How to plan and implement a content campaign

We’ve figured out step by step how to work with content when you need a targeted campaign for results.

Right now, customers live in an ocean of content. To attract their attention, you need high-quality and useful material. But how do you make content marketing work to achieve your goals? We share the algorithm that we use ourselves.

Step 1. Forming a strategy

First, clearly define your business objectives. Do you want to boost sales to existing customers, attract a new audience, or enter another market? Then study your target audience in detail: segment it, identify the needs, desires, and pain points of each group. Determine what motivates consumers to move further along the customer’s path, and what hinders this process.

Next, formulate the buyer’s path: from the first contact with the brand to making a purchase and subsequent retention. What are the key stages that affect the fulfillment of your goals?

Analyze the competitors’ content. Evaluate the quality of the materials, and think about creating a unique product: unusual ideas, fresh formats, or hot topics that can favorably emphasize your offer.

Draw up the final structure of the strategy, which will become the basis for the next steps.

Step 2. Developing tactics

Based on the approved strategy, you need to think about exactly how you will convey the message to the audience. This includes:

• choosing content formats;
• defining placement sites;
• selection of promotion tools.

An example from practice is a campaign for Western Digital. Task: to inform corporate customers about the rebranding of the line of hard drives for organizations. What they did: they clearly identified the target audience – specialists in the procurement of corporate equipment. We have identified a key stage of the user’s journey – familiarization with the new product name. We chose the storytelling format: we consistently showed how the brand’s corporate solutions developed. We have identified the main site – Habr: the resource is well known and inspires confidence among the target audience. Added links to products to the text. To expand the coverage, we used: programmatic; targeted advertising; mailing lists.

Step 3. Preparation of the technical infrastructure

Check if everything is ready to launch the campaign. Create accounts and cabinets on the necessary sites. Prepare an analytics system to track the results.

Step 4. Content Production

The strategy is in front of our eyes, the tactics are outlined, and we begin to fill the campaign with meanings: we formulate key messages for each segment of the target audience and each stage of interaction with the brand. Then we create a content plan that will ensure the delivery of messages.

For large projects, it is useful to prepare in advance:

• Basic content. Research, facts and figures that will be useful in preparing publications and instructions for authors.
• Questionnaires for management. To get valuable comments from top management, rather than wasting their time on voicing the basic content.
• Questions for specialized specialists. To get details that are not available in open sources, this will increase the value of the content.
• The semantic core. What is your target audience looking for online? Using keywords will help you attract organic traffic and make your content more relevant.

When the preparatory work is completed, you can proceed directly to content creation. Remember that the materials must:

• match approved key messages;
• take into account the specifics of the audience and the stage of its journey;
• include elaborated keywords (where appropriate);
• rely on the collected data and expert comments.

When the texts are written, evaluate the time spent relative to the quality of the content received. It may be more profitable to transfer the production process to external contractors or AI. However, for the most part, this applies to posts for social networks and simple formats. For example, AI cannot write emotional texts.

Keep an archive of materials. Save ideas, blanks, and texts of published articles that can be reworked or updated later.

Develop recommendations for authors on current trends in the field of content in recent years.

Step 5. Distribution

Your content is ready, now is the time to bring it to a wide audience. What are the key points that are important at this stage?

• Choose suitable sites, taking into account the format and target audience.
• Actively promote your content to ensure maximum reach.
• Follow the sales funnel model: first, wide coverage, then retargeting to interested users.
• Conduct A/B testing of titles and visual elements for optimization.

Step 6. Evaluation of the results

The KPI needs to be determined at the start. The main rule is that indicators should be relevant to the task. For example:

• for a campaign to increase awareness – reach, reads, engagement, brand search query dynamics;
• for sales– the number of leads, conversions, and CPC.

Remember that you always need to look at a set of indicators, considering both quantitative and qualitative metrics. However, the measurability of PR (including individual content activities) is a separate big topic…