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Liquid Death, a provocative canned water company, took a huge gamble on its branding, and it’s paying off. Now they’re using advertising, public relations and marketing to amplify growth.

For those of you who have not heard of Liquid Death, the idea is to “kill your thirst” and rid the world of plastic bottles by drinking your still or sparkling water out of an aluminum can.

There was certainly a potential that the brand would be off putting, but it has actually garnered a devoted audience, currently boasting nearly 700k followers on Instagram and 1.2M on TikTok today.

How

Businesses have been boring people with their sales copy since the stock photo was invented. Probably longer.

Which is fine. There is a place for that. Keep your brochures. Keep your 45-minute PowerPoint presentation. Explain to me every aspect of your product or service… your mission statement, history, every feature and benefit, that picture of your founder with his arms folded.

That stuff is great… but don’t bring that shiz to social media. You see, I’m on social media to STOP thinking. I’m

No? Ok, let’s work on that.

If you’ve been hanging out around DigitalMarketer for any length of time, you’ve heard someone mention Desmond Morris and the 12 Stages of Human Intimacy, and about how every interaction is human to human. Not B2C or B2B. It don’t matter what you’re sellin’.

Great copy hits folks at a real, human level. It doesn’t ask for something right off the bat. If you make me FEEL something, then I’ll give myself permission to start THINKING about what you sell.

Easier said than done, amiright? It’s tough!

Here are some tips to get out of your spreadsheet and start thinking about your product or service like an actual human who might buy it. 

Numero Uno: Focus on Stage Five of the Customer Value Journey (Excite)

Listen, if you’re not familiar with the Customer Value Journey, stop reading this article and go here right now. 

Are you up to speed? Excellent. 

As a Digital Marketer Certified Partner, we’ve had the opportunity of building out many Customer Value Journeys for our clients. Stage five is the Excite phase. It tends to be difficult for some businesses to explain why people get excited about them. 

Kinda sad, right? 

They know why they are excited but have a hard time articulating why their customer might be.

This is all about the “A-Ha Moment”. It’s your secret sauce, it’s the thing that turns your product/service from a “nice to have” to a “must-have.”

You must know what this is for your business. And if you say “we’re the best” I will reach through this screen and slap you. To quote Sally Hogshead “Different is Better Than Better.” 

Once you understand this key element of your business – you will be free from trying to explain everything right off the bat. You will have focus. And most importantly, you will have the power to make people EXCITED (that’s a feeling!). 

Once they’re excited, you have their attention, and you can hand them a brochure and fold your arms in a power pose. Just kidding. Power poses are for boy bands. Don’t do that. Unless you’re in a boy band. Or a doctor. Why do doctors love to fold their arms in photos?

Numero Dos: Understand That the Hero is Not You

It seems like if you have to sell something you have to talk about yourself, right? 

NO, you jerk – you’re so self-centered, geez. 

You eventually do have to talk about yourself to sell your stuff. But you need to position yourself as the GUIDE. You are Yoda. You are Gandalf. And I am a nerd.

Your customer is the hero, and they have a villain: a problem in their life which you get to show them how to defeat. Your product is their Excalibur. It’s way more exciting than your brochure. 

Keep this in mind in the imagery that you use on your website, social channels, or anywhere else. The customer is the focus. And it is usually more effective to focus on the desired after-state at the end of the journey than the miserable before-state they find themselves in right now. 

In the movie poster, it’s them in the foreground holding Excalibur (your product) triumphantly over their head, and you are in the background smiling like a proud parent (arms folded of course).

Story is a powerful tool to make someone feel something. Humans are drawn to stories.

If you want to know more about learning how to tell a story around your business, Donald Miller’s Building a StoryBrand is required reading.

Here’s a picture of Donald Miller from a Forbes article. (ahem… arms)

Numero Tres: Your Customers Are Your Best Writers (cheat code)

So if your customer is the hero and you want to write copy that sounds more like your hero… to find more heroes… look no further than your reviews. They are a Gold Mine.

