Are you the first marketing hire, and trying to get all of your programs running? Here’s a quick sketch of how to start.

• The first two people you need are product marketing and demand gen. If you have a demand gen background, hire a product marketer. If you have a product marketing background, hire demand gen. Both of these people will need to stretch into (or hire contractors for) adjacent areas. Your PMM will need to do a lot of writing, and your demand gen person will need to do some marketing ops and analytics.
• Next, figure out messaging and positioning and, depending on the company, some basic field enablement. A reasonable guess at messaging and positioning will make your content and demand gen programs much more effective and useful over the long term.
• Then, you’ll need a topic strategy. Here’s how to get from positioning and messaging to content. A topic strategy is your decision about what small number of topics you want your brand to be experts in. It will lay the groundwork for your content marketing.
• By the way, we’ve put together a rigorous, but simple, process for figuring out your keyword strategy. SEO should not solely determine your topic strategy. But you can use your keyword strategy to get started with your topic strategy.
• Next is to start producing content. Distributing your content will be a key part of this. Distribution means getting your website into a place you feel comfortable with, but it also means spinning up demand gen and community engagement experiments. Here’s more about how to do that.

Simple, right? Of course not, but we’re always happy to brainstorm about specifics, use the chat button if you’d like to set up a time.

If you’re publishing copies of your sites in multiple languages, you have several options for how to organize the site for your users. But you should probably use folders. For example, https://ercule.co/jp. Here’s why:

• Having all pages on the same domain usually corresponds to easier maintenance and deployment. And if you have separate domains, you’ll often end up with separate Wordpress installs, for example, to back each one. And that means inconsistency and poor user experience.
• Keeping everything on your main site means that all backlinks point to the same domain. That means everything on your site benefits from better link equity.
• Having all your sites on the same domains means that cookies can be shared across sites. For example, a visitor to ercule.co who switches to ercule.co/fr can still be retargeted and can be easily tracked with the same analytics trackers.

There are some alternatives, but we don’t recommend them.

• A different top-level domain, e.g. site.de. These domains can be hard to acquire in every relevant country, and their authority profiles have to be built up separately in Google.
• A different subdomain, e.g. de.site.com. While there is some debate, in our experience backlink equity is not transferred as well across subdomains.
• A URL parameter, e.g. site.com?lang=de. Google explicitly recommends against this.
• Automatically serving different versions of the site to different users. This is very, very hard to do reliably and is also not recommended by Google.

You can see Google’s advice here, which has a little more detail but is very similar to what we said above. A couple of last notes:

• Don’t forget to use an appropriate hreflang tag on each page.
• You can use the International Targeting report in Google Search Console to troubleshoot.

You want your site to load as quickly as possible. Site speed is becoming an increasingly important factor in whether your site ranks. And it has a major impact on conversions, too.

A big culprit we’re seeing for slow site speed these days is – oversized images!

• Your 2,000 x 2,000 pixel Ultra HD author thumbnail
• Images that aren’t compressed at all, but could be, with no loss of quality
• A blog image with detail like a Hieronymous Bosch painting. (Actually, this would be cool, let us know if you do this)

These are easy mistakes to make. Fortunately, they’re also easy to correct. Here’s what you can do:

• Look through your CMS image library. Sort the images by size. Look for images that are larger than around 500kb and see if they really need to be that big. (And note that things like icons should be much, much, smaller).
• Most CMSes have plugins that ensure images have optimal compression. Or use something like Image Optim before you upload.
• Talk to your web dev. Ask: What are we doing to compress images? 
• Talk to your graphic designer. Ask: Can you provide cropped and sized images, if you aren’t already?
• Build good habits. Whenever you add an image to a post from now on, make sure the dimensions aren’t any bigger than they need to be.

Seed keywords are critical for building an organic search strategy. But it’s important to pick the right seed keywords; otherwise you end up spending much more time on keyword research than you need to.

Good sources for seed keywords

Your site, particularly on your product and solutions pages, and in your marketing materials. Don’t just look in front page copy – blog posts can be helpful, too, and so can testimonials and landing pages.

