Content marketing playbook

Quickly review and optimize your content marketing strategy and tactics with our playbook

How will this content marketing playbook help me and my business?

Now that most marketers appreciate that content marketing is at the heart of digital marketing, it's becoming more difficult to make your content marketing effective. Competing in content marketing needs an approach where you work to a plan to develop more engaging content than your competitors and work hard to continuously improve this.

This playbook provides a checklist for content marketers and managers to use to quickly review their content marketing. It covers the main activities that need to be managed to drive success with content marketing. The checklist contains useful links through to more detailed Smart Insights member resources explaining each approach in more detail.

It is structured around our RACE Growth System OSA process, helping you identify your:

Opportunity. Review your current use of content marketing and set goals.
Strategy. Creating a content marketing strategy.
Action. Schedule creation and distribution of content.

What is a marketing playbook?

A marketing playbook defines the types of communications, best practices and optimization techniques that should be used to maximize return-on-investment for different marketing objectives. They are designed to help you prioritize where you need to focus your efforts, with quick links to relevant resources to help you in each area.

Playbooks help a business make the most of today’s marketing opportunities by approaching each communication channel in the most effective way, by considering:

Investment priorities and best practices for communications
Audience media use
Communications orchestration
Goal setting and measurement
Integration of activities
Marketing technology and data

What does the content marketing playbook cover?

Our playbook checklist will help you review your approach to content marketing since it features:

A break-down of activities split across our simple RACE OSA Framework to help you optimize each area of your content marketing
22 factors to create effective content marketing (with a short description of each)
Links to our Content Marketing Learning Path – held on our interactive e-learning platform – as well as supporting guides and templates to help you define your content strategy further

Resource Details

Author: Dr. Dave Chaffey
Format: A playbook containing a checklist of 22 factors you should be managing for better results from content marketing – which fuels SEO, social media marketing and, ultimately, conversions.
Related resources:
- Content marketing toolkit – guides and templates to help you create a content marketing strategy
- Content Marketing Learning Path – a fully accredited, interactive, e-learning course focussed on improving your content marketing activities

About the author

Dr. Dave Chaffey

Dave is co-founder of Smart Insights and creator of the Smart Insights RACE Planning Framework. For his full profile, or to connect on LinkedIn or other social networks, see the About Dave Chaffey profile page on Smart Insights. Dave is author of 5 bestselling books on digital marketing including Digital Marketing Excellence and Digital Marketing: Strategy, Implementation and Practice. In 2004 he was recognised by the Chartered Institute of Marketing as one of 50 marketing ‘gurus’ worldwide who have helped shape the future of marketing.