Crystal Clear Communications Blog

What is the single most important content marketing decision you can make?

To do successful content marketing, you need a content marketing editor with the experience and judgment to do 4 things with your content:

Get your content on mission.

Your content marketing editor should begin by defining your content marketing editorial mission statement.

The mission statement defines who’s your audience, what kind of content you’re going to give them, and how it will help them achieve their goals. It gives the content marketing editor a clear direction to follow.

Your completed mission statement serves as a litmus test for content — telling you what to publish and what to avoid. Here’s more on how to create your content mission statement.

Keep your content on strategy.

Successful content marketing editors align their work with the needs of the business  – specifically, its top 3 objectives and goals.

What are the 3 most important things the business must achieve in the year ahead? How will that achievement be measured quantitatively? How will content marketing specifically enable the business to achieve its objectives?

I’m surprised by how often marketers don’t know the business’ top 3 objectives for the year ahead.

To help the marketing team succeed, marketing leaders must ensure that business objectives are always crystal-clear and closely linked to marketing activities.

Here’s a blog to help you create your one-page content marketing strategy.

Deliver content that’s on message.

Co-create a business message with maximum potency. A Message Map workshop brings together everyone with a say in the message — executives, R&D, product management, sales, marketing, finance, human resources, and the content marketing editor – and gets them all on the same page.

Together this team can co-create a 1-page Message Map that the business can stand behind. An agreed-on Message Map is a springboard to success for your content marketing.

A Message Map is also a tremendous timesaver, since it provides content creators a pre-approved message to begin with. It defines key topics and the company’s stance on them.

That’s how a Message Map saves time that other companies waste in unproductive review processes. A Message Map also enables real-time content such as newsjacking (riding the news media’s coat tails with your business’ viewpoint and message).

Here’s how to use a Message Map to tell your story better.

Deliver content on time.

The best content marketing programs make a date with audiences, then regularly deliver content on deadline without fail. Just as morning newspapers arrive each morning and the 6 o’clock news comes on at 6 p.m., your content must arrive on schedule, as your audience expects.

Too many newsletters and blogs launch with a big head of steam — issuing 10 posts the first month, only to later dwindle down to one post a month.

Set a regular, sustainable cadence to publish content. Create and follow an editorial calendar. But allow enough flexibility to incorporate the breaking news of the day.

Grant your content marketing editor full authority to enforce the publishing schedule so that your content appears like clockwork.

Content marketing that’s on mission, on strategy, on message and on time catapults you light years ahead of competitors.

Choosing the right content marketing editor is the single most important content marketing decision you’ll make. Make sure you’ve got someone with the right set of skills — writing, interviewing, editing and visual presentation — perhaps someone from outside your industry with a journalism background.

Here’s an ebook on how to succeed with content marketing.

Enough said!