9 Expert Insights for Managing Content Marketing Effectively

Managing content marketing is the most crucial element of digital marketing in any era, but it is especially challenging with the changes wrought by AI. In case you hid under a rock for the last year, content is the new SEO, and creating valuable content on a consistent basis is how you earn viewers’ attention today, much the way early TV relied on programs to get viewers to watch commercials. Now that TV advertising is dead, or at least in its death throes, content marketing is the name of the game.

However, GEO or generative engine optimization means you must alter some of your strategies for managing content marketing to show up in AI search results that users employ with increasing frequency today.

Managing content marketing

Seems simple, right? You create content, share it across social platforms, and money begins flowing in.

Maybe that was your expectation, but has your result matched that expectation?

Probably not. That’s because managing content marketing requires a variety of activities and skills that you may not have. Here’s a checklist of requirements for good content marketing:

• Build a content marketing plan
• Create a content marketing calendar
• Perform research to build an SEO/ GEO strategy, along with keyword research
• Create and design content
• Use a content management system
• Manage social media sharing
• Integrate your content marketing with your email marketing program
• Distribute content across channels
• Analyze results to optimize performance

Next, let’s take a look at these actions individually.

1. Managing content marketing: Planning

A marketing plan consists of everything in a business plan except the pro forma financial statements. Lots of variation exists in constructing a marketing plan, but major elements of a marketing plan include (in order):

1. Situation Analysis
2. SWOT Analysis
3. Goals and objectives
4. Strategic Plan that covers all 4 P’s with 1 year of detailed planning
5. Implementation
6. Measurement and Control

Commonly, a marketing plan will comprise between 15 and 45 pages, not including figures, notes, and references. Although companies seeking funding may find their marketing plan significantly longer. A marketing plan is normally developed projecting plans to five years in the future and is usually updated at least every year. The marketing plan forms the foundation of long-range planning for the firm, as well as forming yearly tactical plans which detail the current year’s actions and expectations.

2. Managing content marketing: Calendars

Nearly all B2B and B2C companies use content to drive purchase–whether that’s in-store or online. But you need a story that readers want to hear if you wanna cut through the clutter.

A calendar keeps you from staring at a blank screen and wondering what to talk about today. It allows you to easily see previous posts to allow easy internal linking. And, a calendar ensures you stay on message. If you want more on content marketing calendars, check out this post from the experts on content marketing, Content Marketing Institute.

You don’t need anything fancy to create a marketing calendar. In fact, I offer a content marketing template in Excel that you’re welcome to download and customize. Alternatively, you can use Excel, a whiteboard, a big wall calendar, or any one of a number of apps to help manage your content marketing calendar. You should include posts by date (I normally schedule a month out), title, image links, keywords, campaign goals, outbound and inbound links you’ll need, and spaces for individuals to sign off before the content goes live. Let’s take a look at some advice from the experts in the infographic below.

You also need to be flexible. If something happens in the news, you should adjust your calendar to take advantage of or avoid being insensitive. For instance, a national tragedy warrants a suspension of promotion and, instead, calls for messages of sympathy or offers of help. Don’t use a tragedy to tout yourself or minimize the impact of events. For instance, many TV programs, like The Tonight Show, changed their formats in the aftermath of 911 to show their support for the loss of life.

3. Managing content marketing with SEO/ GEO and keywords

If I’d written this post a few years ago, SEO and the keywords related to a successful SEO strategy would have dominated our discussion in this section. Don’t get me wrong, SEO is still an important aspect of managing content marketing. Today, you need to supplement that strategy with new writing strategies to help AI tools understand your content if you want to show up when users search with these tools. Now, you must also focus on brand mentions by these tools to optimize success.

Among the changes to consider based on GEO are:

• Including lists that make it easier for AI platforms to serve up your content
• Use schema markup to help organize your content
• Headings, subheadings, and images also help improve your content
• Focus on E-E-A-T (expertise, experience, authority, and trust) by writing insightful content that contains data, citations to highly authoritative sites, and reviews that help users and AI tools evaluate your content’s value. Include resumes for key employees or other means to toute your value.
• Ensure your content is fresh by updating or deleting old content.

Keywords still matter, although you must focus on user intent when choosing them. Years ago, keywords were actually words, so the name stuck. Today, keywords are really phrases representing the words users employ when searching for something and they’re the key to reaching your target audience.

Again, I’ve written extensively about keywords and the Google Keyword Planning Tool, so I’m linking to those posts.

Choosing the “right” keywords requires an in-depth understanding of your target market — often in the form of personas, which are stereotypical individuals who make up your target market.

• Who are they and what do they look like?
• What are their biggest pain points?
• What aspect(s) of your products are most important to them?
• Who and what do they admire? Hate?
• What factors interfere with their ability to purchase a solution?
• How do they talk about their problem … the problem you solve?

You also need to understand your competition, since you don’t really want to go head-to-head against a strong rival.

