It's Christmas and a new year is just round the corner, so you and your business might be looking to shake things up in 2017. You've got the cash to spend, and you want to do so wisely. Here's how:
Positioning
Go through a thorough positioning exercise. Without knowing what your brand is, what it stands for, who you are targeting and why you are different from your competitors, none of your content marketing or brand identity efforts will actually have any impact. Get hold of good B2B content strategist who can breathe some new life into your positioning and messaging. Nail the messaging and everything else will flow. Ideally, involve your lead content editor in this process. Never underestimate the words.
Visual refresh
Now you can begin to take a look at your visual marketing collaterel. This process will involve your lead content strategist, lead senior designer and lead content editor - yes the person responsible for the words. They'll need to understand the visual vision in order to craft the right words to describe your brand identity.
Website update
With the visual refresh done, you can begin looking at your website. Do take a look at my Content inventory for Drake fans for some initial ways of structuring this process. A huge team is needed to achieve this: strategist, copywriter, designer, developer, content analyst and a project manager to keep it all on track.
Content plan
Great you have a new website, you love its look and feel, you're happy with how it works, and the copy reads great. What about content? A website is a ravenous never dying oven which needs to be kept warm and its kindling is a content plan that covers everything from lead gen, to SEO to reputation nurturing. Your content strategist and content editor should be able to help with this, and you might want to pull in an ops team to help with the analytics.
Content operations
Tracking and measuring content is still a gnarly science which means it's an exciting time to be a marketer. If you're using platforms like Marketo and Pardot that's a step in the right direction. A content analyst can help define how to set these platforms up on your website and what you can achieve. They can also recommend ways to optimise your website and what analytics can be run in the background.
That's it - Merry Christmas everyone. Don't worry about work for now. It will all be waiting for us when we get back to work in the new year. Focus on what matters - friends, family and yourself.