With companies allocating more budget on content marketing, you can’t just publish content for the sake of publishing content, otherwise, you’re just wasting time and money.
By following these steps, you can build a solid content marketing strategy that helps you effectively reach and engage your target audience. Remember to be consistent, set clear goals, and track and analyze your efforts to ensure the best possible results.
Identifying your audience is often neglected as a fundamental step in creating a content strategy. It’s like typing a message on your phone and not knowing who it’s for.
Before creating content, you need to know who will consume it. Learn about their interests and their common problems. Study how they behave online and what influences their actions. Once you’ve created personas, you can then craft your content around them and make sure they can fully appreciate and digest whatever you’re putting out there.
If you skip this step, you will most likely struggle to create the right tone of voice for your audience, and that’s what most companies are experiencing. This is crucial for your content marketing strategy.
It’s important to create content with a definite purpose in mind. A lot of marketing teams are caught up in the what, how and where of content marketing that they often forget about the most important piece: the why.
Ask yourself: Why are you allocating resources to content marketing? Is your goal to generate leads? Are you aiming to build relationships with your audience? Will you be creating content to improve your customers’ experiences? Are you just starting out as a content creator and want to introduce a new brand?
With the objectives established (don’t forget to document them), it becomes much easier to come up with specific approaches and tactics to send your message across.
You are most likely selling a product or service that’s also being sold anywhere else, which means there is also a plethora of content online about your industry. So how in the world will you stand out? By using your unique voice.
The goal is to make your content different and more valuable than other sources. If you are able to associate your content to the authentic heart of your brand (which is not easy to do at first), you can share your unique knowledge and perspective which your personas will appreciate.
One way to do it is by defining your business: Who are you? What do you do? Why do you do it? How do you want your customers to view your brand?
You already established the goals and you have found your unique voice. Now this is the fun and easy part. Creating a content calendar allows you to carefully plan around your goals and strategies by properly scattering and setting up the timing of your content posts.
The rule of thumb is to add your ‘regulars’ first. These are recurring types of content that go out on specific days. Some examples of this are inspirational quotes, blog promos, or end-of-week wrap up posts. Then insert your one-time specials — those that pertain to specific events, promos, or new updates.
Note: Your content calendar is only a part of your content marketing strategy, not your strategy itself.
What other content should be included in your content strategy plan? As our own research shows, video marketing should be an essential part of any marketing, as it’s proven to engage your visitors to keep them on-site longer, improve lead generation, and reduce abandonment.
Research your content when you’re ready to write, you’ll need to find out: What’s already out there How your new content can add value for your audience.
Develop a variety of content so that it does not get monotonous, both for you and your customers. Lastly, you need to know how to promote your content well.
Timing is everything and trendy marketing strategies keep you in sync with your audience. Promoting content can hit multiple target goals, i.e. not only does your content reach your target audience but it also builds quality links back to your site. If your content is interesting enough to be shared on social media it will bring in social signals for your site that will also improve your site’s SEO.
You can’t determine whether your content marketing strategy is effective if you don’t know how to measure it. The thing you also want to avoid is to get obsessed with vanity metrics that don’t really represent your actual success.
It all goes back to your goals. If your aim is to enlarge your pipeline, then obviously your metrics should be around the number of leads and conversions. If brand awareness is your goal, then you should look at social media engagement metrics.
With this information, you can easily decide which networks to target to get social media engagement and shares for your content.
Once you know what and how to measure, you can then test different approaches to determine which ones work best, and which ones to improve on.
Thinking of starting your content creation journey? Storyy can provide you with your own content team in your pocket that will take that off your plate and give you the results you want and more! Claim your FREE Social Media Video Edit today!
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