Spend some time reading every review that you can. You’ll not only learn what is important to your customers (great hints here for some A-Ha Moments), but you’ll learn how to talk like them. 

And since reviews are public and pretty much fair game – you can just use their actual words in your copy. Emojis and all. It’s like cheating.

Our agency creates video ads. We write scripts and hire a lot of smart funny people. But the best words we use and most effective sales copy often come straight from reviews.

So press up, down, up, down, left, right, left, right, B, A, and then start using reviews in your marketing! You’re now INVINCIBLE!

Numero Cuatro: Heighten Reality

Good content informs or entertains. Great content does both. But remember, make them feel something first (as a human) so they give themselves permission to think about you.

While it may not be appropriate for every audience, most businesses can stand to bring a little levity, a little magic, a few giggles to their content.

As I said, we make video ads and we’ve found that the easiest way to do that is with cheap laughs. You know, stuff that worked on the playground. I’m talking toots. I’m talking about falling down the stairs. That kind of stuff.

Sophisticated advice, no?

Any other marketing blogs tell you to use more toots?

Here’s the kicker – it has to support the sale. Your jokes have to make sense within the world of your hero, their villain, and you, the wise guide with the plan for victory.

As long as everything is in the context of your sales message – don’t be shy. Make your characters zany. Use costumes, special effects, make everything in the world you are creating just a little “bigger” than it would be in the real world. The smell is worse. The cowboy hat is taller. The accent is more exaggerated. 

You can also personify abstract things. Like All-State did with Mayhem, or like we did with Pain

Numero Cinco: Hire Funny People

By this point in the article, you either think I’m mildly amusing or a complete idiot. Both are true.

When this fact dawned on me, I realized that we needed to hire some people that were both funnier and smarter than me to help write scripts for our video ads.

It’s the best thing we ever did.

You likely have people on your team that are very good at sales and marketing, but you probably don’t have anyone that can write comedy.

Guess which one is easier to teach?

Hire some freelance comedians and host a Writer’s Retreat. They are a game-changer.

Here’s how we run ours:

• Get an Airbnb for a couple of days.
• All the writers stay on site.
• Provide lots of food and drinks, treat them well.
• On Day 1, go over the critical sales messages and value propositions.
• That night, without influencing each other, each writer comes up with an original concept.
• The next day is spent with everyone collaborating to make one script the best it can be.
• Choosing a script to work on is hard, but you walk away with a bunch of other concepts you can use later.

Comedians are often able to bring a fresh and unexpected perspective that can grab attention. They aren’t as close to it as we are, and frankly, they don’t care as much about how many sales the video will generate. That’s an asset for this type of work – they can focus on the more human, story-driven aspects.

Another game-changer for us: hire improv actors for your video. They just approach things differently and will add another layer to your script that you wouldn’t otherwise have.

We’ve come a long way together. I hope this article has helped you see some ways that your business can put a more human face on your messaging. If you want to talk more about it, we’d love to. Check us out at GravityDigital.com

I’ll leave you with a photo of our beloved founder Casey. 

Matt Brannon

As a Digital Marketer Certified Partner and Creative Director at Gravity Digital, Matt Brannon helps create funny, stuff-selling videos for direct to consumer brands.

Everybody tells you to make SOPs as an agency owner. It’s the only way to grow, right?

Yes…and no.

Your marketing agency needs SOPs. That’s a fact. But your agency doesn’t need to waste time creating documents that collect digital dust. If you make SOPs for every single task in your business, your hiring process will be a breeze. But, soon, you’ll find your employees and contractors aren’t even opening up those SOPs. They figured out their way to get the task done, and it’s more efficient. 

All

That’s the secret of functional SOPs that your employees actually use. 

We’ll explain…

How to Create Functional SOPs

Functional SOPs are the brain of your business. We’re not saying that you don’t need SOPs. You definitely do. Standard operating procedures (SOPs) help you hire, move employees to different positions, and figure out where you’re inefficient. Especially as an agency owner, SOPs are your absolute best friend.