For example, Dropbox’s site for Dropbox Business uses a bunch of important phrases in its value pillars. Dropbox’s reach is sufficiently broad that something like “team collaboration” may make sense for them to target.

Vidyard’s site also includes some useful language in its value pillars. Some of the pillars are too broadly written for a topic strategy, most likely. (This can also be an opportunity to use topic strategy as a way to drive clearer product messaging – what if all of these value pillars contained helpful topics?)

Here’s a testimonial from Zoey’s site that has a helpful phrase in it.

Landing pages, especially those that describe an asset, can be helpful, too. Here’s a Zylo landing page with a ton of helpful phrases on it. The PDF itself is a longer read, but likely to have lots more.

Competitors’ sites are also an important place to look. Braze’s library page has some great topic candidates, and there are additional ones on the front page of a competitor’s site.

Other important sources include:

• Sales calls. Use a tool like Gong to check out transcripts and important topics that you can potentially use in your content creation.
• Everyone else in marketing, particularly product marketing.
• Customer success and services. You can get lots of value from a good relationship with these teams.
• Sales enablement and sales, particularly development reps. Check out their call scripts for phrases that are resonating.

Put these in a spreadsheet, ideally something in the cloud so you can very easily collaborate on it.

Picking the right keywords

It’s important not to pick keywords that are too narrow, or too broad. There isn’t a hard and fast rule for this, but in the end, you’re going to focus on 3 - 5 topics at a time.

Can you realistically see your choices occupying one of those slots? Do you think that each of your seed keywords could potentially be a blog topic? If not, probably too narrow. Will people who use your keyword to search be likely to convert once they land on your site? If not, probably too broad.

Let’s imagine you run a company that sells software to help companies assess their customer satisfaction.

• We would probably include “customer satisfaction measurement” or “survey software”.
• We probably would not include “how sales reps should use customer satisfaction measurement software”, because it’s too narrow and unlikely to be a blog topic.
• But “customer satisfaction” is likely too broad. There are lots of reasons that people would be looking for this term that have nothing to do with what we sell.

Head keywords vs. long-tail

Long tail keywords are keyword phrases that are complex and relatively long – for example, “how to measure customer satisfaction for automotive companies” – that also have low volume but very high propensity to convert. Pursuing long-tail keywords can be extremely helpful, particularly for direct-to-consumer companies.

If you go after long-tail keywords, generate them after you’ve completed your final strategy, based on the head keywords you decided to prioritize. Looking through the lens of your overall strategy, long-tail keywords tend to be more of a tactical consideration.

Search continues to be a critical driver of website traffic, and, in turn, leads and new customers. And organic search in particular is a relatively low-cost investment in capturing that traffic, with lots of side benefits. Organic search is a:

• Critical marketing channel
• Important way of building trust
• Durable generator of traffic, leads, and revenue
• Useful lever for organizing your content strategy and site experience

Organic search is where your customers are

Organic search drives huge amounts of traffic – a typical number that’s thrown around is over 50%, but you can see what’s true for your situation by checking your analytics. Even without optimizing for organic search, most companies see a majority of their traffic – and a large percentage of leads and customers – coming from organic.

So you kind of have to be there, just as you’d be with any other major marketing channel.

But organic search has some advantages that make it a really great place to be, too. There’s a big difference in the value of a random person driving by your billboard on a highway, as compared to someone who sees useful content from you in response to a search for a solution to a problem you can solve. Your audience is trying to unblock themselves. They have problems, and they run a search on Google, using keyword phrases, to find solutions to those problems.

Organic search is heavily targeted toward people who want to become customers, and in our experience, it’s extremely effective at doing that.

Organic search results are a way to build trust

Customers tend to trust organic search results more than they do paid ads. And in our experience, leads who came through organic search end up being much more likely to buy than people who come in through paid channels. There’s something about organic results that seem to do a better job of targeting people who are interested in buying.

Organic search also tends to be a quick way for customers to assess the credibility of multiple companies in a space. If you’ve ever Googled something, you probably focused your clicks on the top few results. That high ranking is an important signal of a company’s standing in the market.

