The ICE content prioritization framework
The ICE content prioritization framework
Marketing Powerup #51: Prioritize content ideas using the ICE prioritization framework.
Hello, and welcome to Marketing Powerups! 👋🏽
Today's powerups include:
Write copy that converts using “money” words.
How should you deal with the SEO apocalypse?
The ICE content prioritization framework.
Ready? Let's go! ⭐️
🎖 AI-powered marketing templates
Marketers get amped up by new strategies but drown in the endless work to launch ‘em.
Sound familiar?
With so much endless work, it gets harder to drive real results.
Copy.ai (today’s newsletter sponsor) takes those tasks and automates them with just a few clicks. Whatever content you need, Copy.ai makes it easy to generate on-brand content at scale.
They’ve compiled the best AI-powered marketing templates for ads, blogs, videos, and more. The best part is they’re free!
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⭐️ The ICE content prioritization framework
Prioritization is one of the most difficult tasks for a content marketer.
You could create thousands of content types covering hundreds of different topics. You also have stakeholders from across the business, SEO keywords, lead generation or traffic goals, and pitches from writers.
So, where do you start?
That’s where a prioritization framework I learned from the growth marketing and conversion optimization worlds comes in: The ICE framework. Sean Ellis (Founder of Growthhackers.com) created it to help teams rank growth experiments and tests based on Impact, Confidence, and Ease.
I’ve adapted it to help prioritize content ideas.
1. Impact 🔨
Impact refers to how likely this content idea can move the needle for a specific key performance indicator (KPI). It requires knowing the current goal of the marketing team (organic traffic, email subscribers, new signups, qualified leads, etc.) and how it fits with the business's overall strategy.
Consider keyword research, web analytics data, and customer data here.
2. Confidence 💪
Confidence refers to the level of certainty or confidence you have about the previous criteria (Impact). This could be based on past experience or data.
For example, if your team has never created a whitepaper before, you likely don’t know how it will positively impact your KPI. In that case, you’ll likely have low confidence in this content idea.
3. Ease 🌤️
Ease refers to the degree of difficulty of creating and distributing this content idea. Factors that impact Ease include the technical implementation of this content idea (e.g., creating a bespoke interactive microsite vs. a blog post), resources required, and organizational barriers.
The ICE score 📊
To prioritize content ideas using the ICE framework, you give a score from 1 (low) to 10 (high) for Impact, Confidence, and Ease for each content idea. The average of the three numbers is the content idea’s ICE score. You prioritize each content initiative based on the highest ICE score.
The true power of the ICE framework lies in using it with a team. In this case, ask team members to score each content idea individually. Then, come together as a team to compare ICE scores. If there are any big discrepancies, you can have a discussion and come up with the final ICE score for each content idea.
Free powerups template 🔖
I’ve created a powerups template exclusively for Marketing Powerups subscribers to apply the ICE content prioritization framework.
→ Download and make a copy of it here (a direct link with no email required).
✨ Mini powerups
Fun-sized tools, links, and blurbs to boost your marketing.
📝 Chat with any of your files as if it’s ChatGPT (tool): Plug in any documents with 10 to over 1,000 pages into Humata, and you can ask it questions and get answers instantly. You can summarize long technical documents, repurpose them to other types of documents, and more!
💸 How to write copy that converts with the power of money words (article):
, the copywriting legend and founder of Copyhackers, shares two money words and one lose-money word that will help you sharpen your copy and speak better to prospects. Your team should now test these words in your website, ad, and email copy! I know I have.😵 SEO apocalypse is here. Should you be concerned? (post):
warns that the SEO apocalypse might be around the corner with Google’s SGE coming out of beta. He’s seen the search traffic of 60% of search queries dramatically decline. Eli shares 7 points in this LinkedIn post to help you navigate whether you should be concerned.If you enjoyed this, you’d love this Marketing Powerups issue from the archives featuring
about his A2E framework for prioritizing marketing ideas.
That’s all for now, friends!
Have a powered-up day,
Ramli John
Connect with me on LinkedIn and Twitter
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