If you want to scale your agency from 5 clients to 10 and eventually 20+, SOPs are the way to do it. But only if you use them the right way. If you spend too much time on SOPs your employees don’t use, you wasted time that could have been spent on lead generation or deliverables. 

Here are the 3 steps to create functional SOPs your employees open, use, and share.

Step #1: Choose the top tasks you need SOPs for

The first step in creating functional SOPs is figuring out what tasks need them. It’s tempting to create an SOP for every single part of your business because it feels efficient. But, if your team doesn’t use them, then it was a waste of time. As Ryan talked about in his Traffic and Conversion Summit session, you only need SOPs for the most important tasks.

Everything else will collect digital dust on your employee’s desktops, never opened again. What’s an important task? This can range from running your meetings, uploading content to WordPress, or writing podcast show notes. The important tasks of your business are the ones that are moving the needle and are consistently on to-do lists.

• Tasks outsourced to VAs (like writing podcast show notes)
• Meeting templates (Gino Wickman shares meeting templates in Traction)
• Tech instructions (like publishing a blog post to WordPress)

Here’s part of an old SOP we used to write the Perpetual Traffic Podcast show notes:

This was an important SOP for us because 1) we uploaded a new podcast every week (recurring task), and 2) we needed to create a consistent experience with our listeners (to move the needle on audience growth).

Once you’ve figured out the tasks that move the needle and are a consistent part of your agency, it’s time to write your SOPs. 

Step #2: Write down every step with an explanation

Each task that moves the needle and is done on a consistent basis has the green light for an SOP. In Step 2, don’t worry about anything but writing down every step of a task or process in as much detail as possible. Your goal is to be able to hand this document to someone one the street and have them be able to do that task or run that process.

Yep, your SOP needs to be that detailed. 

When we write SOPs, we divide them into sections. This makes it easy for the person doing the task or running the process to know what they need before getting started and moving on to the next step.

For example, here’s the Table of Contents from our Blog Post Uploading SOP:

Working with the Blog Document:

• Section 1: Get Finalized Post
• Section 2: Prep Post for Layout
• Section 3: Process Images
• Section 4: Uploading Post Copy into WordPress
• Section 5: Fill out SEO and Sidebar info
• Section 6: Publish Post

In each section is a detailed description of the standard operating procedure. Here’s what the two first sections of our Blog Post Uploading SOP look like:

At this stage, you’re just writing down everything involved in the task. The next step is giving your SOP the final polish.

Step #3: Delete as many words as possible

Each SOP should be as short as possible. The longer the SOP, the more complicated you’re making the task or procedure. Complicated tasks and procedures are the opposite of growth in a business. You don’t want your employees stuck on a single task all day because it takes them 30+ pages to get through the SOP.

Just reading that sounds unrealistic.

In step 3, you have one goal: delete as many words as possible from your SOP. Shorten your sentences. Tighten up your explanations. Use more images. Make your SOP a seamless experience instead of a cartography class. 

Our SOP for the Certified Partner Weekly Email is two pages long. It doesn’t need to be any longer for our email team to get it written and out the door. This SOP is broken up into two sections:

1. Procedure
2. Email Outline

At the top of the document is the schedule for ideating, drafting, reviewing, and submitting each week’s email. Below that is the email outline to follow. 

Could this SOP be 10+ pages long? Absolutely. If we added every detail possible to writing the email and uploading it to our email provider, it could probably be longer. But, we don’t need every detail for it to get done right. We just need our team to know the schedule (so the email gets written!), to understand who’s in charge of what part of the process, and to have the outline. 

That’s it.

Now, you have an SOP that your team will actually use because they genuinely need it! Ahh, the magic of functional SOPs. 🪄

Are Your Employees *Really* Using Your SOPs?

