Your content marketing strategy is essential in driving some of your biggest success factors which include organic web traffic, brand awareness, lead generation, and ultimately sales. The thing is, there’s a lot to consider when it comes to creating a strategy.
You can avoid problems by planning what Google and your online audience want. That’s it!
Think of your strategy like a map – you need one if you want to get where you’re going. If you don’t have one, you’re going to get lost.
You have to be strategic and intentional if you’re want to succeed especially when the competition is so high. Being strategic pays off in the long run.
In this article, you’ll learn everything you need to know about developing an effective content marketing strategy. Sounds good right?
What Is a Content Strategy?
According to hubspot.com, a content strategy is a plan in which you use content (audio, visual, and/or written) to achieve your business goals. It also includes content planning, production, publishing, promoting, tracking, and SEO.
Your strategy should be flexible because what worked for your business in the past might no longer work.
So you must learn more about how your audience is reacting to your content and your business goals change. Your strategy should shift and evolve as well.
The good news is that with a strategy in place, you can adapt because you are accounting for different variables and you can easily identify what is and isn’t working.
Why You Need a Strategy
Every business can benefit from a content marketing strategy as it provides the following benefits:
1. It simplifies the process of content creation
2. It keeps you consistent
3. It helps you generates leads for your marketing campaigns
4. It boosts your credibility
How to Develop a Content Strategy
There is a lot that goes into developing a content strategy. Below is a step-by-step guide you can follow to create and execute your content marketing strategy right away. Here’s where to start:
1. Define Your Audience.
Who are you creating your content for? This should be the first question every marketing team asks themselves when developing a content marketing strategy.
Defining your audience starts with establishing a buyer persona to serve as a fictional representation of your customer.
Start with your most common type of customer and consider their geographic location, their interests, their aspirations, and their needs.
2. Set S.M.A.R.T Goals With Measurable KPIs.
The S.M.A.R.T. goal framework is a simple but valuable tool that can guide your goal-setting process:
Image Source: The Coaching Tools Company
It’s likely you have more than one goal for your content. By spending time outlining each of the goals of your content marketing strategy, your marketing team can be more intentional about creating content that hits all of your objectives.
Make sure your goals are both measurable and timely and define why you want to create content and how it will tie to your goals.
3. Analyze Your Content.
Even if you have never created a content marketing strategy before, you have likely used content to interact with your audience.
Look over what you have created. Consider content on your website, social media channels, email, text messages, and more.
Pull whatever analytics are available to you to understand what types of content have succeeded and which ones haven’t driven engagement.
4. Learn From Your Competitors.
Just as you analyze your content, you should analyze your competitors. Visit their websites, follow them on social media, and subscribe to their email newsletters.
What do they do well? What doesn’t work? Replicate the approaches that have been successful for them, and fill in the gaps where they haven’t built a strategic advantage.
5. Analyze Your Keywords.
Analyze your own keywords with tools like SEMRush and Moz so you better understand where you rank.
Find out what your target audience is currently searching for and interacting with. There are plenty of ways to do this, but one of the most effective is to use SEO tools to see what people are searching for on search engines.
Cool, right?
There are tons of tools out there too, such as Google Keyword Planner, Ahrefs.
6. Brainstorm Topic Ideas
After examining keywords, your content, and your competitors’ content, you should know what topics you want to target. If not, you can use a few platforms, such as BuzzSumo, Feedly, or BlogAbout to inspire you.
From there, you can begin to plan your content calendar.
7. Decide How You Will Measure Results.
To gauge how effective your efforts are, you must have a way to track results and measure ROI.
This may be page views, time spent on-page, social media engagement, number of new customers, newsletter signups, or more. What matters most to you will depend on your business’s goals.
8. Determine Content-Type
Consider your resources, and determine what kind of content you can produce and how often you can create and publish them. You can include this in your content calendar.
9. Figure Out the Best Content Channels
As you work through this process, you’ll start to get a sense of where your audience is hanging out, and where you already have a successful online presence. It’s best to focus on what’s working and expand from there, rather than try to do everything at once.
10. Identify and Allocate Resources
Now that you know what type of content you’re planning to create, who it’s for, and where you’re planning to share it, it’s important to make sure you have everything you need to deliver on your content marketing strategy.
Summary
A content strategy is your roadmap to content marketing success.
Without one, you won’t be able to create effective content or enable your performance to consistently improve into the future.
Feel free to see these steps as general guidelines while you learn more about creating content strategies, and let me know which methods work best for you!
Don’t get lost. Create a map.
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