How To Build A Custom Content Marketing Strategy by Airtable
How To Build A Custom Content Marketing Strategy by Airtable
How To Build A Custom Content Marketing Strategy by Airtable
custom content
marketing
strategy
Introduction 4
In this book you’ll find advice from industry insiders and content
marketing experts, along with purpose-built templates you can
copy and start using immediately, to get your content team up
and running in no time.
CHAPTER ONE
• User personas
• Analytics
“You need to talk with customers to understand what job they are
hiring your product to do,” says Chris Savage, CEO of the video
hosting platform Wistia. After that, “decisions that were hard
become easy,” because once you understand that your customer
is “hiring” your product to complete a larger “job,” the universe of
content that you can create expands dramatically.
Let’s say your product lets users navigate and crunch their site’s
analytics using a voice interface. If you are writing content solely
about how your product works, you’re going to hit a wall pretty
quickly. If we break things down through the jobs-to-be-done
framework, however, we quickly find that we can write an infinite
supply of content just for one specific kind of customer.
• Action: Knowing what your audience does will help direct the
kinds of pieces you write and the subject matter you address,
from “how-to” pieces to tutorials.
It’s pretty easy to tell a conventional company blog from one with
a well-thought out strategy.
After talking to your big corporation customers, you find that one
of their biggest needs is proving ROI up the chain of command.
They love your product, but actual adoption hinges on proving to
their bosses that it can generate revenue for the company.
Agencies, on the other hand, aren’t as sure about your product—
they want to see case studies of how other companies have used
it before they will commit to a free trial.
• Title
• Writer
• Publication date
• Publication location (where the piece should be published)
This is a lot of information, but it’s about the minimum you will
need for your average content pipeline.
Once drafts are finished and ready for edits, you don’t want to
have to wait around, tagging people in Slack and hoping that
they notice and have time to do edits. You need a system that
automatically takes articles from the writers’ hands and into the
hands of your editors.
To get this kind of “edits marketplace” set up, filter down to only
those articles that have the Revising status. When a writer
changes the status on their piece to Revising (signifying the piece
is ready for copy edits), it will pop into sight, ready for an editor
to pick up and polish. Over time, your team will get used to
checking this view for work that needs to be done. This way, no
one has to spend time asking for an edit on Slack—you simply
assign someone the responsibility of checking the Needs
copyedit view.
They listen to what people say about the articles they’re writing
and revise their ideas about their customer personas. They look
at what kinds of pieces get the most social shares and create
more of them. They examine the sorts of keywords they can rank
for and optimize more of their work around them.
But getting those kinds of insights isn’t the result of any high-
level strategy—it’s the result of simple, checklist-like actions that
tend to be forgotten or don’t get prioritized.
Art history has always been a hobby of mine. I joined Artsy right
out of grad school because I was drawn to the educational goals
of The Art Genome Project and the company as a whole. The
ambition to create a comprehensive, searchable database of the
world’s art has many interesting implications.
My day starts with sorting out the current status of all of our
content, to see if anything has changed from the night before.
Then I’m making sure any outstanding text is being filed on
time, and kindly nudging people if I think anything is behind
schedule. We’re a team of 13 full-time editors and three interns.
We publish five to six stories a day, ranging from short news
pieces to very involved custom-design features. All of our stories
get a lot of attention from a visual perspective, and we also have
quite an arduous proofing process involving fact-checking and
editing, and much deliberation about headlines. Everything is on
a tight deadline.
What are some of the tools you use to get your work done?
One of Artsy’s recent features. This article is about the Chinese village of
Dafen, which at one point was producing 60 percent of the world’s paintings.
But you’re right that we all have a concern for the traditional
disciplines of the art world. Artsy’s mission is to make all of the
world’s art accessible to anyone with an Internet connection—
with technology as a vehicle that will bring engagement with art
to more and more people.
