This CEOs Guide to Content Marketing provides the key steps to 1) align content with business objectives, 2) produce high-quality material that creates an inbound lead funnel, and 3) evaluate your content marketing investments.
The recommendations I detail here can help you reduce customer acquisition costs and boost revenue while positioning your company as an industry thought leader. You’ll learn practical techniques for setting KPIs, creating buyer personas, and striking the right balance between educational and promotional content to engage prospects at all customer journey stages.
Table of Contents
Aligning Content Marketing with CEO Business Goals
Before getting started on any content marketing strategy, make sure that what you’re about to do aligns with your overall business goals.
Define Clear KPIs
The first step is to define some clear KPIs. Establish measurable goals for all of the content marketing efforts that you’re about to embark on. This can include:
- Setting specific revenue targets that are tied to some of the marketing initiatives
- Setting up KPIs such as numbers for lead generation, conversion rates, and customer acquisition costs (CAC)
Many companies unfortunately don’t fully understand their true CAC. Content marketing helps you dramatically reduce those customer acquisition costs. Yes, you do have to invest in creating high-quality content, but when you do, including adding SEO to it, you dramatically reduce your cost to acquire a customer and increase your revenues.
Set Up Buyer Personas
Another big misstep that many companies overlook is setting up buyer personas. When you write content, you want to talk to a specific type of person that buys your products or services.
Here’s what you need to know about your buyer persona:
- Their pain points
- The challenges they’re facing
- The ways they get information
- What types of influences they have, such as who influences them in making these buying decisions
When you have this information, you have a better understanding of what it takes to reach them and the kinds of messages that they would likely respond to.
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Buyer personas can take days to develop. But with MakeMEDIA, you can create a buyer persona in about a minute. This video shows how:
If you write content without keeping a buyer persona in mind, your content will be diluted. Let me give you an example. One of my prior companies, WealthEngine, sold wealth data insights and we targeted nonprofits, universities, and financial institutions because all three of those different groups wanted wealth data information on prospects.
The difference is in what they called their clients:
- Nonprofits would call their clients donors
- Financial institutions would call their clients customers or clients
- Universities would also call theirs donors or sometimes patrons
If we wrote content that was specifically for “clients,” then our target customers who called their clients donors would not feel that the content was written for them. Instead, we would create different pieces of content designed around the buyer persona. When you do that, something magical happens – you attract many more people that are just like that persona.
See our expert guide: 32 Content Creation Ideas for Business Executives
It takes a little bit of time doing the research to come up with what those talking points would be, but it is well worth the exercise because it helps you hone your messages.
Normally this takes days of research, but using MakeMEDIA, you can do this literally in just a couple of minutes by answering a handful of questions. It will then help you create a very detailed buyer persona as well as a slide persona that you can use for developing your content.
Balance Educational and Promotional Content
The last thing to note about aligning your content marketing with your goals is that you should absolutely balance educational content and promotional content. You have to strike the right mix to engage and convert prospects.
Pro Tip: Make Content For Each Buyer Journey Stage
If you only produce promotional content, which is where a lot of companies falter, then everything looks like a sales pitch and it becomes harder to establish trust from prospects who could be led down the path to make a purchase but are just not ready yet.
Having content that you can use for educating them and nurturing them becomes an essential part of your entire content marketing strategy.
To illustrate, one of the companies I founded was MailerMailer, an email marketing software company (acquired by Nasdaq:ZD), and we created a wide variety of content to help attract customers. If we only focused on case studies and product comparisons, which is the very last stage of the buyer journey, we would be missing out on all of those potential customers who, if we just educated them, would be able to follow the path toward making a purchase with us.
Instead, we created lots of educational material in addition to sales material. The educational material included content with titles that started with some of the following:
- “What is”
- “How to”
- “Benefits of”
- “Best practices”
All of these types of content pieces provide a lot of education to our prospects and help build trust so that when we do share content that has more of a sales intent, they are more likely to trust us and therefore buy from us.
