Content marketing is an excellent strategy for businesses and startups looking to reach a wide audience. It’s a great way to spread the word about your products or services and may even help you create a loyal customer base.
But if you’re a newbie to content marketing, where do you start?
Creating a marketing strategy is the roadmap to your success. It will help you grow your business by maximizing your reach, targeting your audience, and encouraging that audience to buy.
When done well, content strategy is one of the most critical components of your overall marketing strategy. But it takes time and money to come up with great content. So whether you outsource blog posts or create videos in-house, you must have a well-thought-through process for developing quality content.
There’s a lot to consider when building a content marketing strategy, so check out these key points to help you on your way!
What is a Content Marketing Strategy and Why is it Important?
A content marketing strategy is a marketing strategy that involves creating blogs, images, videos, and other types of media to attract, engage, and keep customers or clients.
Content marketing strategies are essential because once you have identified your target audience, you need to develop the right plan to reach them.
This plan can then be adjusted, adapted, or built around a specific set of goals. If you are hoping to increase brand awareness, boost organic traffic, or generate more leads, a well-developed content marketing strategy is the way to do it.
The 8 Fundamental Parts of a Killer Content Marketing Strategy
Now that you know why you need a content marketing strategy, here are some things to keep in mind.
Clearly Define Your Content Marketing Objective
Marketing goals are small objectives that help your company achieve its bigger goals, such as generating high-quality leads or raising brand awareness. There are many marketing goals – yours could include:
- Generating high-quality leads
- Growing brand awareness
- Improving customer value
- Increasing your referral rate
- More product sales
- Industry authority and thought leadership
Without a clear goal, you’ll have no way of measuring the impact or value of the work you put in.
Goals are an essential tool for keeping yourself, your team, and the company on track. They provide a clear measure of success and can be seen as an achievement when you reach them.
Content marketing may come with challenges, but the more you persevere and create quality content, the better you’ll understand ROI. Optimizing your strategies will be inevitable as you move forward. Without clearly defined goals, how will you ever know where and how to optimize your strategy?
2. Understand Content
Before creating a content marketing strategy, you must uncover what content actually is.
Content creation is a lot of work and requires a lot of creative thinking. The key to successful content creation is understanding that quality content needs to be combined with good marketing tactics. Custom content has been shown to increase engagement metrics and make prospects more inclined to buy from you.
Before you sit down to write a blog or edit a video, you need to do a little research. You may have all the information you need to write that blog (you are the expert, after all!) but do you know what keywords you should use to properly optimize it for search engines? Do you know what the competition is doing or saying regarding this subject? What will you say that provides value to the reader that cannot be found elsewhere?
All of these questions should be answered so you go into the content creation process with a deeper understanding of the content itself.
3. Get to Know Your Audience
Now you need to make sure you know and understand who will be accessing your content.
Your target audience is the group of people who are most likely to want your product or service. These are the people that you need to ensure are seeing the content.
Your specific target audience will depend on a number of factors including age, gender, income, and geographical location. It is also important to consider their interests as well.
To find your audience, take a close look at the customers or clients that you already have.
It’s best to find your target audience by looking at who you are already working with. Age, living situation, and interests are all excellent determining factors to discover when getting to know your audience better. One good way to identify your ideal follower for marketing is by taking a quick look through the profiles of those who already follow you on social media or asking visitors to fill out a simple survey.
If you want people to buy your product instead of your competitor’s, then you’re going to have to work out what your competitor doesn’t already provide and fill the gap. Take a look at products or services similar to yours and see how they’re marketed, then create something more original.
One of the most critical components of a content marketing strategy is developing a loyal customer base. And you can only create the emotional connections needed to establish loyalty when you really know your audience.
4. Research Your Competitors
Once you have defined your audience and before you set out to create content, you need to do a bit more research. Check out other businesses of similar size or type to yours and see what they’re doing with their content marketing. Likely, their articles are published regularly and in different formats; social media is used to disseminate the latest developments in your industry, offer giveaways, and create partnerships and networks.
