Advanced Content Marketing

You've tried content marketing. You've seen some success. Your boss or your client wants to see more. You might be wondering, where do I go from here? Well, you've come to the right place. This course gives you the advanced knowledge and practical skills you need to take your content marketing program from good to great. You'll learn how to scale your content marketing with message architecture, compelling stories, unique thought leadership, and advanced content operations. Throughout the course, you'll get well researched facts, proven techniques, and real world examples based on my 20 years of content experience. And you already know the basics, so this course focuses only on advanced material. I'm Colleen Jones, author of The Content Advantage, founder of Content Science, and former Head of Content at Mailchimp, and I love sharing what I've learned about content marketing. So, if you're ready to take a journey that goes far beyond the basics, I'm ready to be your guide. Let's start Advanced Content Marketing now.

• What do you want your customers to remember after they interact with your content? If you're not sure, chances are you need a message architecture. It ensures your customers get the right message. And it helps you and your team create interesting content that brings a message to life. A message architecture starts with creating a message, no surprise there. So let's walk through how to do exactly that. First, define what you want to communicate to your customers. To me, this is really focusing on what will benefit your brand or your company. A good starting point is to review your company's brand, voice, design, or identity guide. This usually lists characteristics that your company wants to exhibit. For example, when Intuit revamped TurboTax, they chose characteristics such as approachable and insightful. If your company doesn't have such a guide, that's okay. You can take a crack at writing down a few words or phrases and ask your marketing colleagues for feedback. And if you work in a large company, you can make this a group exercise, check out the attached template. Now let's consider your customers, define what your customers want or need to hear. This is where you really put yourself in your customers' shoes. I suggest reviewing any customer journeys, insights, or personas on hand. If nothing like that is available, then check whether any publicly available research or information about your customers, or your industry is available. Anything that helps you gain empathy for your customers is great. Then write down your customers' top aspirations, problems to solve, or frequent questions, strive for five to 10. Again, if you work in a large company, you can make this a group brainstorming exercise, check out the attached template. Finally, frame what you want to communicate in terms of what your customers want or need to hear. This is where message magic happens. Let's say it's important to your brand to come across as insightful. And let's say your customers are small business owners who don't have a lot of time. A key message for your content marketing might be, insights in a jiffy. Once you define the message, you can bring it to life through show and tell. Take the message, insights in a jiffy, you can show it through stories of other customers getting insights quickly, experts giving tips to get insights effectively, and more. You can also just say it occasionally. This combination of show and tell, to me, is what makes content marketing so powerful. So make your content marketing clear and compelling one message at a time. Your content marketing team will love bringing messages to life in creative ways. And your customers will find that content hard to resist.