But in our attempts to elbow-out the competition, we may have made a critical error. Owned, earned and paid, while each comprised of very different channels, are often treated as merely that: different channels for distribution. When in fact, inherent in each of these overlapping spheres are realities that impact the when, where, how and by whom your content will be received.

More specifically, owned, earned and paid media have unique strengths and abilities to target buyers at stages throughout the purchasing process. By better leveraging these strengths, marketers stand to increase internal efficiencies, and improve campaign performance and ROI.

Below are activities, roles and key stages of the buying process for owned, earned and paid.

Owned Media

• Examples: Website, blog, social media channels, newsletters, subscribers, email lists
• Roles: Establish subject matter expertise, develop content themes, build audience, build foundation for thought leadership
• Key stages of the buying process: Consideration, comparison, trust, loyalty

The most obvious benefit of owned media is that it is your own. It cannot be altered or taken down without your consent, and it is forever ubiquitously available to potential buyers for the upfront price of its creation. Total control also gives you the ability to optimize for readability and conversions. Your content can be best positioned to achieve its intended outcome and serve your goals—no one else’s.

Also, owned media consumers have found you. They’re looking to solve a problem, consider solutions, compare vendors or validate their decision, and have turned to you for answers. As a result, you are in a unique position to grab—and hold—their attention.

To best leverage the freedom and flexibility of owned content, make it your most meaty. Long-form content (website pages, blog posts, etc.) is smiled upon by Google and lends well to building your brand’s credibility on a particular subject.

Balance legitimacy with brand messaging. First and foremost, your content must be high quality. Provide strong support for content with third-party sources and subject matter experts. But also use this editorial freedom to weave in brand tie-ins so readers associate subject matter expertise with your company.

Lastly, owned content must be optimized for a conversion—and for the right one. Readers in the consideration stage are likely ready to take the leap into a free trial, download a premium content asset, request a demo or subscribe to your blog. Those in the comparison and trust stages are on the verge of a purchase; and in the loyalty stage, becoming a passionate brand advocate.

With complete control, the sky’s the limit. Content should be written with a specific buyer persona and stage in mind. And calls to action should also be tailored (and tested) to guide visitors to their next step.

Earned Media

• Examples: Influencer marketing, PR and media relations, guest blogging, online reviews, word of mouth
• Roles: Build thought leadership, establish credibility
• Key stages of the buying process: Awareness, trust

Earned media’s primary benefits are borrowed reach and third-party validation. Because of this, building awareness is well suited for earned media. This is your chance in front of a fresh audience; make it count. Your content should be strongly aligned with both the audience’s needs and your brand’s value proposition. Guest blogging is a strong tactic here. Demonstrate thought leadership to make an impression, and if possible, include links or CTAs to draw readers back to owned channels.

Trust is another key stage for earned. Buyers often turn to outside sources for third-party validation before making a purchase. This is where influencer marketing and public relations are critical. Nurture influencer and media relationships, and don’t forget the power of a passionate customer base. The right placement, endorsement or positive review could be the social proof your prospect needs.

Paid

• Examples: Native advertising, sponsored content, banner ads, affiliate networks, native newsletters, native social, social advertising
• Roles: Accelerate awareness, drive conversions
• Key stages of the buying process: Awareness, consideration, purchase

Paid media is owned and earned’s outbound cousin. It gives you the greatest control over when and where buyers will come into contact with your content, and ideally it’s highly targeted. (Its easy-to-calculate spend also makes ROI clearer than the others, though attribution modeling isn’t quite as straightforward as we’d like to imagine.)

Broad reach paired with precise targeting makes paid media ideal for awareness, consideration, and purchase. It allows you to introduce your brand to a greater segment of your buyer personas. And retargeting can be highly effective in nudging leads toward conversion. As mentioned above, paid is most successful when it’s highly targeted. Precise segmenting and action-oriented copy will help the right messages reach the right buyers at the right time.

Mapping Owned, Earned, and Paid Along the Buyer Journey

Buyers have specific needs, goals and questions at each stage of the purchasing journey, and are likely to be consuming owned, earned and paid content along the way. This path is far from linear, and the convergence of owned, earned and paid further complicates matters. (While social content might be “owned,” the platform is not.)

Nonetheless, mapping owned, earned and paid to the buyer journey avoids taking a shotgun approach to your marketing strategy. Instead, content is directly tied to the buyer’s mindset and a desired action or outcome.

There are endless theories, models, strategies and diagrams on content marketing, but they all boil down to a few simple questions:

• What is your business goal?
• What is the user trying to achieve at that moment?
• What unique, compelling and useful thing can you offer?

Keep these in mind, and the picture suddenly becomes a whole lot clearer.

The post Owned, Earned and Paid Media Should Integrate, Not Seperate appeared first on Relevance.

Prioritizing content will make sure your time is spent on projects capable of delivering the greatest value:

• Align content production with business goals and buyer needs.
• Allocate internal resources more effectively.
• Achieve greater relevance by mapping content to major events, holidays and seasonality.
• Address gaps in content proactively, whether related to specific keywords, buyer personas or stages in the sales funnel.

This article will dive show you how to prioritize content based on organizational goals, target buyer personas, the customer journey, the content’s longevity and more.

Ask yourself—or your editorial team—the following questions before adding content topics to the production queue. For those that fall flat, send them back to the drawing board.

Does it align with your top organizational goal?

Is your organization’s top marketing goal to build brand, generate leads, close sales or increase loyalty—or some combination of them? While all stages of the funnel are important, prioritizing them will help focus marketing efforts and budget resources.

Whatever you decide, all content you produce should directly support one of your business goals. Mapping content to specific marketing goals and KPIs is key to maximizing and proving ROI.