They might not be today…but they can be tomorrow. Just by simplifying how many SOPs you create and how you write them, your marketing agency can change overnight. You can go from putting out little fires all day long to knowing that any task/procedure moving the needle and happening consistently is getting taken care of. 

As the owner, executive, or manager of a marketing agency, this is a breath of fresh air. If you’re focused on putting out the (consistent) little fires that come with employees and freelancers not using SOPs because they’re too complicated, bulky, and time consuming, how can you captain your ship towards smoother waters?

There’s a hard way to grow your agency and an easy way. Part of the easy way is creating functional SOPs so your employees actually use them. The other part is the realization that you don’t know everything, and you’re not supposed to. There are marketing strategies, agency growth tactics, and marketing knowledge that you don’t have—that could help your agency reach your big goal this year.

And they’re all inside of DigitalMarketer Lab. Lab is our members-only platform where the top marketers give away their marketing expertise through Insider Trainings, Workshops, Playbooks, and our Toolkits. 

By becoming a Lab member, you get access to every past Training, Workshop, Playbook, and ToolKit—and our community of 10,000 marketers.

See what’s inside Lab here.

When it comes to digital marketing what do you need to OWN to make sure your business thrives in this post-digital world?

WHAT IS DIGITALMARKETER:

DigitalMarketer is the premier online community for digital marketing professionals. It’s a place where you can learn how to market like a pro, connect with industry experts, and get the strategies and tools you need to grow and scale your business to new heights.

https://www.best digital marketing agency in abuja rocksview digital hub.com/

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In the “old” days, before the digital revolution brought most commerce online, marketing and public relations (PR) were two distinct disciplines divided into their own departments and agencies. Marketers identified prospects’ needs and disseminated messages that guided audiences toward a purchase. On the other hand, public relations professionals managed an organization or public figure’s public image by increasing positive press and maintaining their brand reputation. There was little crossover between these two fields.

But since the rise of the digital sphere, content marketing, and social media, the lines have blurred.

Today,

And yet, marketing and PR are still different practices with their own objectives, strategies, tactics, and methods for measuring performance.

If you’re still not entirely sure how PR and marketing differ, you’re not alone. Today, we’ll illuminate those differences to help you understand.

Marketing and PR Defined

To start, marketing and public relations have different definitions.

Marketing

Definition: the process of igniting demand for goods and services by identifying and targeting one or more key audiences. 

Goal: to drive prospective customers to engage with the brand, make a purchase, and, ultimately, continue coming back for more.

PR

Definition: the process of managing an entity’s image through press, partnerships, and strategic communications. 

Goal: to ensure the public has a favorable impression of the company or person they represent.

Both act as a middleman between the audience and the business. Today, they leverage many of the same channels and platforms to achieve their goals, which is why the two disciplines are often conflated.

Key Differences Between Marketing and PR

Even though marketing and PR have become more integrated in recent years, they’re still performed for different purposes and measured in unique ways.

Here are three things that separate marketing and PR:

Goals

Marketing: the ultimate goal of marketing is to sell a product or service. Typically, this means identifying the target market(s), understanding buyers’ pain points and challenges, mapping the buyer’s journey, and finding ways to reach people and guide them along that journey. Successful marketing teams work closely with sales teams and ensure sales pros always have a healthy pipeline of qualified leads.

PR: the ultimate goal of a PR team is to ensure a brand maintains a positive reputation. In most cases, this means identifying the best communication channels to reach the general public, crafting messages to spread through those channels, and working closely with the media to amplify those messages further.

Duties

Marketing: marketers spend their time crafting and launching campaigns via owned, earned, and paid channels to attract prospective buyers and guide them toward a purchase. This often includes efforts like writing content for emails and search engine optimized blog posts; composing copy and creating graphics for traditional and digital ads or website assets; crafting and publishing content for social media; and producing videos and live events — just to name a few.

PR: PR professionals’ days are consumed with crafting brand messaging for social media and other channels; writing press releases; securing interviews and public speaking opportunities; building relationships with media personnel and influencers; and defining and managing a brand’s image.