I value the people I work with and want to find systems that
support them in accomplishing those things. To me, a great
process on an editorial team is one that helps editors stop
thinking about process and focus on their work. It’s a logical
problem of putting all the pieces together, but it’s also
psychological because I’m dealing with many different
personalities. I like both of those aspects of the job.
How would you define your management style, and what is most
effective about it?
An artist paints in his studio in Dafen. Photo by Adam Kuehl for Artsy.
What do you think makes the Artsy team—and how you all work
together—unique?
What have been some of the most fascinating stories you have
told through Artsy?
Dozens of copies of Vincent van Gogh’s The Starry Night, 1889, are delivered to a
gallery on the eastern edge of Dafen. Photo by Adam Kuehl for Artsy.
Collaborating with
your team
Leveraging tools to build accountability and
collaboration into your workflow
We’ve seen teams go through this shift time and time again—as
the amount of people and moving parts involved in producing
your content increases, the spreadsheet containing your entire
workflow falls into disrepair. Due dates are pushed forward.
Pieces don’t get finished.
What you need, at the most basic level, is a view that shows you
the evolution of a piece of content, from left-to-right, as a series
of card stacks.
When you first put together your editorial calendar, it’s fine to
have a single due date. But due dates change over time, and it's
easy to lose accountability for how long articles actually take to
write.
The first step to fixing this is to gain visibility into each distinct
stage of the writing pipeline; the second is to ensure that your
due dates truly hold people accountable, rather than slip ever-
further into the distance.
To do this, it is important to set separate due dates for the
different stages in your pipeline. Let’s say you know the
publication date for a certain piece—you also know the piece
requires a significant research aspect, as well as a few days’ worth
of revisions after the initial draft. Setting due dates to complete
each status saves the trouble of following up after each discrete
stage. when, instead, you set due dates for when each status
should be completed. Placed on a calendar, these stage-specific
due dates will allow you to visualize the progression of an article
over time.
At the end of each week, take some time to reflect on how things
went and where you're going. Review everything that’s been sent
out during the week by filtering down to just the last few days of
publication dates—did we hit our publish dates? What could we
have done better? Next, switch gears to review the pieces that are
due to be delivered in the next two weeks. Do any of those pieces
need extra information to move forward?
Accountability is transparency
With the right system in place, you can bring all of these moving
pieces together to create a scalable content process.
As you grow your blog, you can incorporate curated guest posts
in order to continue bringing new and valuable insights to your
readers. This kind of collaboration can help grow your blog in
two ways:
• You can write guest posts for related blogs. Not only is this a
great opportunity to meet new people with similar interests
and learn from their ideas, it’s an excellent way to connect with
their readership, and hopefully provide value to a wider
audience.
Slack is the perfect tool for keeping your team on the same page.
Here are a few of our favorite ways content teams use Slack:
Where do you find best practices about that world?
Which are some brands you think are doing a really amazing job at
reaching your particular audience? Who inspires you?
For teens, I look at Sephora and Forever 21. They’re both really,
really strong examples of brands who know who they are, who
their consumer is, and what that consumer wants from them.
What are some of the most common mistakes you see new people
coming into your field make?
Assumptions. People are so comfortable with things that they
think they know. The hardest thing to do is say, “I actually don’t
know the answer to this, let me let me find some research, or let
me do a test, or let me try one of these other 20 tools to figure out
what is actually true in reality.” People make assumptions that
can lead to poor marketing. Just because you think something or
you feel something or you know one person that did something,
doesn’t mean it’s true, or representative of the larger population.
I should write that on my hand!
We do books for readers 0–18, but it’s really 0–99, because YA,
which is the young adult category, especially in the past eight
years, has just become so popular with adult readers as well.
Technically YA is just stories where the main characters are teens
and the content is appropriate. The books’ lengths are often a
little bit different. Shorter than adult books. And then the subject
matter is a little bit different. You’re not going to have a Fifty
Shades of Grey with teenagers.
