Content Marketing Playbook
The Meaning, Importance & Elements of The Ultimate Content Playbook for Your Business
Content marketing is a marketing technique whereby media and published information (or content) influence buyer behaviour, prompt them to take action and establish a relationship with your brand. When executed well, content marketing generates a very different experience from advertising. After engaging with content marketing, users come away knowing they received a service that delivered relevant information assets they value. Rather than advertising, that feels like an interruption or a persuasion.
73% of B2B marketers worldwide have a content marketing strategy today. And nearly one-third of them strongly feel that their business has been very successful with content marketing in the last 12 months.
Once your marketing team devises a successful content marketing strategy for your business, the next challenge is maintaining the success. How do you ensure that your content quality remains consistent in a dynamic market with rapidly changing business circumstances, high employee attrition, and spiralling costs?
The answer lies in a content marketing playbook.
What is a Content Marketing Playbook?
A content marketing playbook is a compilation of your company’s different content strategies. It includes their outcomes, your learnings, insights, and the content marketing processes usually followed in your organisation. If we were to define a content marketing playbook, this is how we would do it –
A content marketing playbook is a script for the methods, techniques, and processes you follow to successfully execute a content marketing strategy.
There are three aspects to this definition –
- Scripting customer experiences through data analysis and insights
- Building a competitive strategy that uses content marketing to reach the target audience
- Creating a framework for content creation and marketing lists down the content strategies that have been effective in the past.
Why are Content Marketing Playbooks Essential to Business Success?
Every organisation faces an unending demand for content. We need high-quality content to support marketing, communications, product experience, sales enablement, and all other verticals that rely on customer relationships. To meet that demand, businesses must scale their content creation abilities. A content playbook could help you overcome these challenges by effectively connecting strategy and execution. Here are some reasons why your business needs a content marketing playbook today –
- Defines a standard content strategy for the entire organisation
- Defines turnaround time for content creation and publishing
- Defines modus operandi of evaluation of content effectiveness
- Guide to analysing customer data and using it to refine content strategy
- Aligns all teams involved in content marketing, such as in-house content managers, outside agencies, and content creators.
A content playbook can be essential when scaling up your content marketing efforts. A content playbook makes it easier for you to outline an overarching content strategy for your business. It documents your experiments with content marketing and enables your team to stick to mediums that work best for your business.
Elements of a Content Marketing Playbook
- A Strategic Vision for Content Marketing – Start with a vision statement or a short description of your content strategy objectives. Your content strategy vision should answer the question, “What are the goals we want to achieve with our content marketing efforts?” This section of the content playbook should also define the guiding principles for content strategy execution.
- Key Messages & Campaign Goals – Your content strategy playbook should state your underlying content messaging and enable anyone who reads it to understand what your content should convey. The content playbook brings everyone involved in content creation and marketing to be on the same page and establishes a shared vision.
- List of Relevant Assets – Outline the different content assets developed by your organisation in the past and describe the entire life cycle of the content assets. It includes describing the content creation process, the channels on which it was deployed, and how it was relevant to the customer journey.
- Roles & Responsibilities – Here, we delve into the technical aspects of content strategy implementation. The R&R section of the content playbook defines the roles played by different team members and how all the pieces fit together to implement the content strategy vision. It also describes the different points in the campaign when different teams are expected to take the lead and engage the others involved.
- Communication Guidelines – Marketing content must maintain a consistent voice and tonality across channels. Make sure to include a style guide in your content playbook, to help content creators maintain the right brand voice across all content assets.
- Scripts – To maintain consistency of messaging in emailers, social media replies, and other communications, creating some scripts or templates for the content may be a good idea. Use your preferred verbiage to draft some example messages to be used in specific scenarios.
- The Playbook Champion – The content playbook will need updates, additions, and changes as your content strategy evolve. Designate a playbook champion who will be responsible for adding new insights, upholding its standards, and including the playbook in the training process for any new members of the team.