Measuring Success

Marketing: marketing teams typically measure their success by the number of leads they were able to generate for the sales team, the number of sales they were able to influence, and the ROI of their campaigns. On a more granular level, they might track metrics like blog post traffic, social media engagement, or web page bounce rates.

PR: PR teams measure success through the amount of positive press they can generate, the size of media coverage, and the brand’s public reputation. They also often monitor social media shares or mentions, a brand’s net promoter score (NPS), and website traffic or audience reach.

Where PR and Marketing Intersect

Despite the different strategies and tactics they use to achieve their goals, marketing and PR teams share one unified mission: creating success for the company they serve.

Here are three ways these two disciplines may overlap:

Channels

In the past, marketers relied on print ads, direct mail, broadcast ads, and billboards, and PR pros leveraged print media, radio shows, and TV programs. Today, both marketers and PR teams use many of the same digital channels: 

• Social media
• Email
• Live events
• Brand websites

For example, a brand’s Instagram account may be used for both marketing and PR purposes.

Connecting with Audiences

Both marketers and PR pros strive to form genuine, meaningful connections with prospective and existing customers. And both teams perform plenty of audience research to help tailor their messaging and ensure they’re deploying the right strategies in the right place at the right time. 

To be successful in marketing or PR, you must be highly skilled in communicating and understanding consumers’ motives.

You Need Both to Drive Sustainable Success

Despite the growing collaboration and shared mission, marketing and PR aren’t interchangeable. In other words, one cannot replace the other. While PR may positively impact your brand’s public image and marketing efforts may help increase sales, you still need both to holistically maximize your organization’s success. 

By investing in both and aligning these teams, you can achieve a positive reputation, consistent messaging, and a better chance of growing your market share.

Jeff J Hunter (owner of VA Staffer) recently partnered up with Trisha Leconte to run BrandedMedia. Trisha’s personal branding agency “HEROBrand” – which is an acronym for “Helping Entrepreneurs Realize Opportunities”- was absorbed by BrandedMedia and they are so excited to announce their partnership.

In this video, Jeff and Trisha talk about the CORE Branding Method focused around building your own personal brand!

https://brandedmedia.io/

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DigitalMarketer

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If you’re like many people, you’re spending the first few weeks of the new year clearing out clutter, getting organized and setting goals. You can get a similar sense of satisfaction when you use this approach in your content marketing strategy. 

A content audit can set the stage for strong performance in the upcoming year. If the idea sounds intimidating, it’s really no different from taking a personal inventory of how you spent your time personally and professionally in the past year: 

Which of your efforts paid off the most? What did you find yourself spending a lot of time and energy doing that wasn’t worthwhile? What new things would you like to try? 

Here’s

What is a Digital Content Audit?

A digital content audit is a process for cataloging and evaluating all your online marketing assets to make sure you’re providing the right information for every stage of the buyer’s journey in the best possible format. 

Your content could include many different types of resources: 

• Blog posts
• Case studies
• E-books
• Infographics
• Interactive experiences, such as quizzes or assessments
• Reports from industry analysts 
• Sales sheets
• Social content assets
• Webinars
• Whitepapers
• Videos

While it can be helpful to have a comprehensive list of everything you’ve ever created — especially if you’re starting in a new role or taking over marketing operations for another company or brand you’re less familiar with — it’s not always necessary. 

Think about your goals for performing a content audit. You may just want a better understanding of how you’re promoting one specific service or catering to a certain audience or industry. Maybe you’ve been doing content marketing for years, and you want to take a closer look at which pieces brought in the most qualified leads from the past year. In that case, you can narrow your focus. 

You also want to make sure your content is easy to find. One challenge we see our clients encounter after years of blogging is that newer, more relevant posts start to compete with other, older posts covering similar subject matter. The older posts had years to rank in search engine results and accumulate views, but they may not reflect your focus or your brand as well as something published more recently. 

