But if content marketing has become the ubiquitous marketing strategy for brands, many organisations still struggle to effectively formalise their approach to content creation and amplification. At iCrossing, we have developed a simple-to-use, online self-assessment tool that allows you to benchmark your organization's level of content marketing maturity in the industry and, crucially, take the necessary steps to improve your entire operation.

Developed over 10 years experience helping our clients optimise their content marketing operations, our strategic model has been tried and tested by some of the world’s most innovative brands. And to help you understand the most common pitfalls faced by many marketing departments, we have broken down these challenges into 5 key areas.

Content strategy

Content marketing is not just about creating some well written blog posts and a handful of great looking social videos. The key to effective content marketing is ensuring all content has a clearly defined purpose and role to play in nudging audiences along a clear customer journey that ends in conversion. And identifying what you want audiences to do at each stage of this journey requires a strategy.

People & processes

Process is everything when it comes to producing content efficiently and at scale. Too many organisations are creating content in isolated divisional silos that don’t deliver on the needs of the organisation, as a whole. A centralised approach to content production, with organisational buy-in to an agreed approach at the highest levels of your organisation, is crucial if your content is to be truly effective for all areas of the business.

Audience & experience

It may sound obvious, but too many brands are still creating content that focuses on what marketing departments want to tell customers, rather than what audiences want to know (or find out). And in order to do this, you have to really understand your audience and their specific needs from your brand or product. By developing strong audience personas and switching your focus to start creating content that is genuinely useful to these prospective customers, as well as providing engaging digital experiences through which they can consume it, audiences will want to return to your brand, time and time again.

Amplification

Content marketing can only be effective if it is seen by the right audiences, at the moments when they need information from your brand. And to ensure this happens effectively you’ll need to employ paid media tactics to amplify your content at every customer touchpoint, throughout the customer journey. It’s a process that requires constant testing and optimisation to find the right mix of channels and formats, from SEO to paid social, so benchmark, measure, test and optimise should become your content marketing mantra!

Measurement and reporting

Knowing what data to collect and how to measure it is the secret sauce for any content marketing operation. Likes, shares and engagements may be comforting metrics to see, but they don’t really tell you anything about the effectiveness of your content. Truly mature content marketing operations are using technologies like GA, Adobe and social pixels to really understand what audiences do as a result of engaging with your content, so they can make more of the stuff that actually works.

So while sifting through spreadsheets to identify conversion and micro-conversion points may not be glamorous, it is effective, so ditch those vanity metrics and focus on the KPIs that produce real insights.

If you’re looking to tell meaningful stories that spark action from customers, deliver demonstrable ROI, or improve the efficiency of your content creation, then we can help.