How to Content Market

  • Identify a topic of interest in your market: Things are always changing, new management trends, new spending, new technology. Just listen to other people’s conversations and see what is interesting people
  • Set your goals for a piece on that topic: We aren’t creating content just to create content, typically we are creating it to:
    • Have an excuse to engage a partner or customer in the creation
    • Build your credibility
    • Build your audience
    • Re-use in RFI or RFP responses
  • Decide what you want to say: You can create a piece that just describes what is happening, but if you want people to engage you usually need a point of view on what is happening, or add something new to the conversation.
  • Choose a type of content that allows you to achieve your goals: This isn’t hard but make sure the format you are choosing supports your goals. For example:
    • You want an excuse to engage partners and customers: Then an article where you can ask for a quote, or a podcast interview where they talk about the topic might be good, but running a survey or analyzing and publishing data on the topic might not give you the same engagement opportunities
    • Building credibility: People love data, and if you take the time to find public data, or create data (e.g. run a survey), and then analyze it, or if you write long content people will assume you are a serious credible practitioner in the space
    • Build your audience: People don’t like to read, but if you put out quick “snack-able” content in infographics or videos it can grow your audience
  • Plan and Write: We write a lot and we follow the second grade writing approach.
    • Start with an outline
    • Put bullets for the major things you want to say
    • Add sub-bullets for the supporting ideas under each major bullet
    • Then turn the outline into a draft
    • The edit
  • Publish: This might be the most important step.
    • Think about where your audience hangs our (usually LinkedIn)
    • Think about when to publish (what day, what time of day)
    • If you are posting on social media who will you tag in the post
  • Engage: If someone likes or comments on your content engage back
  • Track: Week track of your engagement stats (LinkedIn does a great job creating these for you)

How FedScout supports your Marketing

FedScout has tools to help you organize and manage your content creation process

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