The Content Marketing Playbook

Markus Jenul
Dec 13, 2021
7 min read

Updated: Jan 8, 2022

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?

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.

Here is Gary Vee’s example:

The Micro content is perfect for the distribution. You don’t want to share the big pillar piece on your social channels cause this will most likely overwhelm your audience.

Instead you want to have shorter forms of content that create interest.

The micro content links then back to your landing page where the audience will receive more information after filling out the form.

So what are the types of Micro content that you can create? Below is a model that we used with one of our customers.

The pillar content was in this case a long Video Developer Report which was then split into several micro pieces of content:

1) Blog Post:

You can also turn a long Whitepaper or Webinar in one or multiple Blog posts that link then back to the main webinar (e.g. Long Form Content: Ultimate Guide to Container formats Whitepaper - Split it into 3 blog posts: Container Formats Part 1, Container Formats Part 2, Container Formats Part 3,

2) Short Videos:

(e.g. split the Webinars, tech talks, etc. into short videos) - they could be just a little teaser of the actual webinar. Just enough so that people keep watching

3) Images / Graphics

(Copy images out of a presentation and a short description and share those on social media. Just like the one below:

4) Listicles

(Create short lists of the insights)

5) Infographics

6) Snippets

(Text snippets, Quotes, etc. that the sales team can also use for their distribution)

The goal here is to make the best use of the pillar content by generating curiosity.

The micro piece should make readers curious about the rest.

So what do you do now with all of that content? The next big part is to distribute all of the above generated content over the next couple of months through all your channels.

STEP 6: Content Distribution

If you follow the above process then you will have enough content to promote for the next couple of months.

We want to make sure that we choose the right distribution platform. You won’t find a lot of people beyond the age of 70 who are using snapchat.

It is crucial to know where you can find your audience. The following report of PEW Research can help you with that.

Create a list of all your distribution channels you would like to use and decide where you plan to distribute all of your content. This can look like the below:

Once you know what and where to distribute your content, I would like to talk about automation. I prefer to use Marketing Automation systems such as Hubspot that allow you to pre-schedule all of your posts.

That is a superpower right at your fingertips.

Why? Because you can pre-schedule all your micro content on those platforms ahead of time. E.g: 1 Post: Week1, 2 Post: Week3, 3 Post: Wek5, ....

Always remember that repetition is key! AGAIN.. Repetition is KEY! Your audience needs to see your content on average 7 times until you get their attention. So distributing your content over and over again until you see a decline in viewers is absolutely necessary.

Build out a 6 month distribution calendar that includes this asset over and over again.

AND fill the gaps with different content that you produce.

Once scheduled, you can lean back and see the leads floating in.

So what’s next? Let’s put this process into action.