A content audit can help you identify keyword cannibalization or areas where you’re competing against yourself for the same search terms. Repurposing some of these older posts or redirecting them to something more relevant can help you avoid having several similar posts or pages effectively cancel each other out. 

What are the Benefits of a Content Audit?

There are many benefits to performing a content audit, starting with the fact that you’ll become more organized just by taking the time to do it. Here are a few other reasons to consider auditing your content:

1. You’ll Identify Gaps

Your customers’ needs are constantly evolving; your products and services should be, too. Sometimes those changes happen faster than your marketing team can keep up. As you evaluate your goals for the year, you might realize you need to focus more on a certain type of buyer or a part of the buyer’s journey. 

Maybe you think you’ve done a great job raising awareness about how you solve a particular problem, but the content you have on that topic isn’t leading to many conversions. Maybe your sales team is still fielding a lot of questions about the topic, indicating you need more educational content about it. Or maybe you’re losing a lot of deals to one specific competitor lately because they have a strong partnership with a bigger brand, but their solution costs twice as much as yours. 

A digital content audit can help you uncover these gaps, making it easier to plan for the year ahead. 

2. You’ll Find Opportunities To Repurpose Content

Remember that amazing brand video you did three years ago? I’m willing to bet no one else does, either. If it performed well and the information is still relevant, why not breathe new life into it with some updated footage and a few shorter clips to promote it on social media? You can do this just as easily with older webinars, interviews or blog posts. 

In fact, updating and republishing older blog posts is one of the most effective strategies for many of our clients today. It’s often easier than starting from scratch, and it improves website traffic faster than waiting for a brand new blog post to rank. 

3. Your Priorities Will Become More Clear

Once you’ve identified your gaps and you’ve identified your top performers with a digital content audit, it will be easier to determine where to focus your attention next. You can see what’s going to have the most immediate impact and what may be a longer-term goal. For instance, if you have an important service page that’s ranking No. 10 in Google’s search engine results, improving that page’s position to No. 5 can mean the difference between receiving 5% of all the organic traffic searching for that term and only receiving 1% of that traffic.

4. Your Best Pieces Will Perform Even Better

Whether your content marketing budget is $50,000 for the year or $500,000, you should focus on where you’ll get the best returns. If you have dozens of high-quality content pieces, it can be difficult to make that call. When you look at the numbers, it becomes much more obvious. Instead of creating five more mediocre pieces of new content, you might decide to put that budget toward promoting two or three of your greatest hits. 

5. You’ll Eliminate Outdated Content 

If you’ve been in marketing long enough, you’ll remember the days when you could write a 300-word paragraph about virtually anything, and you’d be ranking on the first page of Google simply because there was so little competition. 

Ten years later, your random musings about office personality types are still driving thousands of people to your website every month, but they’re not looking for anything remotely related to what you do. You don’t want to lose that traffic, but you need a better way to relate it to what you have to offer today. You might also need to update your voice and tone in that piece so it’s more closely aligned with your brand today. 

Whether you realize it or not, that hastily written post you published so long ago is the first impression many people have of your brand — so make sure it’s a good one!

How to Conduct a Content Audit

There’s really no right or wrong way to perform a content audit. If you’re using a content management system like HubSpot, yours could be as simple as creating a report that shows the top performing blog posts and landing pages of the past year. If you are more focused on SEO, you could use a tool like Semrush to see how your content is ranking for key terms and identify opportunities for improvement. 

If you want to go more in depth and understand how your content contributes to your buyer’s journey and your entire brand ecosystem, you may need to build your own content audit template. 

Conducting a content audit is a standard part of our process when we start working with a new client. It’s also something we update at least once a year. 