4. Managing content marketing: content creation

So, what types of content should you post? There are many options, including posts:

• highlighting your values and/or contributions to the community
• celebrating partners, customers, and/or employees
• inviting your community to provide feedback, such as suggesting new products or voting on a new logo
• creating entertaining content, such as a meme or a quote
• developing how-to videos
• addressing users’ questions
• sharing a case study using your product
• sharing content created by others
• hosting a contest
• sharing content from your blog, podcast, or a transcript of your video
• celebrating an accomplishment or holiday
• going LIVE
• and, lots, lots more. Try to develop content that helps move users down the conversion funnel toward a purchase such as this image showing how to layer content.

The key to the kingdom is to publish high-quality content consistently. Layering content to ensure you work effectively to move engaged users through the decision-making process ensures a steady stream of conversions. By creating variety, employing video, images, text, graphics, and focusing on various keywords, your community will engage more deeply and keep coming back to see your new offerings.

Including a call-to-action (CTA) is part of every landing page. The most basic advice for new salespeople is to ask for the sale, something often overlooked in the mass of other things they’re doing.

The same goes for your content. Tell readers what you want them to do. Should they download an ebook, join your mailing list, or buy your product?

And, don’t flood your posts with a bunch of CTAs. One strong CTA is all it takes, with maybe a fallback offer, and it’s enough. Anymore, visitors get confused about what they’re supposed to do, and instead, they’ll do nothing.

5. Content management system (CMS)

A CMS, such as WordPress, is essential for managing content marketing. These systems help you publish, organize, and manage the content on your website. Through plugins that extend the usability of your CMS, you can make it easier to create great content, help it rank better with search engines and AI platforms, automate sharing on social and email platforms, and much more.

Choosing the right CMS is essential, as changing later on is a huge task.

6. Social media management

There are a large number of options when it comes to sharing your content on social media. Obviously, the channels used vary with different target markets. For instance, as a B2B marketer, I share on LinkedIn using a schedule similar to Facebook. Here’s a graphic to help you choose:

You want to create additional content, in addition to sharing your website content on social platforms. Keep in mind that you can’t just talk about yourself or share only your own content on social media. Experts recommend an 80/20 split, with only 20% of your content being promotional. I take a liberal view of this, so any content I create, I consider promotional since I include a CTA in the post. Hence, I spend time each day curating content from other, related sources. A marketing automation tool, such as Buffer, really helps ensure you share on a regular basis.

Adding social share buttons to your website is also essential, as it makes it easy for visitors to share your content on their own platforms or join your communities.

7. Email marketing

Don’t forget email marketing when it comes to managing content marketing, as this marketing strategy offers the highest ROI of any available options.

In addition to sharing your fresh content to subscribers, send highly-personalized messages on a regular basis to help:

• Update subscribers on new products, events, and other changes
• Nurture leads to improve conversion rates
• Remind customers when it’s time to repurchase
• Keep front-of-mind so subscribers easily recall your brand when making their next purchase
• Generate goodwill by sending holiday messages, birthday cards, etc

8. Managing content marketing: Analytics

Google Analytics is your friend, and EVERY website should include code in the head to track visits to your website. Google Analytics includes an enormous amount of valuable information and tools to extract insights from your website.

Consider including advanced tracking to make better choices about content marketing moving forward. Use unique tracking codes to track:

• Goal completions
• Conversions within your pages
• Actions on various social media or external sites
• and, lots more

But it’s not enough to simply add tracking and codes to your content. You need a strategy to optimize performance, such as using A/B testing to improve performance.

Next, you need dashboards to make sense of your data. Create several dashboards to reflect different goals and derive insights. For instance, you might monitor your SEO with a dashboard that includes keywords driving visits. You can monitor conversions by setting up dashboards reflecting multi-channel attribution models. Then, segment your conversions based on customer demographics, geographics, and psychographics to optimize performance.

9. Managing content marketing: Influencers

I get emails every day from marketers who hope I’ll include their content on my site.  Then, they send a number of follow-up emails that seal their fate. I almost never do this. Not because their content isn’t valuable, just that it’s time-consuming to keep up with it all: storing, organizing, etc. Instead, I normally use Google and search for the best sources for links that suit my purpose. I find I frequently link to the same resources because I can count on them to provide quality content.

So, I don’t recommend creating a huge list of influencers and then emailing them every time you create something mildly interesting. Instead, I recommend developing deep relationships with other bloggers and social media influencers. Then, when you have something valuable to share, you can bring it to their attention with much better results than just reaching out to large swathes of influencers.

Conclusion

Managing content marketing takes time, money, and sustained effort. Unfortunately, you won’t see the effect of your dedication to managing content marketing immediately, as it takes time for search engines and LLMs (large language models, which underpin AI) to find your content, and it takes a significant amount of content to entice them to “recommend” it to users. Over time, you’ll see a vast improvement in visitors to your website, as well as massive conversion rate improvements.

Let me know how it goes by posting in the comments below.

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