The flipside of this is – if you aren’t ranking for relevant terms in organic search, your competitors might be. And that means your competitors are building trust that they have the resources and product to solve your customers’ problems. Try to avoid scenarios where active users of your product are finding solutions to their follow on problems, on your competitors’ sites.

Rankings in organic search are durable

The minute you stop paying for Google Ads – or any other paid channel – you don’t show up in those listings anymore, which means you aren’t really building an asset, but instead paying for leads.

That can be fine as a short-term strategy, but a lot of B2B companies develop dependency on paid channels, which, when they get turned off, mean that lead volume declines dramatically. Plus, ads are becoming more competitive and take up more space on the front page. This means that clicks from paid ads are going to become more expensive.

But with organic search, you can continue to generate leads and revenue without paying for placement. It’s true that you have to make some content investments to maintain your rank, but you’re probably making these investments, anyway.

Content strategy and site experience can be organized using SEO.

To be successful in organic search, you need a strategy. “Keyword strategy” is often made to sound complicated, but fundamentally it’s pretty simple – find topics (not just keywords, topics) that are relevant to your business, with a worthwhile balance of competition and volume.

A keyword strategy can be a great way to organize some of your content marketing. The exercise of going through brainstorming, organizing, and then prioritizing topic areas is a super helpful exercise for content teams.

And it’s a great reason to prioritize site experience, too.There are just 3 things that we look at in our 5-minute SEO audit. Does the site load fast? Does it look good? Can we tell what it’s about?

Google (and other search engines) are pretty good at prioritizing high-quality content in search results. This means that organic search can be a good organizing principle for your content strategy. The data that’s available is a reasonable proxy for what’s in demand.

By the same token, SEO is responsive to a high-quality site experience. That means that SEO is an important lever for thinking and talking about site performance.

Conclusion

Organic search is an extremely useful channel for marketers, and one that’s not super expensive to get right. Beyond organic search, there are some other considerations, too – owning your audience, getting conversions, and distributing links to your content on other channels.

There are lots of extremely long guides to building keyword strategies. This is not one of those. The idea behind this list is to give you the fastest steps to building a high-quality keyword strategy without wasted effort.

Limit the number of seed keywords you come up with

The first thing you’ll do is generate an initial list of topics, or “seed keywords”. It is possible to build seed keyword lists that have many hundreds (or even thousands) of keywords that you then go on to evaluate for inclusion in your final strategy. In fact, many articles on how to build a keyword strategy suggest that you do this, often by using Google’s suggestions or suggestions from a paid tool, for example.

It’s often helpful to be thorough, but in practice we see limited value from additional suggestions generated by keyword tools, unless you have a large team behind your SEO efforts. We bet you can name most of the seed keywords you want to use in an hour or two of research. No need to build exhaustive lists.

If you decide to go after long-tail keywords, generate them after you’ve completed your final strategy

Long tail keywords are keyword phrases that are complex and relatively long – for example, “how to measure customer satisfaction for automotive companies” – that also have low volume but high propensity to convert. Pursuing long-tail keywords can be extremely helpful, particularly for direct-to-consumer companies.

But as a matter of process, you should prioritize building a list of more general, or “head”, topics. Then take your most promising keywords and expand them into high-intent versions that you can build landing pages around.

Pick seed keywords that are not too narrow, but also not too broad

The most efficient sources for seed phrases include your own site, your marketing materials, your competitors’ sites, and transcripts from sales calls. Put these in a spreadsheet, ideally something in the cloud (Google Sheets, for example) so you can easily collaborate on it.

Then, you’ll want to make sure you pick seed keywords at the right level of detail for your strategy. Let’s imagine you run a company that sells software to help companies assess their customer satisfaction.

We would probably include “customer satisfaction measurement” or “survey software”. We probably would not include “how sales reps should use customer satisfaction measurement software”, because it’s too narrow… Or “customer satisfaction”, because it’s too broad. There are lots of reasons that people would be looking for this term that have nothing to do with what we sell.

Understand what volume and competition data are telling you

There are lots of ways to pull volume and competition data, but the point is to answer the questions:

• How much interest is there in these topics?
• How much high-quality information is already out there?

