PICASSO Framework in Content Marketing

P‐I‐C‐A‐S‐S‐O is an acronym for Plan, Infrastructure, Create, Amplify with Syndication plus Sharing, and Outcome. The PICASSO Framework was developed by Kudani for use with its KudaniCloud content marketing software. It is a proven content marketing blueprint that gives you the confidence to create a profitable content marketing program (Clifford, 2016). 

Are you familiar with PICASSO Framework in content marketing?

— Lord Vincent Van Mendoza (@digitallourd) February 16, 2021

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PLAN

Any content marketing initiative should always begin with a plan. You must start with a solid plan or you will risk going off course without even realizing it. Content marketing planning should be guided by the MASFC method. That means you:

• Define your Mission
• Develop your Avatar
• Create your Style Sheet
• Construct yur Buyer Funnel
• Lay out your Calendar

Define your Mission

To reach your audience or target market, you need to begin with a clear mission statement. You have to ask yourself whether you are aiming for brand awareness, lead generation, engagement, sales, lead nurturing, customer retention/loyalty, customer evangelism, and upsell/cross-sell.

Develop your Avatar

Nothing is more important for you as a content marketer than understanding your customers. By understanding your ideals customers, you can develop content or make your product or service indispensable. The best way to have a clear picture of your ideal customer is by making avatars. Avatars are representations of your targeted customers. Marketers have a love‐hate relationship with them. They know that they need to create and use them, but they find avatars difficult to develop — but not you because you are a good content marketer.

You can try HubSpot’s persona maker for a start.

In using avatars, you can:

Tap into feelings and emotions in your copy.

After you understand how your buyers want to feel when they use your product, you can evoke those feelings with your content. Remember, content marketing is likely about storytelling. Appeal to their emotions. In fact, a Harvard Professor Says 95% of Purchasing Decisions Are Subconscious.

Use buying triggers in emails and real‐time messaging.

If you know your avatars’ buying triggers, send your emails and messages at the right time to catch the interest of your buyers. You can also make sure that the same content is (though crafted in a different style) on your website and anywhere else where your buyers can find you.

Directly address problems they are experiencing.

People use search engines to help them to solve their problems. Solving problems for your customers is key to generating revenue. Your content, in all appropriate formats, should focus on problem solving.

Use influencers to persuade them.

Knowing whom your customers listen to and respect is an important piece of the content puzzle. It’s a great idea to reach out to influencers for endorsements in your content whenever possible.

Set the tone, style, and delivery of your content.

You can determine whether you need a formal voice or something more conversational for your audience. As for me, it is more effective if you vary your tone depending on the demographics of your audience.

Create your Style Sheet

Creating your style sheet is promoting a sense of branding. People rely on your content when they hant to know about your company. These are some of the factors you have to bear in mind as you work on your content:

• Writing style – This should depend on your audience. Do you need to sound formal? Or sounding more casual would be fine? You need to define this writing style so that all the contributors can match the way they write for your brand.
• Tone – This is conveyed by the choice of words and your sentence style. You may ask yourself whether or not to use figures, emotion, or the combination of the two.
• Punctuation – You need to create a style sheet that details any specific punctuation or word usage requirements. For instance, you may not want to have exaggerated exclamation points!!!!!!!!!
• Blog post and web layout – Make sure to provide a guide that tells staff what the layout of all owned sites should be. Just like mine, the color palette of all the layout across the sites should be consistent. Without consistency, your brand communicates an unprofessional attitude.
• Image style – Create a style guide that details the size and requirements for all visuals.

Construct your Buyer Funnel

Funnel is a term used to describe the process of collecting visitors and sending them through a defined set of steps, from the beginning where they “meet” your brand to the end when they become a buyer.

Here’s how a prospect might go through the funnel (Clifford, 2016):

✓Top of the funnel content (TOFC): When people initially discover your business, the content they see first should be educational. They want to determine whether you’re presenting a solution to a problem they have.

✓Middle of the funnel content (MOFC): If customers believe that your product may provide a solution, they begin to think about how they might implement the solution you offer. They consider costs and comparisons with other competitors, and frequently read reviews and case studies.

✓Bottom of the funnel content (BOFC): After people become customers, you need to strengthen your bond with them to ensure that they continue to be delighted with their purchase. The final phase in the funnel involves encouraging buyers to be advocates for your business and arming them with the content that helps them socially sell your solution to their network.