We also made sure to create unique content that addresses all of the customer journey stages that a prospective buyer goes through. This helped us reach clients that were not yet at the evaluation stage of selecting a vendor.
As a CEO, your guide to content marketing should involve investing in high-quality content that aligns with your business goals and targets specific buyer personas. By doing so, you can dramatically reduce your customer acquisition costs and increase your revenues. CEO marketing is all about striking the right balance between educational and promotional content to engage and convert prospects effectively.
Investing in High-Quality Content Creation
You may be wondering about the strategies you can employ to ensure your content consistently delivers value to your target audience and stands out in a crowded space where many of your competitors may be publishing similar types of content.
See our Enterprise SEO ROI Calculator
The good news is that there is always a very high demand for great quality content. Good quality content provides a unique perspective and, in the eyes of Google, offers helpful information for readers to know what to do next, whether that’s to read another piece, make a buying decision, or something else that will guide them on the path that led them to read the article in the first place.
Avoiding Fluff Content
A lot of fluff is being written by AI content writers that produce generic content, which is often seen as fluff because it doesn’t provide any unique insights, analyses, or thoughtful guidance for the reader.
To create high-quality content, you really want to produce deep, rich content that has easily recognizable subject matter expertise. In fact, that’s one of the factors in Google’s E-E-A-T guidelines for getting content well-ranked: having the expertise, experience, and authority to talk about the content you’re producing.
Focusing on Customer Pain Points
The key to this CEOs Guide to Content Marketing is to focus on customer pain points. That will attract other prospects just like your best customers because they are facing the same challenges. Using buyer personas helps you stay focused on the kind of content you could be producing.
You may have personas for:
- The end user of your product
- The manager who ensures deliverables are met
- The financial buyer or executive who signs off but doesn’t actually use the product
You would need to address each of those individual personas differently because they want different information from your content.
There are several ways you can find out what these customer pain points are:
- Conduct interviews and surveys to identify common issues.
- Ask, “Tell me about the last time you were looking to use our product. What were you trying to do that day?”
Asking the question in the context of their entire day, rather than just focusing on their use of your product, helps you gain insight into where you fit into the mix.
More than likely, there are other people who feel the same way and have the same experiences and issues, so you’ll be able to speak to that.
Incorporating Valuable Content Elements
Other things to incorporate in your content include practical solutions, actual advice, and checklists. Those are very valuable pieces to include. You also want to talk about industry trends, news, analysis, and timely insights. These are important factors that show not only Google for ranking purposes but also your prospects that you are indeed an expert in what you do. This helps educate clients and improves your brand recognition and awareness.
Diversifying Content Types and Channels
The next part is diversifying the types of content you create. You want to create content in multiple channels because everybody consumes content in different ways.
Blog posts are one of the fastest, easiest ways to get content out there. They also help your site rank well on Google so people searching for the types of solutions you offer can find you. They may be in various stages of their buyer journey, so producing content that starts with “what is” or definitions of what you do can be helpful for people in the early stages.
Videos and video marketing have really taken off in the last couple of years, and the trend is going to continue. Video podcasts are also making strong inroads towards building community and gaining a following. The nice thing about podcasts is that they’re not as hard to do as you might think.
You probably have happy clients already. You can interview them, not just about your product or service they purchased, but more about their business, really putting a spotlight on them. It allows them to talk about their challenges and how they’re overcoming them. As the host, you’ll automatically send a supplemental message to your prospects that you’re one of the reasons that client is quite successful.
LinkedIn and social media are also big, especially in B2B sales. Let me give you an example of a good social media post versus what I would call an average post.
- Good posts have a hook that gets someone to read the rest of the post and an ending that engages people to post a comment or reshare your post to their network.
- Posts that don’t do well are the ones that say, “Hey, I’ve got a new blog post,” and then provide a link.
You’re causing the reader to take yet another action, which introduces more friction for them to consume your content. You want to reduce the friction.
Don't just post a link to a new blog. Post insights, analysis, a summary, or tips from your blog, and provide the link in your own comment as the first comment.