Just as with everything else in business, we want to find places where we can (a) efficiently fill a need that’s (b) worth filling. The typical way to do this is to pull volume and competition statistics from a tool like SEMRush or Ahrefs. (Note: the numbers you’ll get from such tools are very rough and only give us directional information.)

If you want to get creative, you could also use tools like Google Trends or even other data like social shares, though of course that would result in data that wouldn’t be specific to organic search.

Relevance for each keyword is a critical measurement

Relevance is what you want to be known for. And it’s ultimately what makes visitors convert on the pages you build for organic search.

For a company that sells customer satisfaction software, a term like “customer satisfaction software” will have the highest score possible for relevance. On the other hand, a term like “survey software” – because it can mean so many other things – will probably have less relevance. Be sure to include relevance along with volume and competition as a statistic for your final weighting.

Balance volume, competition, and relevance in the right way for your position in the market

The last step in building a keyword strategy is to combine the 3 key statistics – relevance, volume, and competition – for all of your seed keywords, and see what seems like the best bets.

You can use whatever formula you like to combine your keywords. In particular, you might be at a company that’s just starting out with content marketing, in which case your algorithm puts more emphasis on picking stuff that’s not competitive. On the other hand, you might be in the opposite situation, in which you’re working at a company that already has a lot of traction in search. In that case, it might make sense to go after more competitive keywords.

Use a simple formula. (Or skip using a formula altogether and eyeball it, if you need to.) Of course you should choose things that rank well on your list. But you might have other considerations, too. What’s easy to update? What do we feel comfortable talking about? What do we know about where our business is going? These are all things that might influence the choice of where you ultimately focus.

Iterate and update

Most companies (and, for that matter, agencies), build a keyword strategy once and then forget about it and don’t touch it again for, let’s be honest, years. This is bad, especially at fast-growing companies that need to be responsive to changing conditions around the strategy they’ve built. You need to revisit your keyword strategy consistently, let’s say once every six months to a year, and make sure everyone’s still on board with it.

Building a keyword strategy doesn’t do anything unless it gets followed, and even if it is followed, it takes a consistent effort over months to see results.

Conclusion

Building a keyword strategy doesn’t have to be a long, drawn-out process. You can build a reliable, defensible strategy in just a couple of hours if you limit your focus, incorporate relevance alongside volume and competition, and keep your strategy updated in response to conditions.

In a lot of client meetings, we hear clients express their concerns about whether they’ll be penalized for duplicate content. It’s unlikely, and here’s why.

Understanding duplicate content

Let’s imagine you run a SaaS company that helps companies manage subscription billing. And your site has a blog post titled “What is billing management?” Perfect.

You want to build your expertise in this area, so you start writing related posts – let’s say, “Billing Management vs. Accounting.”

At some point, you’re going to have to define ‘billing management,’ and that definition is going to look an awful lot like the one you wrote in the previous piece. Or perhaps you think there’s a need for a new article that would benefit from whole sections of content that you wrote for other posts.

The myth is that, based on this “duplicate content”, Google will assess some kind of penalty, making it harder for you to rank and acquire traffic.

What duplicate content (and the duplicate content penalty) really means

It might be the phrasing that scares people. “Penalty.” Punishment!

But really, the duplicate content penalty just means that duplicate content – and by “duplicate content”, we generally mean content that is exactly the same – will confuse Google, and may not show up in search results. Because, as they say on their site, Google tries hard to index and show pages with distinct information.

Google is focused on providing the best possible user experience. When you, the user, type a question into the search bar, you want to search results that offer varied answers.

If Google identifies the exact same answers – word for word – on several sites, it’s going to rank one of them much higher and the others much lower.

So, don’t think of the ‘duplicate content penalty’ as a mode of punishment. Rather, it’s a system that puts a premium on unique information. (Of course, Google is not a purely agnostic search engine, but that’s a topic for another blog post.)

Scenarios you shouldn’t worry about

Most businesses are working really hard to produce original content in strategic ways that assert their expertise. Still, they worry about duplicate penalties. Some scenarios that will not trigger duplicate content penalties:

• Reusing text you used elsewhere. Just make sure you paraphrase or rephrase it.
• Multiple posts on one topic. So long as the posts are individualized with different headlines and subheads, multiple posts on a topic are actually great for SEO.
• Multiple posts in one keyword area. Fear not: this is another very effective strategy for building credibility and search performance.