We don’t kid ourselves—we know that the number one driver for
book sales out there is word of mouth. So I would say that the
most important thing, especially for digital marketing, is to make
sure that everything we do supports that one-to-one
recommendation, whether it’s a fun listicle-style post on
penguinteen.com, or a really beautiful quote asset, or interior
illustrations, everything we do should be shareable and a
conversation starter. We also do a lot of “Reader Love,” where we
will take thoughts and reviews and reactions from readers and
post that or amplify. So yeah, that’s definitely at the forefront of
everything we do. Empowering that voice and then shining a
light on it is so important.
Any final advice you have for folks to want to get into publishing or
just getting started that they should keep in mind?
One last question: what’s one niche thing that you’re really
passionate about outside of work?
Distributing and
promoting your
content
How to drive results whether you’re at an agency
or in-house
At the most basic level, what you want is to link each discrete
article to a discrete customer in your pipeline. Doing so creates a
system that allows you to automate a large chunk of day-to-day
communications.
For example:
Clients now have a single source of truth that they can check to
see where each piece of content is in the pipeline at any moment
in time.
Let's dig into the best ways to execute each step of this
framework, and look at how you can orchestrate it all in a single
Airtable base.
You can drill down into your target audience and set yourself up
to maximize your work's performance by splitting up your
audience into three to four verticals that are likely to find the
most value in your content. Doing this will allow you to stay
laser-focused on who you're talking to, which can guide
everything from the topics you discuss, to the language that you
use when discussing it.
• Marketers
The ideal keywords will have high volume and low difficulty: that
is, there's a high volume of searches for those keywords, but it's
easier to rank near the top of the search results for them. You can
use a tool like keywordtool.io to get data on search volume for
your chosen keywords, which will help you to find the most
valuable keywords to optimize for.
Now that you have a roadmap for your content production, the
next step is to figure out where to distribute it—where is your
audience hanging out online?
• Interest-based forums
If you don't have a good sense of where your audience hangs out,
a simple Google search can work wonders. In our example,
maybe you would search for “instagram fashion forums.” Or, you
can dive into a particular community—maybe a fashion
subreddit—and unearth more communities by seeing what other
sites users commonly link to. If using Airtable, you can throw the
channels you've found into a new table and link them with the
verticals you've identified.
You can't spam community leaders with links any more than you
can spam your community: these leaders get countless
unsolicited links all the time, so the odds that they'll look at yours
is slim. Spamming a leader is ultimately a lost opportunity: if you
instead make a genuine connection with them and then ask them
to read your content, you can gain a true, influential proponent
who will want to help you and your content succeed.
How do you start from nothing and create a company blog with
enough sustainable traffic to reliably funnel millions of people to
your website?
Taking the first step to turn a spark into a small fire can be the
hardest part. That's why stores sell fire starters: kits specifically
designed to get a fire going.
When you share your content to these websites, you aren't just
giving people first exposure to your blog: you're also starting to
engage with like-minded communities, and beginning to
cultivate a community of your own around your blog and its
content. That's how you'll start your fire.
Inverting a problem can loosen up your brain and help you see
the problem from a more productive perspective. If a hammer is
all you have, everything looks like a nail. But if you have a drill
and a saw, you suddenly have a lot of ways to fix the issue in front
of you. You’re no longer committed to hammering.
Get multi-dimensional
When the tool you use reduces all of that information to a single
dimension, you are forced to juggle the extra metadata for each
article in your mind, leading to cognitive overload and avoidable
mistakes. A simple calendar cannot convey all of that
information in a way that’s genuinely useful and all-
encompassing.
The more views you have, the better: understanding all your
variables lets you make smarter decisions about how to assign
and publish work.
That’s why, if you segment your pipeline into parts, you can
make sure you are informed the moment a piece is no longer on
track for completion—and intervene to keep your blog on target.
