Learn all about the content marketing growth framework.
As the world of B2B content marketing grows, so too does the number of businesses that are trying to make it work. In fact, according to a recent survey by Content Marketing Institute, more than 60% of all B2B companies say they use content marketing as a major component of their online marketing efforts.
But despite the rise in popularity and adoption, there’s still a disconnect between what businesses expect from their content marketing efforts and what they actually get.
While content marketing is often treated like a standalone activity, it’s really just part of a larger system: the customer journey.
And while marketing efforts are usually restricted to running campaigns, they actually have much more to do with creating valuable experiences for your customers throughout their journey—from before they even know who you are until long after they’ve made a purchase.
Content marketing is a powerful way to reach your audience. It’s also one of the most challenging aspects of digital marketing because it requires you to create content that’s useful, engaging, and optimized for search engines and social media platforms. It can help you reach new customers, build trust and credibility with current customers, and increase brand awareness.
But where do you start?
You’re already doing a lot of research to get your content marketing plan off the ground. But what if you could do even more?
We’re talking about digging deeper than just keywords and ad copy. We’re talking about digging into what your audience really wants and then giving it to them in a way that really resonates.
And how do you do that?
By using a framework called “The Content Marketing Growth Framework,” which is based on four steps:
- Researching your audience
- Creating content that resonates with them
- Distributing that content in the right places at the right time.
- Optimizing your content for maximum impact
The Content Marketing Growth Framework helps you get the most out of your content marketing efforts by aligning your content creation process with your company’s growth goals.
This framework will help you:
- Identify opportunities to grow your business.
- Develop an approach that supports those opportunities.
- Measure the results of your efforts.
Is your interest piqued?
Let’s dive into learning more about this magical framework to help you cut through the noise.
What is a content marketing growth framework?
A content marketing growth framework is a strategic marketing approach to get the most out of your content. It is a four-step framework that outlines the lifecycle of a content asset and the four key areas that content marketing teams should focus on as they develop their plans for the year and decide where to invest their energy and time:
1. Research
The first step in a content marketing growth framework is research, which includes both discovering what’s working for your competitors and learning about your target audience. This step is crucial because it helps you determine where to spend your time and energy.
2. Creation
Your next step is creation, which involves creating the asset itself—whether it’s an article, video, or blog post—as well as any accompanying assets, such as social media posts or images.
3. Distribution
After you’ve created an asset, you’ll distribute it across platforms like social media, email newsletters, and more so that it reaches your target audience — this is where things like SEO come into play so that people can find your content when they’re searching online (and potentially convert).
4. Optimization
After distributing your content and seeing how it performs (via metrics such as engagement rate), optimize accordingly by taking what works best from each piece of content and applying those learnings to future.
Developing a B2B content marketing growth framework is the first step in building a successful content strategy. It allows you to determine what types of content will be most effective for your business, how much time and effort you should put into each type, and how often you need to publish new pieces.
Why should brands build a content marketing framework?
Brands that use a content marketing framework are more likely to have their content reach its intended audience and achieve its desired outcome.
Here are the top three benefits of using a content marketing framework:
1. It helps you create content that resonates with your target audience
The first benefit of using a content marketing framework is that it helps you develop an effective strategy for your content. Your strategy should include all the key components of your business—from customer personas to buyer’s journey maps—and help you create a plan for how to deliver value to your audience. Once you’ve developed this plan, you can focus on executing it across multiple channels and platforms.
2. It allows you to set goals and track progress toward them
A content marketing framework helps you be more accountable for the quality of your content and its distribution.
The framework ensures that all of your content is aligned with your brand, making it easier to track results, such as how many people are engaging with each piece of content or where they are coming from. It helps you better understand why people want to read what you’re writing, who they are, and what they want.
You can then use this information to optimize how you write to resonate with your readership and ensure better engagement with them.
3. Helps brands easily scale up your content efforts
The third benefit of using a content marketing framework is that it allows brands to easily scale their efforts without compromising quality or effectiveness.
This is because frameworks provide companies with clear processes they can follow when creating content; they also give them guidelines on how often to post updates on social media sites like Twitter or Facebook—which are crucial when scaling up from small beginnings (such as one person writing blog posts about their favorite things).
How does the content marketing framework work?
The content marketing framework is a four-step process that helps you get from idea to publication.
Step 1: Research
Research is the first step in building your content marketing framework. It allows you to better understand the audience you’re aiming to influence and the industry you’re navigating.
It’s in the research phase that you’re looking to uncover content-channel fit and content-user fit with your audience. You want to make sure that your marketing message is reaching people in a way that makes sense for them, for their habits and preferences, and for how they prefer to engage with brands.
Content-channel fit refers to how your message fits into the channels it’s being delivered.
Are you delivering a message that matches up with the goals of the channel?
Is it consistent with what people expect to see there?
For example, if you’re a fashion blogger, it would make sense to post on Instagram and other visual platforms, but it wouldn’t make sense to post on LinkedIn or Twitter.
Finding the content channel fit allows you to start researching the types of content that resonate with your target audience, and you can use this information to build your own strategy. Moreover, if you uncover your target audience as Marketing professionals on Linkedin, you can track the kind of content they consume the most and resonate with.
Content-user fit refers to how well your message meets the needs and interests of your target audience. Are they interested in what you have to say? Do they need what you’re offering? If you have an audience of young people interested in fashion trends but write about design instead, then you won’t have much luck engaging with them.
For example, if you discover that Twitter threads with memes are a hit with your audience, you can leverage such powerful insights to inform your marketing strategy.
And once you’ve ascertained the content channel fit and content user fit, you now have the content-market fit.
Content market fit can be discovered by researching your audience and studying their content habits. Once you have found the right content-market fit, you have a clear idea about the type of stories your audience loves to see and the content channels they spend their most time on.