None of these examples are actually duplication. Rather, they might be considered iteration, or repetition, or variations on a theme – all of which are the content marketer’s friend.

In general, an effective content marketing strategy involves making the most out of all the content you have. Strategies we recommend to clients include:

• Repurpose. Adapt old content for newer, more relevant topics
• Refresh. Update posts regularly to make sure that they’re accurate and optimized.
• Recycle. A blog post can easily become a chapter within a white paper.

After all, you spent a lot of time crafting this content – with a little revision time, you can give it new life. And by doing so, you know that everything on your site is relevant and active.

What to do about truly duplicate content

OK, there are a few cases where you may have truly duplicate content.

Most commonly, this is caused by CMS errors rendering the same content on multiple URLs. Technical issues like these are common but easily found with a technical audit of the site.

Or, your duplication might be intentional. Perhaps you published a blog on your site and Medium (which we don’t recommend). Or you’ve got event info on multiple pages of your site. Or you have press releases that are republished elsewhere.

If you can, set some canonical tags. They’ll let Google know which of the duplicate pages should be ranked higher. SEMrush has a great little guide for canonical tags. But in any case, you’re very unlikely to be assessed any kind of real penalty for this.

Of course, another cause of duplicate content is straight-up plagiarism. Don’t do this. It’s not good for your brand or your soul or even your SEO. Search engines will notice your duplicate content if you plagiarize, and assess actual penalties. Like, penalty penalties, also known as “manual actions”.

This is very unlikely to be a problem unless you are doing it intentionally.

Conclusion

For most businesses, duplicate content penalties are not a huge danger. Google ranks duplicate content lower when it can’t decide which of the pages has primacy. So when we talk about penalties, we’re really just talking about weaker search performance.

If you’re taking time to create original content and publish it in a consistent way, you’re probably not at much risk for these ‘penalties.’ Optimizing your site for SEO means taking inventory of your content, and making sure there are no duplicates.

Fear of duplication should not stop you from repurposing and reusing content, or from building numerous assets around individual keyword groups. These tactics are the backbone of an effective content marketing program. Cases like republishing are not necessarily good, but are unlikely to cause you problems.

Have any questions about your duplication fears? We love to talk shop. Hit us up in the chat below.

Choosing a CMS is one of the most important decisions you’ll make with your marketing tech stack. There are literally hundreds of options, but we think for most marketing teams – at companies up to, let’s say, 200 employees – it boils down to just a few.

Before we get into a typology of content management systems, there is one cardinal rule that we use with everyone we talk to.

Innovate with your product, not with your CMS. You want a standard, popular, good-enough solution that lets you go fast.

• Yes, fast means that the website itself is fast – though this is achievable with most standard CMSes.
• More importantly, fast means that your CMS isn’t an obstacle for your content marketing team. A common outcome of CMS decisions is that content marketing teams end up having to use a system that they don’t feel comfortable with, that has lots of unexpected quirks, or that otherwise trips them up and reduces the speed of adding and updating content. Avoid this if you can.

Types of CMSes

Here’s how we divide them up:

Vanilla CMS. Really, this is Wordpress, though there are lots of others that follow this model (Drupal, for example, in most of its configurations. But most small companies should just use Wordpress if they’re going down the Vanilla CMS route.)

This type of CMS is a combination of an application that lets you edit – and display – content, with a database, which stores content. Each page is generated for a website visitor on demand. For example, if you visit /blog/legal-process-management, Wordpress will do a bunch of work to retrieve the blog template, populate it with the correct text from the database for that page, and show it to the user.

Wordpress is a little slow and not cutting-edge, but the software is well-understood, easy to host, easy to find help with, and has quite a lot of flexibility.

Static site generator. Think Jekyll, or Hugo. This is technically a CMS in that you use it to manage content, but it works very differently from a vanilla CMS.