Here are a few best practices we’ve developed over the years for conducting a content audit:

1. List All Your Content Assets In a Spreadsheet

If you want to make things easier, you could limit this to the content you’ve created in the past year or in the past few years. Here are the categories we typically include in a content inventory:

• Content title
• Type of content
• URL or location (if it’s a brochure or sales presentation that’s not live)
• Main keyword (and whether or not it’s ranking) 
• Target persona or industry
• Funnel stage (awareness, consideration, decision, customer delight)
• Pillar page it supports
• Campaign it supports
• Page views
• Conversion rate
• How many new contacts and customers it brought in

If you’re looking for a content audit template, here’s a good example:

2. Review Content Performance

HubSpot’s dashboard and reporting software makes it easy to see your top performers for the year or for all time. You can sort all your blogs and landing pages by the number of views or submissions to see which ones were the most popular. 

If you want to drill down deeper, you can also use attribution reports to see which content or campaigns contributed to the most leads, deals and even revenue. 

3. Use the Semrush Content Audit Tool

You can also use Semrush to get additional insights about which content is ranking for specific keywords, which is driving the most search traffic, and where your rankings have increased or decreased the most over a period of time. 

With the Semrush content audit tool, you can analyze all your website pages quickly. The tool will group your pages into four categories: 

• Rewrite or remove: anything published more than two years ago and viewed less than 15 times in the last 30 days
• Need to update: content published more than six months ago and viewed less than 15 times in the last 30 days
• Quick review: content published less than six months ago and viewed more than 150 times in the last 30 days, indicating a quick win
• Poor content: pages with less than 200 words, which Google may penalize for thin content

Using this website content audit tool, you can also evaluate pages based on many other factors, including:

• Shares
• Backlinks
• Number of sessions (based on Google Analytics data)
• Bounce rate
• Search queries

After looking at this data, you might identify some quick wins to improve SEO by updating a page title, meta description, user experience or other elements of your pages that aren’t doing as well as you’d hoped. 

It’s a great way to get a head start on your content audit and get recommendations right away. 

4. Highlight Areas For Improvement

There’s always an opportunity to improve any piece of content, so you’ll need to narrow this down based on your own goals. If one of those goals is to help the sales team close more deals and your content shows you only have two decision-stage resources, that’s a good place to start. Maybe these pieces need to be updated or combined, or maybe you need to develop something entirely new.

5. Prioritize Next Steps

Finally, it’s time to put together a game plan based on your content audit. It’s important to be realistic about your time, resources and budget, so start with three to five things you know you can accomplish this quarter or this year and go from there. Determine who will be the subject matter expert for each if it’s not you, who else should be involved or give input, and what your timeline will be for updating or creating each piece. 

Try to think beyond the content piece itself and put it into the context of the larger goal. If the goal is to help close more deals, you’ll need a lot more than just a well-written guide. How will prospects find this guide on your website? How do you plan to distribute it to people who have indicated interest already? 

In addition to writing the guide, your next steps might include: 

• Updating a nurturing email workflow to include the guide
• Starting a retargeting campaign to show the guide to people who visit certain pages on your website
• Running display ads with a specific publication on on a specific site
• Creating a short video to show how easy it is to implement the solution  
• Developing or updating a case study to share with prospects 
• Working with your sales team to develop a list of frequently asked questions 

As you create new resources, don’t forget to add them to your content audit spreadsheet so the process will be easier the next time around. 

A Content Audit is a Team Effort

Taking the time to catalog your content and evaluate its performance is an important step to developing a strong digital marketing strategy. Fortunately, you don’t have to do it alone. Your sales, customer service and product marketing teams can bring valuable insights that might not be obvious from just looking at the data. They can tell you what questions they find themselves answering over and over, what resources they share most often and what they wish they had to provide to prospects to make their jobs easier. 

Once you have a better idea of what you need after performing a content audit, your work is only half done. It can be time-consuming to update older content pieces or develop new ones, and your team may not have the resources to do that. 

An inbound marketing agency like ours can help you objectively audit your content  and take the lead on writing, designing and developing a plan to promote your next content pieces so your team can stay focused on qualifying leads and closing deals. 

To learn more about how we can help, schedule a consultation today.