Unlock the secrets to healthcare content marketing success.Get Your Exclusive Toolkit

Blog

From the Trenches

Bigfoot, The Loch Ness Monster and Content Planning

Right Source | May 5, 2011

The impact of magnetic content – content that pulls people to you – cannot be understated, and is a key to a well-executed content marketing program. Earlier this week, Mike wrote about our recent webinar What if You Build It and They Still Don’t Come? in his post  Making Content Magnetic.  In particular, Mike addressed how “well-conceptualized, well-written, well-formatted, well-optimized and well-distributed content can truly become magnetic.”

While each stage of the content marketing process is critical, all too often the program stalls before it really even gets started. The goal for content marketers is to have a well-planned, high quality queue of content ready to go.  Unfortunately for most, this content queue becomes a mythical beast.  Like the Loch Ness Monster or Bigfoot, the existence of a content queue for these folks has been often discussed but never confirmed.

The answers to the “Biggest Content Marketing Challenges” question in the B2B Content Marketing Study from MarketingProfs/Junta 42 clearly bear this out — Producing Engaging Content (36%) and Producing Enough Content (21%) weigh in as far and away the top 2 challenges.  I cite this survey all the time – probably way too frequently. Let’s just say there’s a high probability that our team here is beyond sick of hearing about this survey from me by now.  Yet, it’s critically important to understand this because, when you boil it down to its core, this means the biggest challenges are:

  1. Producing Interesting Content
  2. Doing it again (and again, and again, and again)

So how do you counter these challenges?

biggest-content-marketing-challenge

Biggest Content Marketing Challenge (click to enlarge)

The best way to make sure that you have interesting content, and enough of it, is to first develop a plan. If you know ahead of time what you are planning to publish, when you are planning to publish it, and the format(s) it will live in, you have already won a huge part of the battle. With the plan and schedule in place, you know how to attack it and how to plug in internal marketing resources, subject matter experts and external resources (if needed).  When you have a plan, a schedule and you build in the proper lead time in your timeline, you aren’t constantly pressed to quickly turn out content.  When you aren’t constantly pressed to get something out the door quickly, your odds of making content that is actually interesting – and repeatedly doing that – skyrocket.  When done right, you even build up the fabled content queue – the structured scheduled pending log of quality content.  So while you may not believe in Bigfoot or the Loch Ness Monster, the mythical content queue does in fact exist.

Learn more in our featured webinar What if You Build It and They Still Don’t Come?
the anatomy of a content marketing strategy.
Watch the video >

 

Related Resources

About Right Source:

The Marketing Trenches blog provides thought leadership from actual marketing practitioners, not from professional thought leaders. Designed to help business leaders make more educated marketing decisions, our insights come directly from our experience in the trenches. You can find more from Right Source on Facebook, X (formerly Twitter), and LinkedIn.