All content is stored in special types of text files. These are edited to make updates, usually using a plain text editor. When changes have been made and a new edition of the site is ready to launch, the static site generator application is run either on the web or on someone’s computer. That application combs through all the text files and pre-generates a copy of every possible page someone might see, and those copies are stored on a web server.

Static site generator sites are really fast for site visitors. If you’re a developer, they also offer infinite flexibility, and are very low-maintenance. If you’re not a developer, though, static site generators make your life more complicated – you can put a graphical interface on top of them, but they’re not really designed for that workflow.

Website builder. Think Webflow. Your entire site is hosted through a SaaS app, completely managed by a third-party vendor. The mechanics might follow the CMS or static site generator models, but it really doesn’t matter because the only thing that an editor or developer sees is the ability to edit all the files and templates on the site through a web-based editor.

A high-quality website builder will work well for most marketing teams. It can be a little scary that you’re trusting your website to a SaaS somewhere, but in practice we haven’t seen problems. Some website builders severely limit your design options – you want something pretty fully-featured.

Custom or advanced solution. There’s an infinite set of these, and most agencies will try to sell these because they result in more billable hours, and they’re more interesting to build. (HubSpot’s CMS – a tempting choice for HubSpot users – also falls into this category because it works in a lot of ways that are weirdly proprietary.)

For most companies, we advise against these. They tend to have odd quirks and bugs, which violate our “go fast” rules above. They tend to be ultimately harder to migrate from, harder to maintain, and less secure. There are definitely companies that need – and should use – custom solutions. You’ll know if you’re a company like that!

What types of companies should use what kinds of CMS?

Companies with intense developer cultures are served well by static site generators. This is also true for companies where there is lots of interest in staffing marketing with engineering help (rare).

If you’ve got pretty sophisticated design help, that’s an argument in favor of a website builder – Webflow is really your best bet here. Otherwise, you may want to consider Wordpress.

Most types of CMS will work fine for most types of companies, with various pros and cons. If something is working for you, even if it’s not working perfectly, that’s solid evidence in favor of sticking with what you have.

Should I migrate to another type of CMS if I already have one in place?

If you’re asking this question – generally, no.

CMSes all come with tradeoffs. If you’ve already got the organizational structure and resources in place to support Wordpress, and you’re using Wordpress, stick with Wordpress. And rarely should you switch between CMSes in a particular category – don’t migrate from Wordpress to Drupal without very compelling reasons for doing so.

There are a few exceptions to this rule. These all assume you’re feeling significant pain from your current solution and have specific reasons for wanting to switch.

• You’re in the wrong category altogether. You’re a company with an intense developer culture that would really respond to using a static site generator, but you’re using Wordpress.
• You’re using an unpopular or custom solution and have the resources to migrate to something more popular. You’re using ObscureCMS or HubSpot CMS, and you have budget to move to Webflow. (Or Wordpress, for that matter.)
• A significant marketing resource shift is taking place. You used to have 2 front-end developers in marketing who maintained your Jekyll (static site generator) site, but they left, you need the open slots for demand gen managers, and an agency will build and maintain a site based on something standard for you.
• You have 2 (or more) CMSes. The reasoning behind having 2 CMSes is generally that you want a different workflow for more static pages like the homepage, as opposed to templated pages like blog posts. But it’s hard to keep design and other important aspects of 2 CMSes in sync, so you usually end up looking like you have 2 slightly different sites, which causes a visitor experience that reflects poorly on your brand.

There’s no magic in any of these choices. Generally, you should use something conventional and well-supported. Innovate in your product, not your marketing stack.

Getting started with content marketing isn’t easy. As we talk about a lot – not only do you have to figure out what to write, and write it, but you also have to worry about distribution channels, and making sure you content you create adds people to your ongoing audience. In addition to all the logistics, you have to figure out the specific strategies that will work for your company. And you have to get the content created, which means paying for high-quality writing, or doing it yourself!

And this is before you know if anything you’re going to do will actually work.

