Abridged and reprinted with permission from TippingpointLabs.com
At a recent conference, Andrew Davis, co-founder of Tippingpoint Labs, was asked, “If I have 40 hours a month to focus on my online content strategy, what should I do?”
It’s not a lot of time, but if you can devote it, brands can definitely learn a lot about not only how they’re perceived online, but how to contribute to the discussion.
1. Get a baseline (5 hours)
I’ve been touting the power of Google Insights for Search for awhile now. This is the first place I’d start in developing an online communications strategy. Search for your brand, your competitors, and your category. Where are the spikes? Were there long term positive effects on the trend or was it an immediate fall back to Earth? Use regular Google searches to determine what caused the spikes. Was it a big PR hit? A promotion? A positive review in a relevant community?
2. Find your audience (25 hours)
Web content marketing has to follow the behavior of web communities. It has to be extremely niche and highly targeted.
You can use Quantcast to find out where else the people who visit your site are participating. Of course, a good analytics program (we use Google Analytics) will tell you what sites are driving the most traffic to you. But this isn’t necessarily exactly whom you need to target.
Conversations are going on that are relevant to your brand segment, but may never mention your brand. These conversations are valuable too. You can’t think about marketing in terms of your brand name, you have to think about how you can elevate the discussion of the ideas within and around your product or service as well. The baseline research is going to help determine what those conversations are.
Use these sites to develop profiles of your online audience. These will need to be much more focused than TV demographics. I recommend you develop three extremely targeted profiles of your audience and where they participate.
3. Understand your audience (10 hours)
Now that you’ve identified where the people who influence your brand are participating, start to listen. You will need to understand how they communicate with each other, and what motivates them to participate.
What you don’t want to do at this point is listen only for mentions of yourself. We call this kind of behavior ”triage,” where brands seek only to participate where they come up. This is inefficient and ineffective. Ultimately, the only way to build a valuable brand reputation online is to participate in the space as the community would. They are not married to your brand, nor should your online strategy be.
Does it seem like something’s missing?
By now you’ve probably noticed that none of these three steps mentions actually participating. And that is correct. If you have 40 hours in a month, there’s no way to craft actual valuable content for the audiences you’ve identified.
A comprehensive digital strategy takes time and research. You can’t just jump into the pool and assume you’ll make friends. Valuable relationships — the holy grail of content marketing — are the result of long-term, honest engagement.
So, you’ve spent about 40 hours researching your audience. You’ve identified three key audiences, what kinds of content they consume online, and — perhaps most importantly — how they engage with it. What next? Ideally, you should be able to put together a rough editorial calendar that addresses the audiences you’ve identified, with content that they would consume.
Brad Schwarzenbach is a senior writer and strategy consultant for Tippingpoint Labs.
