How to Successfully Plan, Execute, and Analyze Campaign Content

It’s never too early to begin planning and creating content for an upcoming marketing campaign. Did you just find out that your company is attending an event in six months? Don’t wait. Start planning and executing content for it today. In this blog we walk through the three stages of successfully planning, creating, and executing content for a marketing campaign.

Plan

• Start with a high-level timeline. Map out major events such as conferences, speaking opportunities, product announcements, or anything else that you already have on your radar for the whole year. Once your timeline is complete, you should be able to align content with these events. This should provide clarity around the types of content you will need (social, blog, article, etc.) and the topics that you will be writing to. Looking beyond a monthly strategy is important to get everyone on board and allow enough time to plan before the event happens. This communication is especially important when you aren’t the content writer. In an agency setting, like at Ironistic, we use shared workspaces with our clients in order to coordinate these plans and the content development. Tools to help create these workspaces include Google Drive or Asana.

• Catalog proposed content projects. Cataloging content according to topic helps when pairing certain content creation with the content experts needed within the company. Giving that content expert plenty of time to prepare and get you the necessary content is key when preparing.

• Consider the data. Make sure there is a plan to determine and track goals and conversions through Google Analytics for each piece of content developed. Whether it be a press release, white paper, case study, or other, understanding how much traffic each piece of content is bringing in (and where the traffic is coming from) will help you evaluate its value to your audience. When sharing content across different platforms, you can use Google’s Campaign URL Builder to track custom campaigns that visitors should be identified with. You can also implement event tracking code on your website to identify when specific pieces of content are downloaded or accessed through various CTAs on your website. Read more about how to set up event tracking in Google Analytics from our previous post, Event Tracking. So Easy, Your Mom Could Do It.

Execute

• Carry out the plan you created, but remain flexible as content needs to be timely so last minute or unplanned changes and requests are inevitable.
• Utilize your channels. One of the biggest mistakes you can make when pushing out a piece of content is not promoting it through multiple channels. Experiment with different channels such as a blog, social media, press release platforms, or YouTube.
• Give content a new format. Apply your content to different formats so that you reach all audiences, such as taking a blog post and talking about the content on a webinar, recording that webinar and posting it as a video, and then building a webpage to host all of the information in one central location.

Analyze and Optimize

• Study your analytics. Look at the data you collect and then make sure to follow up and engage with your stakeholders to get feedback. What were the ups and downs of the campaign? What did your stakeholders think worked well or not so well? Look at the lead-to-conversion ratios to nail down the ROI on the campaign.
• Create a report around the campaign and content pieces. Boiling it down to the facts and outcomes makes it easier to showcase your performance and validate your work.
• Keep the content going. Once you publish the last piece of content for the campaign, your job isn’t over. Continue to maintain the content you worked to develop and promote it continuously.

In general, keep your customer in mind. Who are they and what kind of content are they looking for from you in each campaign? Start early and plan out the details in advance, getting key stakeholders involved as early as possible to ensure everyone is on board. Be adaptable and be brave. Start with whatever data you have and go from there. Prove what you are doing is working with the content you start with and that there is a clear correlation between your content and the return your company is seeing on that investment.