Does it target the right buyer persona?

Consider the audience. Throughout each stage of the customer journey, decide which specific content piece will best cater to your personas’ needs.

Both the topics and formats of content assets should be appropriate for the buyer persona you’re trying to reach.

For example, an instructional video should probably be intended for your product’s end user, while a white paper is best in the hands of the CEO. Make sure that the language and content are tailored to reflect the background, motivations and challenges of each.

Will it fill a gap in the customer journey?

Each content piece should address the concerns and answer the questions of your buyers at one stage of the buying process, with the intent of moving them forward to the next stage.

If it doesn’t fill a gap, it might replace or reinforce existing content. As Rand Fishkin points out, the path to purchase is serpentine, not linear. Because of this, content must be prolific, and content marketing efforts patient in guiding the buyer toward a purchase.

Can be it be easily repurposed?

This question is often overlooked by content marketers, and is probably one of their biggest mistakes. Can this content asset be split up, combined with others, reformatted or reengineered in new and exciting ways, or are you throwing valuable time and energy into one-off projects with a short shelf life and an expiration date?

Note: Not everything has to be repurposed. There is a time and a place for real-time posts, newsjacking and other timely content opportunities. But approach every project with the intent of repurposing. I promise you’ll end up with smarter topics and more clever outputs.

How does it perform in search and social?

Your content has been aligned with overall business strategy; it’s been mapped to a buyer persona and purchasing stage; it’s been produced and edited. But before you publish and promote your new asset, it’s time for some fine-tuning.

Have you evaluated search and social signals for hints on how you can optimize? Should the topic be tweaked to better fit your company’s keywords or the language buyers use in search?

Google Analytics is a good place to start. Find out what keywords drive the most traffic to your site, the language searchers use and possible long-tail keywords. Use Search Insights to Improve Your Content Marketing: 4 Steps by Kelly Curran is a great resource.

After Google made its AdWords Keyword Planner more about the AdWords and less about general keyword planning, the Internet Marketing Ninjas blog published a list of free keyword research replacements, including oldie-but-goodie Ubersuggest. Paid options include the Moz Keyword Difficulty and SERP Analysis Tool and HubSpot’s baked-in SEO and keyword research tools.

Content analyzers like BuzzSumo serve up the best content, domains and influencers for your target keywords, based on search rankings and social signals.

Don’t underestimate thinking through content in advance. No matter its quality, content that isn’t easily found, readily shared or strategically developed is all but useless. Guard your internal resources carefully, and leave those half-baked ideas on the cutting room floor.

This article originally appeared on PR 20/20.

The post Ask Yourself These 5 Questions Before Producing Content appeared first on Relevance.

Creating marketing assets is only half the battle. In addition to a content distribution strategy of your own, your content marketing’s ROI can be amplified by tapping into some of your organization’s most active players: the sales team.

Here are some tips on creating closer alignment between marketing and sales, by encouraging sales to become content champions.

Communicate and educate.

What may look like sales representative apathy might actually be a case of unfamiliarity. Beef up your internal communications so sales knows what content you offer, and how you can help:

• Sales stand-up meetings: Gather the sales team for weekly or monthly stand-up meetings. Fill them in on the marketing campaigns you’re running and introduce new assets you’ve created. Talk about and demonstrate how featured content can work to sales’ advantage. Report on content performance, such as white paper downloads or top viewed blog posts.
• Newsletters: An internal newsletter is another great way to keep sales in the loop. Link to new pieces of content, revisit older pieces relevant to an upcoming trade show or topic and remind everyone that your evergreen content is almost always ripe for the picking. Scoop.it has recently seen a rise in popularity, but a plethora of services exist to streamline the bookmarking and sharing of online content.
• Training: If your sales team is more traditional, some training may be beneficial. Explaining the impact of content on the buyer journey and discussing the advent of inbound marketing and inbound selling will go far in gaining respect and credibility.

The bottom line: Commit to partnering with the sales team. Keep the lines of communication—and content—open.

Make content distribution easy.

Your sales team is busy selling. So don’t ask them to be part-time marketers, too. Make it easy for sales reps to understand and share the content in their artillery.

• Sales cliff notes: Create a sales cliff notes sheet for all content created by marketing. Include the title, a brief description, content type, link or file path, target buyer persona and stage(s) in the sales process when it should be used. Then make it visually appealing, so it stands out on cluttered desktops and corkboards.
• Sample emails and social shares: When you publish new content, send it to the sales team along with examples of email copy or social media posts to help promote it.

The bottom line: Incorporating marketing content into the sales process may not come naturally to some. Help sales know when and how to share content with leads.

Help each other succeed.

Though it may not always seem like it, marketing and sales are both striving for the same thing: bottom-line impact. Find ways to complement one another to achieve perfect harmony.

• Implement marketing automation: Marketing automation software has huge potential to maximize content ROI. Use it to nurture leads, prioritize sales efforts, monitor engagement and recapture lost sales. Once they start to see a return, your sales team will thank you.
• Help sales answer leads’ FAQs: Sales representatives answering the same questions over and over? Ask them to BCC you when responding to a commonly asked question or request, then harvest ideas for blog posts, web content and more- a win-win for everyone. (Note: This idea courtesy of Ardath Albee at Content Marketing World 2013.)

The bottom line: Help sales win, and they’ll be your biggest fans.

An evolution in the buyer journey has caused a fundamental power shift in the direction of the consumer. The sales team’s role is changing. By positioning your marketing team as sales’ ally, you’ll win some new champions and find the legs your content needs to succeed.

How do you market your marketing internally?

The post Market Your Marketing: Make Sales Content Champions appeared first on Relevance.