The next step is content creation.
Step 2: Content Creation
Your content strategy isn’t just a bunch of blog posts. It’s a way to create things that will resonate with your audience and to avoid falling into the trap of not researching your audience to realize that what you’re creating just isn’t working for them.
Why is this important? Because if you don’t understand who they are and what they want, then it’s unlikely that you’ll be able to create content that will speak directly to them—and even more unlikely that they’ll engage with it in the way you need them to.
It’s also a way to help you get more visitors, who can turn into leads and, thereafter, customers who will buy from you again and again.
A great content strategy will help you create a diverse content portfolio, which is important for your site in a variety of ways. A strong content portfolio:
- Makes your site more linkable because it offers more opportunities for people to link to specific pieces of content (which can help boost your SEO)
- Makes your site more rankable because the more high-quality content you have available on your site, the better it looks to Google and other search engines
- Makes your site more shareable by providing readers with interesting things that they want to share with others
- Makes your brand more trustworthy by demonstrating that you care about quality and providing useful information
The best B2B content strategists understand this and invest in content research and creation. The next step is important and often overlooked entirely.
Step 3: Distribution
Distribution is the third and most important step in the Content Marketing Growth Framework. This step is key to your success because it ensures that your content has the greatest chance of reaching its intended audience. Ironically, it is often overlooked as a key component of a content marketing growth framework.
There’s a harsh reality that every content creator must face: Mediocre content with great distribution beats great content with no distribution. It’s not enough to just press publish on a piece of content and hope that it will go viral. You need to amplify your content and promote it to your target audience by using the right tools and channels to get the word out there.
When you’re creating great content, you want it to be seen. You want people to read and share it. The problem is that once you publish a piece of content, it’s gone forever. It’s gone as soon as the page loads on someone’s browser.
Distribution ensures that your content reaches its intended audience, which is key to making sure you hit your goals. You can have the most brilliant piece of content out there, but if no one sees it, then it’s not going to do you any good. Distribution is important because it helps you get your content in front of people who are interested in hearing from you and/or buying from you.
Distribution is where you take your content and spread it across the internet. You can do this in a few different ways:
- You can turn your content into a PDF document, which you then email to people who have signed up for your email list.
- You can turn your content into an infographic, which you then post on social media.
- You can turn your content into a webinar, which you then host on Facebook Live or YouTube Live.
There are three ways to distribute your content: organic distribution, paid distribution, and owned distribution.
- Organic distribution involves sharing your content on social media, email marketing campaigns, and other channels that allow people to discover your content without having to pay for it.
- Paid distribution refers to using paid advertising on social media or paid search engine results. For example, if you want to promote a blog post about [topic], you could pay for ads on Facebook or Google that target people who have shown interest in [topic].
- Owned distribution refers to promoting your content on owned channels such as blogs or websites.
Whatever your strategy, remember that you have to market the content after publishing it to tap into its full potential.
Step 4: Optimization
You’ve researched your target audience, created some valuable content, amplified it, and now reaping the fruits of your labor by finally getting in good traffic. How do you retain it? How do you avoid competitors from taking your market share? How do you establish standing in your niche between you and them?
You optimize your content.
Content optimization is the next step in the Content Marketing Growth Framework. It’s all about making sure that your content is as easy to find and use as possible.
Optimization can be done on both a micro level (specifically for individual pages or posts) and a macro level (for an overall site or brand). On a micro level, this means that you’re making sure that each piece of content has all of the elements necessary to help Google understand its importance: meta tags, descriptions, images, video embeds, etc. On a macro level, this means that you’re making sure that each piece of content is optimized for search engines but also for humans—so it’s easy for people to find on any device and easy for them to read/watch/listen when they get there!
When it comes to optimizing your content, there are two ways in which you can do it:
- Conversion Rate Optimization
- Search Engine Optimization
Both types of optimization efforts are important, but both come with their own set of expertise.
Conversion Rate Optimization is all about getting more people to your site and bringing them through the funnel until they buy something. And how a piece of content can help you do it. This means optimizing landing pages, headlines, text, and images, along with testing different versions of these elements to see what works best for your audience. Understand the reader’s intent and then map that with your business goals to ascertain how you can serve them content in a way that ultimately results in a conversion.
On the other hand, Search Engine Optimization is about ranking higher in search engines like Google, Bing, or Yahoo! so that people can find your content when they search for it. This can mean using specific keywords in your text and images on your website or blog posts; writing long-form content (blog posts) that gets shared around social media platforms like Facebook or Twitter; or creating videos that go viral on platforms like YouTube or Vimeo (just make sure these videos are relevant to your product or service).
Ask yourself these questions: Am I aligning my content with my target audience’s search intent? Are all my posts updated with the latest info?
These are important questions you should ask yourself quarterly, if not monthly.
In order to drive your content to become more SEO-driven, it’s important to make sure that you’re aligning it with what people are searching for and that it is as accurate as possible.
Do you need a content marketing growth framework?
We live in an age of incredible content saturation, and it’s easy to feel that your brand’s message is drowned out by all the noise. But if you have a strong and impactful content strategy, you can cut through the noise and stand out from the crowd.
The stats are in: companies are increasing budgets for content marketing. This means that if you want to get ahead of your competitors and get ROI out of your content, you need to have a plan in place.
That’s why we created the Content Marketing Growth Framework—to help you grow your business with content by making sure you’re creating consistent, relevant content that speaks to your customers’ needs.
At Contensify, we use the content marketing framework over and over again to usher in great success for many leading brands.
The Content Marketing Growth Framework is a tried-and-true approach to creating content that drives growth for your business. By following this framework, you’ll be able to attract customers who are ready to spend money on your products or services.
Are you a brand looking to create a successful content marketing growth framework?
