Strategic content development is the most effective and controlled way to share your stories with your target audience. Leveraging your brand’s owned channels – social media, website, newsletters, annual reports, marketing materials, e-blasts, public notices, presentations, speeches, key messaging documents, talking points, and press releases – to tell your story consistently ensures your message is distributed broadly to the intended audience.
Consider the following steps when building your brand across your marketing channels.
Step 1: Clearly define your goal, measures of success, and key messages.
What are you trying to accomplish with the dissemination of your message(s)? What business objectives do your communications support, and what metrics or key performance indicators will you use to track your progress? These KPIs might include measuring web traffic to a particular page, tracking the downloads for a research report, or increasing donations to a fundraising campaign.
Next, develop a consistent brand voice with a key messaging document. This tool captures high-level messages, talking points, and tone to be reiterated across all platforms. All communications team members will use this, ensuring consistency within your team as well. The key messaging document serves as a guide for all content development and should be referred to often.
Step 2: Outline the parameters of your content to tell an effective story.
Consider the resources available to tell your story: owned, paid, and earned. Outline these channels and strategize the content that fits each platform. Review the elements available, or needed, to tell your story compellingly.
Again, refer to the messaging document. What stories can be told, and in what manner, to underscore the established messaging and achieve your business goal? A blog post on your company’s website might be narrative-heavy, while an Instagram reel will need to be visually captivating with minimal text. A LinkedIn post will target C-Suite peers, while an internal newsletter will reach employees. Each channel can be used to tell your story, but the differences in format and audience necessitate specialized content.
Step 3: Develop content and invest in high quality visual assets.
Consider the visual elements currently available. Photography, short and long-form video, graphics, and infographics are all essential in supporting your storytelling. If these aren’t engaging, the accompanying text loses its impact.
Step 4: Determine the frequency and cadence.
How often and at what intervals will you be posting on the channels available to you? Daily, weekly, monthly? Develop a content calendar to plan your posts for the duration of your campaign.
Glean from past campaign analytics where and when to best place future content. To that end, also establish consistent checkpoints (whether monthly or quarterly) within your current campaign at which you can evaluate and adjust strategy as needed.
Step 5: Evaluate if the campaign met your overall goals.
At the conclusion of your campaign, review analytics to determine success. What did or didn’t resonate? What content performed best on which channels, and are there patterns among the highest-performing content?
Most importantly, how did the campaign’s performance move the needle on the organization’s business objectives, and how can that be illustrated?
Integrated content marketing builds brand consistency across your platforms with customized content to suit the channel type and audience. A thoughtful, integrated content marketing strategy allows you to convey the story in the most engaging and impactful way. Every day, Elmore develops meaningful integrated content marketing strategies to tell our clients’ stories. We would be pleased to help you do the same. Contact us to learn more.
