A successful content marketing plan includes employees, partners, and customer service to really establish the brand across multiple channels. There are three key objectives when tackling content marketing in 2013.

The first thing is that you need look past content marketing as a buzzword. Understand that it is more than a simple info graphic embedded on your blogs filling your site with back links and more than a real-time photo tweeted during the opening day of the Royals game.

A productive content marketing plan needs to be emotional and tell a story that will guide your customers to alter their behavior, attitudes and perceptions of your brand.

Your content is what connects you with your customers. It’s beyond search, blogs, and even your website. Your plan should include a brand narrative. It is crucial that you stick to this for your content marketing plan, whether that’s online or off. Content, blogs, status updates, videos, tweets, press releases, and photos are all important but the story you choose to tell via customers, partners, and employees is equally as important. Even paid media incentives are a factor in your narrative.

A brand narrative is different than your content narrative. The message you deliver in your brand doesn’t stick with people. In fact, they often reject it. This is the perfect opportunity to give your content narrative that personal touch that can relate to your consumers.

Your content narrative should include:

• Issues that are important to the brand.
• Focus on the brand’s pillars and positioning. This is the core of the brand narrative.
• What is the media’s perception of your brand? Know what they are saying about the brand.
• Besides your brand, what are your fans interested in? Find out those other interests.
• Look at what the communities’ thoughts are of your brand?
• Learn from the past. Content marketing plans won’t work if you don’t look at what basic performance data hasn’t worked before.
• Compare your brand with others by looking at search behaviors. What are some similar products and services out there?
• Customers can have a lot of gripes with customer support. Identifying support issues that concern your customers will be an opportunity to profit.

Once you’ve established your content marketing plan, start looking at how you can up level yourself as a media company. Every business should view itself this way. Consider these simple things when transitioning into the media company you are capable of being:

• Establish an editorial team responsible for getting the message out and assign roles for each contributor.
• Partner with a paid media team using a variety of models to manage your content.
• Sway technology in your favor and invest well.
• By adapting all of these key elements into your content marketing plan, you are on your way to success, whether that’s re-positioning yourself, selling more products and services, or changing customers’ behavior. 

You should have your content strategy in place before marketing it. If you’d like help developing it, contact Susan J. Campbell Copywriting Solutions. We’d love to help get you started.