content marketing process

How to Create a Content Distribution Process to Improve Your Content Marketing Results

October 27, 2016 by Erika Heald 2 Comments

One of the great things about using an editorial management platform like Kapost to manage your editorial process is it makes it easy to create and execute against a consistent, comprehensive content development and distribution process.

I know that I’ve already given some of you hives by sharing my excitement over the ability to easily create and manage a process. But it’s not a process for process’ sake! I promise.

A solid content distribution plan can be the difference between content that finds its ideal audience and delivers on its intended business results and content that gathers cobwebs on the darkest corner of your website’s resource center. [Read more…] about How to Create a Content Distribution Process to Improve Your Content Marketing Results

6 Steps to Develop a Style Guide to Create Consistency in Your Content Marketing Messaging

September 29, 2016 by Erika Heald Leave a Comment

As a content marketer who is often called upon to write brand content, it’s important for me to understand the voice of the brand I’m writing for, who their audience is, and what actions they want someone to take after consuming a piece of their content. That’s why one of my first requests upon working with a new brand is to gain access to their style guide.

Unfortunately, many brands have not taken the time to develop their own style guide, and instead direct me to take a look at their website, or their CEO’s regular contributed column on a popular website.

This is what you call a missed opportunity.

First, I’m going to have to spend time searching out these sources and reading them (and those are billable hours if it’s a consulting project). Then I’m going to have to follow up with all the questions that are still unanswered for me after reading them (do you use the Oxford comma or not? What is the current brand description? What tense should I be writing this in?).

My final piece will then likely have to go through a couple of rounds of edits to meet your actual internal style, which is locked in the head of your primary proofreader and editor. Now you can never completely avoid edit rounds, but I’ve found that having a well-thought-out style guide can considerably cut down on how extensive those edits end up being.

I know that creating your own style guide can seem intimidating if you’ve never done it before, so I’ve outlined the steps I take when creating a new brand style guide from scratch. [Read more…] about 6 Steps to Develop a Style Guide to Create Consistency in Your Content Marketing Messaging

Building Your Content Curation Road Map: 5 Steps to a More Efficient Content Curation Process

July 24, 2016 by Erika Heald Leave a Comment

Content curation can become a time suck, resulting in content that’s shared on social but not otherwise leveraged by your content marketing plan. Which is why you need a content creation road map. This starts by defining your content curation objectives, mapping them against the appropriate curation tools, planning what to do with that content after it’s curated, and measuring your curated content’s effectiveness and using that data to refine your process.

Defining Your Content Curation Road Map

For a lot of people, their content curation process is something along the lines of logging into their computer first thing, scanning their social media channels, sharing a few items, and wondering where the past 2 hours went.

That’s not a process. This is a process:

Find relevant content
Organize your curated content
Share the content in the right channels and content vehicles

To break it down even further, my content curation process looks like this:

Define objectives
ID appropriate curation tools
Decide what to do with that content after it’s curated
Measure the content’s effectiveness
Refine the process

content marketing process

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