FAQs
What is content marketing?
Content Marketing is about building relationships with prospective customers, buyers, or clients by engaging them with fresh, valuable content.
What is valuable content or value-driven content in content marketing?
Value-driven content is content that informs, educates, entertains, and is targeted toward specific consumer or business needs of your prospects.
For example, if your prospective client works in K12 school leadership, your company might use content that informs school leaders and other educators about how some automated curriculum tools offer features that make it easy for educators to measure student learning and inform instructional planning. In this way, you can use engaging content specific products in the context of education challenges and best practices to build relationships with a wider audience of prospects over time while building awareness of your brand or highlighting features or services that support your prospect’s success, or help your prospect reflect on or address common challenges in the educational settings where they work.
Putting content marketing into action requires a strategy that addresses content creation (messaging and design elements); content formats (case studies, blog posts, white papers, videos, press releases…) and content distribution and visibility (SEO, lead magnets, website blogs…).
Sometimes it is useful to refer to value-driven content to distinguish it from promotional content—content used to promote or advertise a specific product discount or sales event, for example.
What goes into a content marketing strategy?
A content marketing strategy is informed by your organization’ marketing context and your specific, time-bound marketing objectives or goals in order guide content creation, content formats, and content distribution.
Your marketing context is defined by your business profile: do you operate a business-to-consumer model or a business-to-business model, or nonprofit…? And, who are your prospective buyers or clients and how do they access content related to awareness of and engaging with your type of business offerings? How do these prospect profiles inform buyer personas whose lifestyle, work life, personal habits, needs, and values (etc.) inform your content creation? An effective content marketing strategy is also informed by your marketing goals: do you want to generate leads, close more sales late in the sales funnel, reach a wider audience, educate prospects about an innovative technology solution…?
Based on your business context, profile, and goals, a content marketer will think of effective and creative ways to leverage different kinds of content and content formats, such as blog posts, white papers, or case studies, and different kinds of content distribution approaches (improving SEO, directing more potential prospects to a landing page with an exciting or informative lead magnet…).
What are the essentials of a content marketing plan?
A content marketing plan is a map that allows a marketing team to map out, operationalize, and track content marketing implementation.
Key components of a content marketing plan typically include place holders on an organizational chart or matrix for aligning content, content formats, content creation responsibilities, implementation timelines or benchmarks, and distribution strategies.
Many content marketing plans create a content calendar or editorial calendar to map out many of these operational alignments and timelines.
What is grant writing?
Grants are financial awards by charitable foundations, corporations, and local, state, and federal government agencies that are used to direct charitable or public monies toward qualified and properly equipped entities (such as a nonprofit organization, college, NGO, or small business) to pursue a social need or mission (medical research, humanitarian relief efforts, public art, vocational training programs, rural medical services, advocacy to combat domestic violence, small business improvements, diffusion of green technologies…).
Grant writers help qualifying entities develop and craft compelling grant proposals or applications.
Most foundations and government agencies receive a large number of applications or proposals for publicly advertised grants, making it essential in most cases for interested entities to submit grant proposals that are:
concise, compelling, and highly polished
effectively documented
aligned with and conforming to all of the funder’s guidelines
highlighting the quality and relevance of the social benefits or impacts achieved and to be achieved by the applicant organization or the programs or project to be funded
adherence to detailed proposal specifications, such as word limits, and technical formatting, pagination, and layout specifications
What are the essential steps of writing and submitting a grant proposal or application?
STEP 1: Finding the right funding opportunity
The first step in the grant writing process is always prospecting for and identifying a funding opportunity. When prospecting for grants check for the following:
Does your organization satisfy the eligibility requirements for the specific grant or funder?
What kind of funding are you seeking (operational, for specific programs or projects, capital improvements or expansions…)?
Do your action goals and funding needs align with the kind of grant you are seeking and the mission, interests, themes, and priorities of the funder and grant?
Do you have the capacity and time needed to develop, write, polish, and submit (before the submission deadline) a compliant, compelling and competitive proposal?
STEP 2: Gathering relevant information and data
It’s important to communicate within your organization and with your grant writer about what kind of information and data are needed to respond to all of the grant application instructions and requirements. Next, someone needs to gather that information for the grant writer to use when compiling the grant.
If you decide to work with an external grant writer or freelance professional, that person will typically have an efficient onboarding process to gather information as well as use a questionnaire form aligned with grant requirements in order to provide a speedy and efficient information-gathering process.
Completing a grant application may also require using research skills to gather various kinds of survey data (e.g., census and demographic data, economic data, employment data, public health data…) to satisfy specific grant requirements or to document core components of your grant proposal.
STEP 3: Drafting the grant application or proposal
STEP 4: Reviewing the draft application or proposal, with input from relevant team members in your organization
STEP 5: Refining the draft—ensuring factual accuracy; checking for optimal alignment with grant instructions, specifications, funder priorities and guidelines; proofreading…
STEP 6: Submitting the grant proposal or application before any stipulated deadline and in accordance with funder specifications (some grants must be submitted in hard copy format—mailed or hand delivered—and others may require use of a specific kind of digital file or specified electronic submission portal…)
How do I know if I am developing a competitive grant proposal?
The following are essential factors for developing and writing a competitive grant proposal or application:
know best practices in the field of grant writing
carefully review and parse the funding opportunity and proposal requirements
develop content that is responsive to the published scoring rubric or review criteria
These steps are essential to preparing a competitive proposal for a grant. The organizational strengths, past achievements, leadership qualifications, and sustainability factors that characterize your organization will also often play an important role in determining how competitive your grant application will be when it is reviewed alongside other applications or proposals.
What is the essential process for working with EdPro?
Working with EdPro is fast, simple, flexible, and highly transparent…
An onboarding or intake call is provided free of charge to clarify if EdPro can provide excellent services for your specific content marketing or grant writing needs.
Based on your goals and needs, EdPro will promptly email you a PROPOSAL that summarizes your goals, the services to be provided, timelines, and fees…(There are no fees logged or required for this part of the process…). (You may also get some contract language to approve before a PROPOSAL is sent, especially if you are a new client.)
Once you have reviewed and approved the PROPOSAL and made any advance/deposit payments specified (typically about 50% of projected fees) work can begin.
A PROPOSAL or parts of a PROPOSAL can be amended, but only if both YOU (client) and EDPRO agree on any new terms or changes and approve them in writing.
Once work is completed, a final invoice is sent for all service fees, minus any advance/deposit already paid and YOU are provided with any deliverables specified in the PROPOSAL or directly related to the completion of the same work/to the fees charged.
Does EdPro charge by the hour, or a flat fee? And how do I know the rates are competitive?
If the your project has a well-defined scope , it’s typically easy to request and receive a PROPOSAL that outlines clearly what services and deliverables EdPro will provide and for what flat fee.
For less defined projects, you can contract for work at an hourly rate. In either case a PROPOSAL is provided before work begins, for your review and approval (and in case you have questions or need the PROPOSAL to provide further clarifications…). It’s also fine to ask for a cap on the maximum number of hours to be applied and charged for, and to have this specified in the text of your PROPOSAL.
EdPro charges less than many comparable professionals in the field, regardless of whether your PROPOSAL provides service for a fixed fee or at an hourly rate. For this reason, you can be confident EdPro rates are highly competitive.