A Content Marketing Metaphor: Training Camp and Pregame

 Posted on August 31,2015 in Campaigns

Around the country, football season is getting underway. The nation’s most popular sport takes center stage each fall, as athletes as young as 5 and 6 years old take to the gridiron—non-contact, of course—to experience the thrill of competition. At higher levels, including high school, college, and beyond, the game of football is a year-round endeavor requiring dedication, hard work, and constant attention to ever-changing rules and challenges. In many ways, a successful football program shares many similarities with an effective content marketing strategy. While, as a business owner, you may not risk physical injury on the field of play, a casual, unprepared approach to marketing can leave your brand bruised and beaten.

No Off-Season

The analogous comparison to football is not exact, of course, as your marketing efforts are not primarily focused on a single season. Your business and online presence requires your attention every month of the year. However, just as a football team continues to workout, study, improve, and prepare during the off-season, you and your marketing team should be doing the same, no matter what campaigns are currently ongoing.

Training Camp: Developing an Approach

If you are creating a content marketing strategy for the first time, it is absolutely vital to identify your specific objectives and draft an organized plan to meet them. Much like a football team’s training camp, where the players, coaches, and staff, spend intensive hours defining roles, developing strategies, and understanding responsibilities, you and your team should set aside dedicated time to doing the same. You need to fully comprehend what you are looking to achieve and what it will take to get there.

In your strategy meetings, you may decide that you want to create a strong, responsively designed website to better capture the mobile-user demographic. Likewise, your team may feel that blogs, videos, and social media integration can help drive traffic and increase your visibility. During this process, though, you will also need to decide how to fulfill your vision. Many companies choose to work with content marketing professionals capable of running the day-to-day operations of building your brand. Think of an outside marketing group as an offensive or defensive coordinator hired by you—the head coach—to help you design and implement an approach to reaching your goals.

Pregame: Get Ready to Go

Once your plan is in place and you have acquired the team necessary to execute it, your next step is to ensure that the pieces fit together before they are launched. This is true for a brand-new marketing campaign, as well as for significant updates to existing strategies. From the moment it goes live, you want your website to be fully-functional and optimized to begin attracting prospective customers immediately. Your marketing team should make every effort to eliminate dead outbound links, substandard usability, and outdated layouts. In doing so, potential problems can be identified and addressed before they can cause difficulties to live users.

You will also want to be sure your content is well-prepared. Misleading or poorly researched information can have a dramatic impact on your company’s image and reputation. Similarly, your social media accounts and feeds should be in place and working properly so that the debut or update of your marketing campaign can be fully effective.

Football is a sport full of excitement and bone-crushing hits. It is also a game of planning and creativity. Your content marketing should combine many of the same elements to promote your brand with an exciting and creative approach. The content marketing professionals at OVC, INC. are experienced in developing unique and vibrant strategies to meet the needs of those looking to increase their online visibility. Since 2008, we have been providing cutting-edge marketing solutions for attorneys around the country and are ready to help you meet your marketing goals. Call 630-635-8000 to schedule a consultation today.

Sources:

http://espn.go.com/nfl/story/_/id/10354114/harris-poll-nfl-most-popular-mlb-2nd

http://www.forbes.com/sites/thesba/2015/08/14/successful-content-marketing/

http://www.business2community.com/marketing/4-social-factors-to-consider-when-developing-a-marketing-plan-01299061

About the Author: Greg Wildman is the President of OVC, INC. Since 1999, Greg has developed hundreds of websites for attorneys from his company's inception as Online Video Concepts, LLC to the modern era's OVC, INC. Greg's knowledge of law firm marketing has helped many attorneys establish online presences through custom website development, Search Engine Optimization, legal directory partnerships, social media marketing, content writing and more.