Bonus: See our AI-Powered LinkedIn Content Strategy Guide for Executives
Creating Metrics Reports
Another extremely useful type of content is creating metrics reports based on your own data or surveys. At my former email marketing company, MailerMailer, we had billions of data points that we aggregated to identify average open rates, click rates, bounce rates, time before someone opened a message, best time of day to send a message based on industry, and lots of other metrics.
We took this data and created a very detailed report with beautiful charts and graphs and released it through press releases. We also targeted specific publications that wrote about email marketing.
The report got covered by hundreds of media outlets, and other bloggers started picking it up. We allowed people to use some of the charts in their posts, with each chart having a note saying “Source: MailerMailer” underneath it.
This enabled us to generate so many inbound links and traffic that we would have otherwise spent a lot of advertising money to get, but we didn’t have to spend anything on advertising because the report was so useful. It allowed people to become aware of who we are, and as a result, we ended up getting many new clients.
There was a side benefit to it as well. Because of all the brand new inbound links pointing to our report from other highly reputable sites, Google started to recognize our site as an authoritative site on the subject of email marketing.
Every time we came out with a new blog post, it would get ranked much faster, and as a result, our content marketing efforts started to really compound. That's one of the best reasons to invest in content marketing, especially if you're a CEO.
You can do your own CEO marketing to create content that you’re a subject matter expert on. MakeMEDIA can help you make that content very quickly just by talking and doing a stream of consciousness recording to make your content.
Establishing a Production Schedule
The last part is to establish a very clear production schedule. We can help you plan your full content calendar so that you never miss a beat and publish weekly at least.
CEOs Guide to Content Marketing: Investing for Lead Generation
When it comes to attracting interest in your products through high-quality content, it all starts with SEO keyword research. You need to know which keywords to pursue before diving into content production. This allows you to create valuable, deep content around your main keywords.
Understanding Keyword Types and Intent
Keywords come in different flavors, and targeting extremely competitive keywords will require a significantly higher investment in your content marketing efforts. Instead, focus on long-tail keywords, which are longer terms with fewer searches but less difficulty in ranking. As you start ranking for these long-tail keywords, you’ll see initial traction.
Google looks at factors like click-through rates to your site as a signal of your content’s value. By targeting a large number of long-tail keywords, you’ll automatically start ranking for shorter terms as well.
Let’s say you create accounting software. You wouldn’t want to target the keyword “accounting” because the intent behind that search is unclear. However, if you write about “accounting software for government contractors who need to be audited,” you’re targeting a specific prospect. With less competition for such a deep topic, your narrowly focused content has a better chance of ranking at the top of page one on Google.
Balancing Informational and Commercial Intent
There are two main types of keyword intent for B2B companies:
- Informational content includes “what is” and “how-to” articles
- Commercial intent involves product comparisons, case studies, and stories
You need a mix of both in your content. People searching for commercial intent terms tend to be closer to making a buying decision.
Imagine you’re an IT service provider. Instead of targeting “data backup,” which could mean different things to different people, focus on “business data backup services.” By adding “services” to the keyword, you change the intent completely. Visitors to your page are looking for services, not just information about data backup.
Optimizing Your Content for SEO
When creating content, incorporate your keywords in the following places:
- Title
- Section headings
- Body text
- Image alt tags
This sends strong signals to Google for ranking your content. Also, link your keywords to other articles within your new content. Our SEO best practices checklist and Anatomy of a Stellar SEO Content provide more detailed guidance.
Promoting Your Content and Engaging Your Audience
To quickly promote your content and engage your audience, use social media platforms. Instead of simply sharing links to your blog posts, create summaries, talking points, or social media posts from the content. MakeMEDIA can generate these for you automatically.
You can also use these social posts and rich content to send out email newsletters. Include lead capture forms on your content pages, such as pop-ups, sliders, or exit-intent forms, to convert readers into qualified leads.
