Content: Found, read, shared and measured

The title of this post basically sums up my approach to the growing discipline of Content Marketing.

These four terms are section headings for my simple and effective way to assess and develop your CM strategy. Below they are broken down into the essential areas that I think needs covering if you are putting together your own content marketing approach:

Found:
It's no good creating content if nobody finds it... so ensuring your text, images and other assets can be found on the web is bloody important. This is consequently the area where Content Marketing and Search Engine Optimisation come together the most; as using the correct SEO techniques and being correctly indexed by search engines can mean the difference between your pages getting lots of traffic and getting practically none.

Read:
Isn't there a wonderful phrase that goes something like "if a tree falls over in the forest and nobody hears it, does it make a noise?"... Well, in my opinion the same goes for your words and pictures... if nobody reads them, are they really content?
I should also mention that the quality of your content is something to watch out for. It's no good just getting the office junior to write all your website content if they've no real idea of how to correctly write for the web. Therefore scan-ability, readability and understandability are all key success factors here.

Shared:
To get your content to as many eyeballs as possible, you have to encourage it's sharing across as many platforms and formats as possible. From RSS feeds through to seeding by simple social sharing functionality, your content needs to work as hard as possible when it is is used off of your website as it does when it is on it. Also links and content out on social platforms can now significantly contribute to you SEO efforts too.

Measured:
This is probably the area least understood about Content Marketing (and therefore probably the area most likely to be missed / skipped). However it's not that difficult to get your head around, especially if you have a person in your organisation who understand your website analytics package and can obtain meaningful engagement KPI's.

Let me know if this framework works for you or if you have a better one