INFRASTRUCTURE

Your infrastructure is critical to the success of your content marketing efforts. If your website loads so slowly or your mobile website looks so awful, you will drive visitors away before they even consider your content. One way of avoiding this is by optimizing your site. Above everything else, you have to pay attention to your site’s performance. Site optimization is primarily what you need to succeed in getting your content across your audience.

These are some of the ways to achieve this:

• Tune up your engine – Your audience doesn’t have the time or inclination to wait for your sites to display. You need to pay attention to your site
  performance so that your prospects don’t have to. If you have not fine‐tuned your sites, you’re not paying attention to the heart of your content marketing operation.
• Set optimization goals and loot at metrics – Consider these two optimization goals for your site: Desktop performance goal: A site should not take more than four seconds to load from a visitor’s desktop. Mobile performance goal: A mobile site should not take more than two seconds to load on your visitor’s mobile device.

You also need to track other metrics, and you use Google Analytics (or other Analytics Tools) for this type of tracking.

Metrics to watch out for include:

✓Opt‐in rate for leads: It’s important for you to know the rate at which your lead magnets are getting people to convert to prospects. Keep your eye on this measure so that if you see a low rate, you know what you need to do. Lead magnets require an opt‐in from your audience, which means that prospects volunteer to give you their personal information. Using an opt‐in with your lead magnet increases the likelihood that you are connecting with a person who is truly interested in what you have to say.

✓Time on site: How much time did your visitor spend on your site? This measurement tells you how much time your visitor spends on a specific page on your site. Obviously, you would like your visitor to spend some time on your pages.

✓Bounce rate: The bounce rate tells you how often visitors leave your site after looking at the one page they landed on. It’s calculated as a percentage. So a 50 percent bounce rate means that 50 percent of the time a visitor lands on your site, he or she doesn’t look at any other page but instead leaves your site completely.

CREATE

There are ways on how you can prepare for the creation of content for your brand:

1. Research on the topic that gets the traffic.
2. Diversify with content types.
3. Write headlines that work well.
4. Fill in your editorial calendar.

AMPLIFY

Content amplification means boosting the presence of your content so that it gets to your intended audience.

You have several types of content promotion available to you:

✓Paid media: This type of media refers to the advertising promotions that you pay for. When choosing these options, you need a budget and a conviction that you will get a return on the money you spend.

Examples: Facebook ads, promoted tweets, traditional and native advertising, print ads, paid search, mobile ads, app ads, and Amazon ads.

✓Earned media: This is the media that you get when other sources recognize and promote your content for you. Your brand or your content is deemed valuable and is showcased in some way or reshared.

Examples: Influencer reviews, traditional PR, and media relations.

✓Shared media: This media consists of the shares you get from others on the various social media platforms.

Examples: Shares on Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Tumblr, and others.

✓Owned Media: This type of media is controlled by you and is becoming more and more important as time goes on. I explain why later in this chapter.

Examples: Website, blogs, emails, microsites, apps, collateral, and user‐generated content.

SYNDICATION

Content syndication is a form of syndication in which content is made available from one website to other sites. In my case, I use Medium as a content syndication platform for my brand.

Take a look at this example:

If you could notice, both have the same content, although presented in quite a different way.

SHARING

Content sharing is at the heart of content marketing. Whenever I market for a prospect, I always make use of my content to feed to their mind. This way, I do not only make myself credible for them, but I also provide them with valuable content for them to become educated customers.

BTW, there’s a share button at the end of this blog. Feel free to share this.

OUTCOME

Measuring content outcome means knowing your numbers. In other words, pay attention to your Key Performance Indicators (KPIs).

Here’s a sample guide table for the metrics (Clifford, 2016):

Content Marketing Goals	Metrics
Increase brand awareness	Social media shares, social media likes, email forwards, referral links
Lead generation Lead nurturing	Blog signups, blog comments, conversion rate, form completions
Increase engagement	Comments, page depth (how many pages consumed), downloads, page views, back links, time on site, click‐through rate
Grow sales revenue by X percent	Revenue influenced by content (which content was consumed before sale), offline sales
Improve customer retention/loyalty	Bounce rate, followers, retention rate
Encourage customer evangelism	Social media shares, comments, follower count, word of mouth
Increase upsells/ cross sells	Measure conversions in shopping cart and on landing pages; number of conversions

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TL;DR: The bottom line

PICASSO Framework makes it easy for content marketers to align ther goals with their course of action in their content marketing initiative. Maximize this formula in content marketing and see the results for yourself.

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