Leveraging Webinars and Live Streams
Another effective content strategy is introducing webinars and live streams to showcase your expertise and engage prospects. Use your long-form guides, white papers, trending topics, and best practices as giveaways to encourage attendance.
By providing high-quality education without a heavy sales pitch, you build trust with your audience. When they face issues related to your expertise, they’ll think of you first. For instance, incorporating case studies and stories in your live streams and webinars provides proof of your abilities and helps convert sales. We use Streamyard for our livestreams – it’s pretty easy to use and streams to multiple channels, including LinkedIn and Youtube.
Measuring and Scaling Content Marketing Efforts
As a CEO, you always want to know if your content marketing efforts are worth the investment. Is the juice worth the squeeze? Measuring the effectiveness of your content marketing can be a bit of a fuzzy science, but there are several metrics you can use to monitor your progress.
Attributing Revenue to Content Efforts
First, try to attribute your revenue to your content efforts. I recommend setting up Google Tag Manager, Google Search Console, and Google Analytics. These three free tools from Google can help you see where your traffic is coming from and what search terms people are using to find you.
If you have a good content marketing strategy in place with a consistent content calendar where you're publishing at least one blog post a week, maybe two, you should start to see results within a couple of months (likely sooner).
A fast way to reach those content goals is to use MakeMEDIA, which allows you to produce high-quality, in-depth content simply by talking for 15 to 30 minutes. The resulting content will be SEO-friendly and full of your own words, thoughts, examples, and ideas.
Improving Attribution Accuracy
Be aware that many attribution tools out there are not very accurate. They may list a lead source as being from a website but not know whether it’s from an organic search result or someone who read your blog, listened to a podcast, and then went to your website and converted.
Here’s a simple solution: add a “How did you hear about us?” field on your lead capture forms. You’ll capture much more information this way. In fact, several marketing gurus, including Chris Walker, are promoting this as one of the best ways to learn about your attribution.
Involving Your Team
Remember, you don’t have to do all this yourself. Your team members are likely experts in different aspects of your products and services and can help answer questions that clients may have. Get them involved in your content creation efforts. MakeMEDIA can help keep that effort coordinated and provide content ideas for each type of expertise your team has.
This will augment your team and enable you to produce the volume and quality of content that’s going to make an impact.
I’ve built three companies and grew all of my businesses using content marketing, saving a lot of money that I would have spent on pay-per-click or other forms of advertising.
Scaling Your Content Efforts
To scale your content efforts:
- Stay on top of industry trends and publish content about them right away. For instance, if a new report comes out that people are talking about, be one of the first to provide your thoughtful analysis. People will start talking about your take on it.
- Assign content creation roles to your team members. If you have a small team or if you’re a CEO trying to wear many different hats, block out an hour a week on your calendar to create content. With MakeMEDIA, you can quickly create content by talking through a handful of questions. It will create the first draft of the article for you, which will be pretty good to go with some polishing touches. It will also create social posts for you.
- As you start producing content, add webinars and live streams to your calendar. Track attendance and survey your audience to see what kind of content they want. Then adjust your content plans accordingly.
- Subscribe to publications in your industry to stay tuned into what other people are talking about. This will help you identify topics you should be discussing with your audience as well.
All of these combined efforts play a big role in expanding your footprint.
By investing in content marketing and consistently measuring and scaling your efforts, you can grow your business and establish yourself as a thought leader in your industry. As a CEO, it’s important to prioritize content creation and make it a regular part of your marketing strategy. With the right tools and approach, you can guide your company to success through effective content marketing.
Starting Your CEO Content Marketing Strategy
So who’s got the time to write all this stuff? That’s the obstacle. It’s the biggest reason companies turn MakeMEDIA. They want to implement the approaches I outlined in this guide. develop a customized content plan that delivers results for your organization. Reach out to us today to arrange a consultation and begin harnessing content marketing’s potential to grow your business.
Your path to better marketing performance starts with a free trial of MakeMEDIA – you’ll love how easy it makes your life:
