The content marketing matrix

Dan Bosomworth & Smart Insights · 2012

Content placed by what it is for — to entertain, inspire, educate or convince — and how close the reader is to buying.

Its place in the frameworkMarket Core›Content

What it does

Two axes: emotional against rational, and awareness against purchase. Its use is as an audit rather than a plan. Almost every content library, plotted onto it, turns out to be crowded into one quadrant, and the empty quadrants are usually the ones the audience needed.

Reach for it when: When auditing what already exists, before deciding what to make next.
Where it stops: It classifies formats and intents; it says nothing about quality or distribution. A balanced matrix of unread material is still unread.

Dan Bosomworth, The Content Marketing Matrix, Smart Insights, 2012.

Why it sits at Content

Everything the organisation publishes: what it is about, what shape it takes, what it costs to make, when it goes out, and how long it stays useful afterwards.

A model is only useful when you reach for it at the right moment. This one answers a question that arises here — so it is filed here, and nowhere else. These are the working areas it serves:

PillarsContent-strategy practice on thematic consistency, and the category-entry-point research on being brought to mind for something specific at the moment a need becomes live.
FormatsContent-audit practice, and the mapping of content to buying stage in demand-generation work.
ProductionFully loaded production costing, and throughput and work-in-progress logic applied to editorial work, where approval is usually the constraint.
The calendarAudience-habit research on the value of regularity, editorial rolling-horizon planning, and seasonality read from the audience’s calendar rather than the organisation’s.
Reuse and lifespanThe evergreen-against-topical distinction, and content-atomisation practice.

All of Content

What it touches elsewhere

Nothing in a business is decided on its own. A conclusion reached with this model at Content lands in these other cores, whether or not anyone follows it there.

Brand CoreThe verbal and visual systems govern how every piece is executed, and what the pillars may claim is set by the message architecture.
Customer JourneyA format’s job is defined by the stage it serves and the transition it is meant to cause.
Business CoreContent is made by people with finite capacity, and approval is a process step with a queue in front of it.
Time CoreThe publishing rhythm sits inside the organisation’s wider year and competes with it for the same weeks.

Filed at the same place

These answer questions that arise at Content too. Where they disagree with this one, the disagreement is the useful part.

STEPPSSix properties that make a person pass something on, written as things to build in rather than as an explanation afterwards.
The 70:20:10 content mixSeventy per cent of effort on the dependable, twenty on what is promising, ten on what might not work at all.

Elsewhere in Market Core

These are other people’s models, named here so you can go to the source and use them properly. The Omnigoal is not affiliated with their authors and is not endorsed by them; nothing of theirs is reproduced here — no canvas, no diagram, no wording. Each is described in our own words, with the originator credited, because the framework is a place to put thinking, not a replacement for the people who did it. Model names and trademarks belong to their respective owners and are used here only to refer to the work itself.

All 125 models