being brought up in a digital age.

Even though you can read headlines that digital books have overtaken printed books, these stories are often misleading because the total number of books being consumed has gone up – and besides most of the digital books sold are novels. For business books, print is still king.

Why do people love print?

You would think that children brought up with digital documents would not want to print things out, nor would they want printed books and magazines. But they do. Indeed, in one study of magazine readers across all ages it was found that even though people could subscribe to digital editions of their favourite magazine, they still preferred the printed version.

So why is that? What is so enticing with print, in spite of the ease and convenience of digital? The answer lies at the end of your fingers. Your fingers include millions of touch sensors and they are vital in helping you negotiate the world around you. Indeed, they are so important the information they provide is seen as central by your brain. When we live solely in digital, our brain misses out and is a bit concerned about the lack of detail it is receiving. Indeed, research shows that we remember less from digital alone and recall more when we print things out. It is as though our brain is more sure when we are touching something.

Some people need this touch information more than others. These are known as “kinaesthetic” individuals – their brain puts a greater weighting on tactile information than other individuals. You can spot a kinaesthetic person by the things they say. They say things like “I don’t feel I understand that” or “I need to get a grip on my studies” and so on. People who have a tendency to prefer touch sensory information reflect this in the words they use which tend to reveal physicality.

Here’s the problem in the digital world. Even though all of us will include touch sense input into what we engage with, around one in three people are touch-dominant.

That means that three in every ten people who visit your website desperately want to touch your information in order to engage with it, but have to rely solely on their visual senses. It means that a sizeable proportion of your website visitors cannot properly engage with your content.

Often, these individuals will print out your web page so they can hold it, so they can feel the content and so their brains can relax a bit because they are getting the range of sensory input required. Some people still print out all their emails so they understand what they have been sent and they can therefore respond properly.

Your web pages needs to be printable

One of the problems with printing out web pages is that browsers are not very good at printing. The key material on the page gets squashed, the adverts can dominate and the pages break in inappropriate places. As a result, standard web page printing is a mess. People can use Evernote’s “Clearly” product which allows them to print out the essence of a web page, getting rid of all the “furniture” that confuses. However, unless every one of your visitors has this browser add-on, they will get poor printing.

You can, of course, avoid this issue by having a “print only” CSS file which means when someone chooses to print your web page, the print only CSS takes over and delivers a much more desirable print experience for people. If you want to print out this article you will see that Smart Insights uses a “print.css” file to ensure the printed page is easy to read.

However, this kind of thing is not always possible, due to limitations of your content management system or the web design software that is used for your website. In such instances, then preparing a “print version” of the content is a good idea. This would be as simple as taking the content, creating a PDF of it and then having that available as a download link. Kinaesthetic people would then get a sense of relief as they would be able to click on the link and get something to print.

Should you make everything printable?

If you have to turn every page of your website into a printable PDF that is going to eat into your time and other resources. So what documents do people really want to be able to print?

Clearly any downloads you have people can print out – switching off the ability to print from within a PDF can work against you. The very reason that many people want such documents is so they can print them out.

The real reasons many people want to print something out is so they can reduce risk.

Our brain is constantly evaluating everything we do in order to reduce the risks involved. It is a central component of our survival mechanisms. Risk reduction transfers to many of our day to day activities, such as buying something. We seek to reduce the risk of spending too much on the wrong things. Hence we like to be well-informed about many of the things we buy.

For people who have a high degree of tactile input requirement, printing out something is required to help them reduce their risks. That means anything on your website that involves decision-making, such as something to buy, really ought to be printable. In this way people can print out the product details and get to “feel” them, helping their brain assemble yet more sensory input as part of its desire to reduce risk.

Key things to enable printing for include:

• Product information


• Terms and conditions


• Biographies and profiles


• Anything else that involves making decisions

Even though we are in a digital age, where millions of words are read each day online, the printed word still has immense value. Ignoring print could reduce your chances of online success; enabling print can bring about greater engagement.

(By the way, I printed this out to check before I posted it.)

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Marketing implications of Apple’s 9 September 2014 announcements? [SmartInsights alert]