• Editing them
There are a few ways to address this. One is regular video calls,
where the editor and writer can communicate in greater depth
about the writing to be done. Another is great systems—tools that
capture and transfer as much data as possible in a consistent
way.
If you're not getting new content out there for your company
every day, whatever content you do manage to publish will get
lost in the shuffle. But publishing new content every day can
quickly get exhausting and daunting—it's easy to fear that you'll
run out of ideas or energy at any moment.
Based on the success of these two articles, you can create a new,
de-risked article by extracting the best advice from the “Ultimate
Guide to Improving Click-Through Rates” and the “Top 5 Tips
for Writing Engaging Emails” article. The result is a piece that
strategically captures the core insights from these popular source
articles and repackages them in a different format to help a
brand-new audience of people.
Once you've learned to remix content, you'll have taken the first
step to building a repeatable and scalable content marketing
machine.
Once you've reused an article, you can check off that it's been
reused, which helps you see more easily which articles are still
available for repurposing.
Let's imagine you wrote a successful post for your company's blog
about how you doubled the number of replies to your email blast.
Why not write to your contact at Online Publication #1 and ask if
they'd be interested in publishing this de-risked, helpful piece of
content?
You can avoid losing track of contact information by keeping it
all in your Airtable base (just create a separate Publication
Contacts table), which cleanly shows everyone you know at each
publication and how to contact them.
Try to find a way to reuse and republish every one of your most
popular pieces, and always be on the lookout for popular articles
that you can remix. By using the 3 R's as a routine part of your
content creation pipeline, you can help more of your target
audience with everything you write.
Tips for hiring your first freelance writer
First, think carefully about the type of freelancer you need. What
quality of writing do you require? Will this piece feature
prominently and be promoted heavily, or is it just to fill out a
rarely-visited page on your website? By the same token, how
complex is the piece? For example, will the freelancer be
expected to interview any other individuals?
Second, sit down and decide how much you can afford to pay
your freelancer. Cost will range widely depending on who you're
working with, but expect to spend anywhere from $5 for a social
post to thousands of dollars for longer form content.
Third, start the search. There are a few options here—you can
post job listings on Craigslist or on online freelancer networks
like Upwork. There are freelance writer-specific marketplaces as
well, like WriterAccess, TextBroker, or BlogMutt. You may even
be surprised to find freelance writers in your own network. You
can also hire an agency if you think you'll need more than one
writer for an extended period of time.
The first Zap triggers when Jimmy moves a card from the
Brainstorming column to the Needs Writer”column. The record
then appears on a separate view which triggers the Zap to create
a new word document with the name and description of the
article, as well as a link to its Airtable view.
This saves Jimmy time setting up new writers. Once he assigns
them, they already have a template to work with, linked in the
Airtable card. Once they’re finished with their draft, they can
move it along the pipeline into the “For Revision” stack.
So look at the content that’s already out there for your audience,
and then ask yourself, “What would be the polar opposite of
this?” Then execute on that.
You can have the best blog in the world, but if you’re not directly
tying your content to conversion funnels, your efforts will never
get you the results you’re ultimately looking for. Whether you
want to collect email addresses, close a sale, or upsell existing
users, make sure it’s as easy as possible for people who read your
content to give you their email, sign up for a demo, or upgrade
their current plan.
Len Markidan, Head of Marketing at GrooveHQ
There are so many ways to extract value (read: traffic, leads and
customers!) from your content, and yet many marketers only ever
use a piece of content once. Don’t make the same mistake.
Meryl Ayres, Content Marketing Manager at Wistia
It will also ensure you learn from what worked and didn’t work,
because you will be actively managing that piece of content for a
committed period of time. All of that insight will be invaluable as
you jump back into the production of subsequent pieces.
Mathilde Collin, Co-Founder/CEO of Front
When the rubber meets the road, though, the key to success is
the same: Great content is great content, no matter what form it
takes. Make it for the appropriate audience, get it in front of
them as best you can, and let it shine.