Read Time: 00:02:21 You publish a lot of content. Want proof? Throughout your day the phone rings, Slack lights up, and inboxes buzz with ideas of publishing content, whether it’s press coverage, downloadable content, social content, paid advertising, videos, blog posts. When ever you push any piece of content live, you are publishing. But do you know how does content publishing your sales funnel play together? Admittedly, content generation is difficult and the fact that there is content to push is a great first step. Jumping off from the Social Media and Your Sales Funnel blog post, a great second step is to follow what we call the Publishing Purpose Checklist. Each organization’s checklist will flex but the basics remain consistent: Primary Questions – What is the content type? – What is the purpose of this content? – What is the goal of publishing? – How will I measure the results? Supporting Plan – What Channels will I publish across? – What Mediums will I utilize? – Who am I targeting? This is fairly straight forward but easy to forget in the often rushed environment of the day-to-day hustle and grind. What is the purpose of this content? In order to be thoughtful and deliberate in a crowded marketplace, answering what the purpose of the publishing is will help you create valuable content, bring a scientific approach to your content game, and help identify publishing strategies that will keep your funnel full throughout. Examples of Publication Purposes: [Attempting to keep it tight and measurable, the goal of publishing content can generally fall into the following categories as mapped back to your funnel] – Brand awareness – Acquisition – Activation – Revenue – Referral – Retention What is the goal? The goals will change depending on the content type, as each is relevant to the piece. Some examples of what people can do with your content are: – New users to your site – Video plays – Newsletter signups – Content downloads – Event registrations – Ecommerce revenue event – Social referrals etc. The key here is to not only measure the goal KPI but the ecosystem of user behaviors to better understand how people interact with your content, despite your goals. For example, you may set the goal of content downloads which you achieve however understanding that an unexpected driver of those downloads was social shares is a massive insight, and ultimately cost saver. And you can only know when measuring and tracking correctly. How will I measure the results? When you set a goal for your content, make sure you can measure it. With so many measurement tools out there the inability to measure is becoming more unacceptable with each passing quarter. Relevant measurement may be a different story but we have to start somewhere. And the closer you map back your measurement to a single set of KPIs cross-content, cross-campaign the better. As you know we champion mapping everything back to the AARRR metrics. So what does this look like in practice? Example Publishing Purpose Checklist Rough: Content – New Product Video Purpose – Activation Goal – Video Plays Measurement – Cumulative Video plays [Facebook, YouTube, website] – Campaign 1 Publication Channel #1 – Facebook Medium – News Feed Ad Target – Lookalike list of past 6 month customer base – Campaign 2 Publication Channel #2 – Email Medium – Newsletter Target – House list – Campaign 3 Publication Channel #3 – PR Medium – PRWire Target – Tech Journalists Clearly there is more to completing a Purpose Driven Content Schedule, but hopefully the above is a great start for you and your team. If you’d like to discuss further we would be happy to set up a call and discuss how Purpose Driven Publishing and Campaign Creation can help you grow your Measurable Marketing Engine.]]>