If you haven’t yet, you will soon see that many businesses have very similar content strategies. You can take cues from these—especially if you notice a lot of engagement— but don’t copy them. Your unique content needs to be branded so that it doesn’t take away from important aspects of your business and becomes synonymous with your business or industry. Instead of copying someone else’s strategy, take what they did well and make it better.
5. Set Up a Content Calendar
Once you know what everyone else is doing and who your audience is, then you can start to plan out your content calendar. Use a content calendar that you or your team can refer to for better organization when managing your content marketing strategy. This helps visualize how your different materials should be used throughout the year and ensures no duplications.
If you have a lot of content ideas, start brainstorming what you will create, such as blog posts with catchy titles or interesting how-to videos.
A content calendar is an invaluable tool for any marketing strategy. It gives you an extensive overview of what content you’ll produce in the year, making it easier to map out and fill in gaps. You’ll also be able to see what topics need more planning and strategy. Workflow management becomes a breeze with a calendar. Your content marketing strategy will be updated regularly, making it easier for you to publish new material when required. You can also set deadlines that specify when you should post each type of content.
6. Identify Your Content Marketing Goals
One key point to uncover when building your content marketing strategies is setting goals and then figuring out how you will achieve them.
Your goals may be to publish two blog posts, one video, and fifteen social media posts per month. You may want to start smaller. You may also have a plan for a certain number of impressions or sales. Your goals may change as you understand what content connects with your audience and how much content you can create. At this point, you may wish to obtain the services of a content marketing agency to help you attain your goals.
7. Promote Yourself
Social media is critical in today’s content strategy. With so many distractions and noise, ensure your audience sees your content by using social media! It’s almost impossible not to be on social media these days, especially since many potential customers will search on social channels before deciding on a sale. And to capitalize on this aspect, all you need are social media accounts to connect and promote your content.
There are lots of strategies you can use to promote your content. Creating compelling content will make it more likely to be linked, mentioned in influential industry blogs, and shared by influencers with their followers.
After you publish your content, use the opportunity to promote it—for free—on social media channels. You’ll achieve more visibility, brand authenticity, and trust when you comment back or respond to messages. And, just like building connections, you can like comments or reply with a helpful or grateful message for better engagement. It might seem a little awkward at first, but it will become second nature with time.
8. Keep Learning For Your Content
Continuous learning through professional development when creating content for marketing is priceless. As we mentioned above, you are an expert in your field, but it’s good to know more than what you’re good at.
If a business owner only knows their area of expertise, they will be limited in the long run. They may be missing out on other opportunities to broaden their horizon.
It’s important to be knowledgeable on many aspects of your niche to help you make better content, earn a good reputation, and find answers or solutions. You’ll have a greater capacity to offer assistance and insight to help your audience feel as though they are turning to the right brand to solve their pain point. Even if you outsource your content, you can provide unique content suggestions that target your ideal customer.
Crush Your Marketing Strategy
Marketing is not an easy task, but it is a necessary one. To be successful in business, you need to have a good marketing strategy.
In the end, content marketing is a marathon, not a sprint. The opportunities you have with content marketing are endless. It’s never too late to start developing your skills and research a strategy.
The first step in creating your marketing strategy is identifying your target customer and their needs. Once you know what they want, you can create content that will appeal to them. The next step is to create a plan for promoting your content and getting it in front of as many people as possible. The final step is to measure the success of your strategy by tracking metrics like conversions, traffic sources, and social media and blog post engagement rates.
It’s natural to feel a little intimidated when you first enter the world of content marketing. That’s what makes it satisfying to see your growth and success, as you’re doing more work and learning more about the industry.
okwrite is a full-service content marketing company that offers services for every aspect of your business. We work closely with you to develop and execute a custom marketing strategy and provide fresh, unique content. Contact us to see how we can help your business develop a solid content marketing strategy.
