While your business objectives drive your use of content as a marketing tool, actual content production depends more on what your customers need. But the key to building a successful content marketing strategy is not just to be customer-centric but to understand how the experience you are creating for your audience connects to and ensures that your company achieves its objectives as well. Your content marketing mission statement embodies this principle. It is customer-centric but also rooted in your business objectives. It should be displayed on your website and used internally by everyone on your content marketing team to guide your content choices. Your mission statement answers three questions: 1. Who is your core audience target? 2. What will be delivered to your audience? 3. What is the desired outcome for the audience? If a piece of content does not align with your mission statement, time and resources should not be dedicated to its creation. The following sections will help us answer these three questions.

If you do not know who your audience is, you will never reach them. The following questions will help reveal your audience - the people who your content will help the most.

PLEASE READ THE FOLLOWING INFORMATION BEFORE ANSWERING THE QUESTION BELOW. It is best to test out different types of blog posts - topics, organization, length, etc. - to determine what resonates with your audience and drives the results you want. One website found that their deep tactical blog posts drove more traffic but their infographic and promotional posts produced more leads. But every website has a different audience, so it is recommended to approach the first 3-6 months as an experiment to uncover your specific reader’s preferences and conversion numbers to know what types of articles to write, how often you should publish, and more. But you have to start somewhere. The following are the most common types of articles found on the internet: Top Of Funnel (TOFU): Lighter articles centered around educating a wider audience and addressing popular internet trends, quizzes/survey/polls and their results, event summaries or behind-the-scenes looks at your business, and other related topics that will bring in traffic. Guest posts: You can harness the power of networking by having others in your industry write guest posts for your blog as well as conducting interviews or reaching out to multiple influencers for roundup articles that create great opportunities for backlinks and exposure to new audiences through email lists and social media. Editorial: Objective opinion pieces addressing industry developments that provide analysis of issues and events from both viewpoints. Tactical: Basic how-to posts. These can also be presented as general problem-solution articles. Deep Tactical: In-depth comprehensive how-to posts. Case Studies: Stories about clients who have used your services or individuals who have purchased your product and how they have benefited. Promotional: Articles promoting e-books, webinars, tools, etc. including reviews and comparison posts. Infographic/SlideShare: Design-heavier articles displaying information in bite-size pieces. Listicles: Articles that rank different services, products, places, techniques, etc. These are great for bringing in traffic. FAQs: Address frequently asked questions in your industry regarding specific topics. We also highly recommend adding FAQ sections to other articles. Evergreen Content: More than a specific article type, this is a content characteristic of an article that never goes out of style or becomes outdated. If the content continues to be relevant to the search term, it may maintain its Google rank indefinitely. Updates: Non-evergreen content can maintain its rank as well if it is frequently and adequately updated with current statistics and developments. It is recommended that you track fact-sensitive articles as they are published and tag them for regular updates. Many of these article types can be combined with others on the list. You may find that you do not want to use all these approaches as some do not fit the content or will produce few results. Ultimately, the goal is to find the kind of content with which your audience engages and then push all blog topics for your business through that filter.

Your brand story defines your content marketing strategy by identifying the specific ideas and messages you will communicate, how you will deliver them, and how both your ideas and their delivery will set you apart from your competitors and reflect your company's values and brand. The following two sections will help identify and develop your brand story.

Content categories are an important means of organizing your website to direct readers to the information that they are seeking. They are often displayed on your navigation bar or a sidebar and are essentially a table of contents of the high-level topics on your blog that readers can then use to find the information of most interest to them. Smaller sites generally have 3-5 categories while larger sites can have as many as 5-10. You can also create subcategories to cover more specific topics within a more general category. Categories are also beneficial for SEO purposes. By creating page hierarchy, you will give search engines a better understanding of a page’s purpose and make it easier to rank. As you add posts within a category and link to the main category page, you will continually optimize it, leading search engines to rank it higher and make your website easier for readers to find. Last of all, categories are a useful way to organize content production. For example, you can begin by writing one article about each category before gauging which categories are more popular with your audience and analyzing what produces the best results. Categories will often reflect the different pillars of your company and will be a good starting point to produce keyword strategies, generate article ideas, write according to a schedule, and cover the broad range of topics related to your company.

When you work with a content agency, you want someone who will work to match your voice and represent you with the most authenticity. Unless you request otherwise, every de Tello Publishing writer will act as a ghostwriter for your site, which means that all the content we create is attributed to you or your team. Let us make you shine! To do this successfully, help us understand the style, voice, and tone that you (or your team members) would use when writing.

PLEASE READ THE FOLLOWING INFORMATION BEFORE ANSWERING THE QUESTIONS BELOW. The ideal publishing schedule for your website depends on a number of different factors, many of which are specific to you, your goals, your business, your budget, and your audience. The following are the main factors to take into consideration when determining how many articles to publish a week, how long each article will be, and the specific dates and times when you will publish: Consistency: Consistency is important when you first start writing a blog. Readers will come to expect content on certain days. Publishing articles at the same time and on the same days is also a good signal to Google that the site is reliably producing new content on a schedule. Best Publish Days: Many sites have seen that posts published on Mondays receive the most traffic while those published on Saturdays get the most blog comments and weekends get the most social shares. An ideal publishing schedule will allow us to hit each of these days. Quantity: B2B companies that publish 400+ articles generate almost 3x as many leads as B2B companies that publish 0-200 posts. And B2C companies generate 4.5x as many leads. Depending on your goals, you may want to dedicate more funds in the beginning to build up the quantity of articles on your site. Once you have enough quality cornerstone content on the site, you can usually afford to post less frequently. However, it is usually recommended to publish at least two articles a week. Quality: Quality always triumphs over quantity. Some blogs have reached one million visitors a month by publishing just once a week and ensuring that the content is to the highest standards. Depending on your niche, you may want to focus on fewer articles to ensure that writers have the time they need to research and produce quality content. Article Length: A quick way to get a general idea of how long your articles should be based on your industry is to look at the top results for search terms related to your business and taking the average word length of the top six articles. The following is a breakdown of the average cost of an article based on word count: - Short: Less than 1000 ≈ $50 - $120 - Basic: 1000-2000 Word Articles ≈ $75 - $160/article - Standard Long-Form: 2000-3500 Word Articles ≈ $100 - $280/article - Long-Form Ultimate Guide: 3500+ Word Articles ≈ $175 - $400/article Budget: When considering your budget, seek to balance the desired article length with the quantity of articles that you would like to publish each month. For new websites, it is recommended to start with a mix of shorter and longer posts that we can then use to test out what resonates with your audience. Based on this information, and with an understanding that this is only a starting point, please answer the following questions:

Get as little or as much support as you need from our team. This section is meant to assess who you have on your team already versus who you will need to use from the de Tello Publishing team to research, write, edit, publish, and distribute your content. As we work together, we will develop the processes for communication and operations to provide both teams with the information they need to deliver and achieve your content marketing objectives.

Last of all, let's get a head start on content distribution. In many ways, it is just as (if not more) important than the content itself. While we will fully address this part of your content plan in another assessment, we would like to have an idea of where you envision sharing your content from the very beginning.

You made it to the end! Thank you for taking the time to fill out the questions in this intake form. Once you hit submit, be on the lookout for an email with a PDF copy of your responses and an invitation to set up a follow-up call to begin refining and putting your content marketing strategy into action!