The Content Marketing Playbook

Hey,

I see you are ready to learn the rules of content creation and how to produce more high quality content...

Yes? 🙂

As you, we have always been keen to find out what secret formula the best content managers worldwide use…

A formula that benefits the entire business.

A formula, you or your team simply apply over and over again and success will follow. But did we just come up with that? 🤔

NO…

We worked with hundreds of Marketers and analyzed their methodologies on how to produce content more effectively. And guess where we summarized it all? Exactly, in this proven PLAYBOOK

Are you tired of hearing:

• Our content strategy sucks

• We don’t have enough content

• Create more content that produces leads and opportunities on scale

• We need to hire professionals that help us with the content creation

Our Rockstar Marketers have been there too...

But they were able to create a winning formula…

A playbook that helped to generate millions of dollars in revenue through content.

This playbook is used by leading YCombinator Startups

But not only that! Gary Vaynerchuk and his team use a similar approach as well!

This PLAYBOOK is for everyone who want to produce more content to either generate more leads, revenue or to accelerate revenue growth

The outcome of using this Playbook is to align everyone on the most efficient content process and thus, impact the company’s revenue

What does this Playbook include? (more content is available in the Kickscale platform)

• Step by Step Process: This Playbooks helps you with a proven process and carries you through every little step that you need to consider

• Enriched with Content: It is enriched with content that helps you accomplish every step

• Team Collaboration: Assign the tasks to your team and be sure that everyone follows them to achieve your or your team’s goal faster

The Playbook

Our job in marketing is to bring the RIGHT leads to the business.

BUT that’s easier said than done right? ;)

We believe that this can only be done if you follow a winning formula. A formula that we will show you now.

• STEP 1: Content is for OUR READER - The ideal Target audience

• STEP 2: Identify Topics and Format

• STEP 3: Create Pillar Content and Long Form Content

• STEP 4: Create a Landing page

• STEP 5: Split Pillar Content into Micro Content

• STEP 6: Distribute Content

• STEP 7: Get access to the entire process

Let’s start with the thing you should avoid - BUT most Marketers do:

Oh, I found a keyword that I want to rank for! Let’s create content around this one! Please don’t do that!! 🥴

This is not wrong, it is part of the playbook BUT...

you should never start with this one!

INSTEAD, start with the Content Strategy Step 1 - keep reading and you will see what I mean 🙂

Content Strategy

So what should you really start with? Be like Gandalf and start with... THE READER!! 🧙🏼‍♂️

Yes you hear right..

Starting your process with the reader will make you immediately a TOP Marketer because so few do it.

In the business world we refer to it as the Ideal Target Audience. It is ok if you don’t know yours yet. We simply build it. 👏

So let’s start with the single most important thing.

STEP 1: OUR READER - the ideal target audience.

Let’s try to find an answer to one of the following questions

• Who is your Ideal Target Audience?

• What are they interested in AND

• How can I help them?

You can start by looking at your current customers.

Contact them and try to jump on a meeting where you ask them questions about their day to day challenges and what benefits your product brings to them. Feel free to use our template to write their feedback down and build a profile like the one below:

This step is crucial!

Now we can start with the actual content creation.

STEP 2: Identify Topics and Format

What topics do we want to cover? 🤫

Use what you know about your audience. What matters to them and what content they are searching for. Let’s take Content Marketers as an example. Something I found that most fellows are interested in, is… you guess it right-- How to produce the right content. So let’s start with analyzing the keyword: Content Strategy There are plenty of tools out there to analyze keywords, but I prefer Ahrefs or Ubersuggest.

Simply type in the keyword you want to rank for and find details on how easy it is to rank for it.

What you want to look at is the search volume - start small, it's ok to have just 50 people searching for something.

But you want to have a low SEO difficulty.

This value shows the competition. The higher the value, the more difficult it is to rank for it.

In our example, it's quite tricky to rank on page 1 of google for Content Strategy. Why? Because of a high SEO Difficulty. But that's ok. We can simply search for other long tail keywords that might bring less traffic but that are not so competitive.

The next question is what type of content you want to produce.

STEP 3: Create Pillar Content / Long Form Content

We recommend producing pillar content but it is not always necessary to start from scratch.

Check first your existing content that you might want to update. This can save a ton of time.

The goal is to create a Pillar Content first. What is Pillar Content?

This is a long form content piece that delivers all the valuable information you have around a certain topic.

E.g. The Video Developer Report, The Global Education Report, ...

This content can come in different forms and sizes:

• Videos: Demo’s, Learning Labs, How To-Videos, anything that explains the entire process in very detail. Could be a video of 30-60 min.

• Webinars & virtual events

• White-paper's and EBook's (1500 words)

• Case Studies

• Datasheets

• Magazines

• Reports

Most important for you is to find out what format will bring the message across. Reports are helpful when you want to show numbers, while Videos make it easier to consume your content.

Just go back to your audience and see what they are usually looking for. I used to be the Head of Content Marketing in the Video Streaming Startup Bitmovin.

Our audience were video developers who loved to read reports or listen to video coding learning sessions.

Find what is best resonating with your audience!

STEP 4: Create a Landing page

This step of the Playbook is a bit more controversial. Should you collect data before you give access to the pillar content? So should you build a landing page, with a form on it that asks people to share their data before you are going to share it with them?

OR

Do you give it to them for free? So everyone can look at it without providing data or paying for it?

I am a fan of giving content away for free. 🤘

That is why I also give this piece away to provide value to you. - Even our platform is free to use to manage your team and processes.

BUT I also understand that lots of VC backed companies need to deliver numbers. And this starts most of the time with leads. In this case I would recommend a mixed approach.

So let's say we need to generate new leads and to measure them. So you will need to create a landing page with a form that asks people to insert their data to download the piece.

I am a fan of using Hubspot for this. You can simply build custom landing pages and embed a form on it.

Here is a good guide on how to do that 🙂

Tadaaa, you are now ready for the next step.

Step 5: Split Pillar Content into Micro Content

This step has really changed the game for a lot of companies AND the best is that this is proven.

Gary Vee uses this process successfully with his team for B2C but it can also be applied to B2B companies.

You simply take your pillar content and split it into multiple pieces of micro content.