Still, content marketing is a good place to start. Here’s why:

• A content library is free, and it’s an asset you own and can improve over time (more here). With paid marketing, when you stop spending, the lead flow stops. Plus, while paid is faster, you’re still looking at a huge investment to figure it out and make it work.
• Having even a small amount of content on your site helps you establish a point of view that you can use for marketing materials, with customers, with press, and so on.
• We haven’t seen a B2B brand be successful without high-quality content. It’s helpful to invest early.

But if you have no money, no team, and no strategy (yet), it’s daunting to start from scratch. So here’s what we suggest:

• Start by actively participating in the communities where your customers hang out. Let’s say you build software to help sales reps close deals faster. Where do sales reps hang out? What about sales enablement managers? Join their public Slack communities, connect with them on social, and answer their questions. Build a spreadsheet of conversations that are happening that you can be helpful – not promotional – in.
• Use your existing expertise in these communities. Answer questions, engage in short conversations – but provide value, not promotion. (Yes, we’re saying this twice).
• And of course, talk to your existing customers and find out what questions they still have.

Once you have some rhythm to your engagement, you can start producing a very modest number of high-quality articles.

• If you can produce 1 - 2 pieces a month that are of significant length (let’s just say 1,000 words?) and help your customer solve a specific problem, that’s a good place to start. Consistency is key. Less frequent but more consistent is better.
• Base the topics for these articles on problems that you know your customers are having. Some of this information will be from the conversations you’re having about your area of expertise.
• Take each article you create, and promote it as much as you can. (I’m assuming you’ve taken an initial step of building your audience as much as you can, too.) Social is important, but the best places are often smaller groups where your users are congregating. And what about your existing customers?
• Use each article to build subsequent articles. Try to pick an area where you can develop some topic expertise and build for depth first, not breadth.

These steps are free, not terribly time-consuming, and can help you build a minimum viable content marketing and promotion strategy.

Digital marketing can be incredibly effective, but there are a huge number of variables to consider, and content has to be successful at all levels of the content stack – including copy, structure, distribution and promotion – in order to generate revenue.

Plus: the environment is constantly changing. New channels become available, company positioning evolves, available resources expand or contract, and the product adds or removes features to satisfy customers.

As a result, successful marketing isn’t so much about being great at any one thing, though of course that helps. Instead, it’s about being responsive to changing conditions, and learning fast.

We recently read an article documenting what it’s like for surgical teams learning how to perform a new type of heart surgery. This new procedure is amazingly effective but the tech involved is unfamiliar, and much harder for surgical teams to learn.

In the study, the authors observed that this particular new technology “requires greater interdependence and communication among team members”, and that’s generally true when new technologies come on the scene. These surgeons couldn’t get a better outcome without communicating a lot more.

Neither can we as digital marketers. In digital marketing today, there’s just too much going on for any one person to be able to solve problems by themselves – creating the right content, editing it, posting it, and promoting it all require lots of specialized skills that are very difficult to find in one person. So establishing a shared understanding is key.

This often takes the form of a team board or a spreadsheet where team tasks are posted, together with their relative priorities and statuses. At Ercule, each meeting with clients is structured around a simple tracker, and even if we’re not touching a specific piece of content, we use the spreadsheet to guide a structured conversation around what’s happening.

The article also mentions an experimental and collaborative mindset as a key attribute of successful teams:

“Teams whose members felt comfortable making suggestions, trying things that might not work, pointing out potential problems, and admitting mistakes were more successful at learning a new procedure.”

It’s easy to think that we have a lot of data, and therefore we know what’s going on and don’t need to talk about it. Website traffic is going up – that’s good, right? But actually, having all the data kind of complicates the additional work. Website traffic might be going up, but we need to understand why. We need to understand whether it’s converting.

Discussion helps because we can think together about what the data is really telling us. We can figure out the little things that we can do to fix the problems we’re seeing. And an open discussion is also better for junior marketers, because then they feel more liberated to actually question what’s going on. (We often find that junior marketers are the ones who actually have the best idea about what we should be doing next.)

Conclusion

Successful teams don’t avoid mistakes. But in addition to being highly collaborative, and experimental, they structure their work so they can engage in real-time learning — analyzing and drawing lessons from the process while it’s under way. And they set things up explicitly so that learning can happen as fast as possible.