How to develop, implement, and scale up a global content strategy
The purpose of this article is to give you an overview of the steps involved in developing a scalable content strategy. The article is intended for content strategists, managers, and digital marketing managers working in large companies and enterprises.
As there are a lot of topics to cover, I’ll split this guide into multiple articles, each of them detailing some of the topics above. Once you have the big picture, I encourage you to go through each of these steps and take what’s relevant for your company, adapting as needed.
Content Strategy vs. Content Marketing Strategy
Before diving into the framework, I’d like to clarify the difference between content strategy and content marketing strategy, as I see a lot of confusion around. …
How to write a content brief that’s useful for your content marketing team
If you’re a content strategist or content marketing manager looking to scale up your content production, you’ll face these challenges:
- finding and hiring good writers
- onboarding them — helping them get familiar with your company’s services or products, main USPs, competitors, target segments, and your tone of voice and writing style
- putting together a coherent strategy to let them know what’s next and what goals they’re working towards
- helping them create good content by providing effective content briefs
I’ll cover the last point here and we’ll address the other topics in separated pieces, so make sure to bookmark this article as a reference. …
Build React components from scratch, with no libraries
For this exercise, we want the navigation bar on mobile to display a hamburger menu.
A case study that shows why you need to focus on personas, funnel stages and search intent
A couple of weeks ago I received a question from the owner of a 3-year old SaaS company regarding the type of content they should focus on to get more leads through content marketing.
Their story, in big lines, was as follows: content was the only piece in their marketing puzzle that didn’t work properly. Most of their clients were acquired through cold outreach or word of mouth, so the cost of acquisition was quite high and they were looking for ways to decrease it.
They didn’t have a clear strategy in place; they did have a content calendar but the topics were chosen almost randomly, based on what the team though was relevant for their target users, and on keyword traffic potential. …
Your first 90 days as a content strategist or marketer in a new company
If you’ve recently joined a new company as a content strategist, marketer or manager, and you’ve been asked to create a 30/60/90 days plan, this article is for you.
I’ll keep it fluff-free, as there’s a lot to cover.
The 30/60/90 days content marketing plan
I always start with the big picture and I use frameworks and processes as much as possible, to make it easier to scale up the activities later on.
In big lines, here’s what you’ll do in your first 90 days:
How to perform a competitor content analysis to find gaps
The competitor content analysis is typically performed before or while developing your content strategy, to get a clear understanding of their strength and weaknesses.
For this example, I will analyze the competitors of Poise, a platform that offers narration services to authors and content creators who want to have their written content repurposed into audio format.
I’m not affiliated with any of these products/services, but I will conduct this analysis as if I were the content strategist of Poise.
I will use this spreadsheet for gathering the data. …
Insights and tips from a content audit
One of the common questions early-stage SaaS startups have is what types of content to create in order to attract more visitors and convert them to trial users or paying customers.
While there’s no standard answer that applies to all startups in all niches, there are some content types that tend to perform better for SaaS products.
These are mostly:
- comparison articles — the startup vs. its competitors
- alternative articles — the SaaS product presented as the best alternative to a known competitor
- demos or product tours focused on specific use cases or pain points
- how-to articles that focus on specific use cases or pain…
Where to find users to interview & what to ask them
In the context of developing a SaaS content strategy, user research serves a couple of purposes:
- gathering raw data from users regarding their pain points
- finding out how they solve their problems at the moment, without your product
- getting a sense of the context in which a user starts searching for a product like yours
- understanding what convinces them to buy a product and what prevents them from doing so
- finding out what users love or dislike about your product and competitors
Once you have enough data to work with, you can start looking for patterns.
A structured way to do this is to organize the needs by type, associate them with user profiles and segments, then rate the importance of those needs. …
A practical guide for setting and measuring content KPIs
When you set content marketing KPIs, always start with your company’s business and marketing goals.
If your company aims to acquire 100 new customers in the next quarter, and the entire marketing department is responsible for 50% of this number, then content marketing can probably acquire 10–25%.
In real life though, you don’t want to guess and come up with numbers based on intuition. So in this article, I’ll show you a data- and goal-driven approach to setting content marketing KPIs.
Content marketing KPIs: what to measure
In big lines, your content KPIs should show very clearly how content marketing is contributing to the overall business and marketing goals. …
Simple subscribe component with React and Styled Components
In this short tutorial, I’ll show you how to create a beautiful subscribe component in Gatsby, and connect it to the HubSpot CRM via their API.
If you’re not familiar with Gatsby yet, please take a few minutes to read my previous article.
To make this easier to follow, I’ll show you first the markup, then we’ll do the styling, and in the end we’ll implement the HubSpot integration.
Let’s start!
Create the React subscribe component in Gatsby
For the component above, I’ll use the following structure:
- A wrapper to serve as a container for the inner components, and to control the alignment of the subscribe form
- A title…
About
