The Ultimate Content Marketing Strategy Resource and Planning Guide for 2023

Content marketing is the creation of written, graphical, and video content distributed online to drive traffic, build brand awareness, and increase sales. This includes blog content, newsletters, podcasts, video, images, infographics, social media posts, graphs, and more.

The goal of content marketing is to drive traffic to your website through the promotion of relevant and informative content. The most common tactic is to provide informative content which educates targeted visitors.

Nonetheless, when done right, it effectively brings in sales. In fact, 70% of marketers actively invest in content marketing. But posting content online alone won’t work. It has to be created in a content marketing strategy and distributed in useful ways to garner views.

This is the ultimate guide to starting a content marketing strategy (or CMS).

What is Content Marketing Strategy?

A content marketing strategy is more than strategically 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 must develop the right plan to reach them.

This plan can then be adjusted, adapted, or built around specific goals. A well-developed content marketing strategy increases brand awareness, boost organic traffic, or generate more leads.

A content marketing strategy defines the campaign’s who, what, where, why, and how.

It’s the roadmap you create before you build an effective content marketing campaign. It should include everything from what type of content needs to be created to how and when you’ll share it with the world.

Your content marketing strategy needs to do the following:

1. Identify the goal(s) of the content
2. Identify the audience(s) that the content is intended for
3. Seek expected outcome(s) or goals

Once these critical elements are established, the following questions are then addressed:

Who is the target audience for this campaign?
How can I help my target audience?
What type of blog content would make sense for my goals?
How often should I blog?
What is the ideal blog length for my goals?
Should I be outsourcing my content creation?

Since each content plan will look different, answering these questions should help your company derive best methods for the brand and goal.

What’s the Difference Between Content Marketing and Content Strategy?

Chances are you’ve seen different marketing companies talk about content marketing and content strategy. But what does all that mean?

For content marketing to work, there needs to be a strategy behind it. Without one, it’s like throwing darts with a blindfold on, hoping you hit the board. Maybe the digital content will do something; maybe it won’t.

So what’s the difference between content strategy and content marketing?

The simple answer is that content strategy is the blueprint you develop to roll out your content. Content marketing is vital to digital marketing and how you use that content to generate leads and grow your business.

Anatomy of Effective Content Marketing Strategy

Developing a content marketing strategy and implementing it can be challenging. You must understand your goals, see your marketing strategy clearly, and then finish it.

But your content marketing effort will be worth it as consistent blogging, in line with your developed strategy, is a surefire way to meet the specific needs of your audience, industry, and business. These actions can grow your brand, increase your brand’s authority, and lead to a greater conversion rate with higher sales numbers.

Here are the necessary elements to make your marketing strategy successful:

A Clear Content Marketing Goal Aligned With Your Business Marketing Goals

A content strategy should be created with an established goal, as the goal will determine the distribution pathways, the blogging frequency, the content type, and the content tone (and much more).

To provide content that genuinely interests the target audience and grows the brand, the brand must do several things:

• Be helpful to the reader. Informative content educates the viewer on something that can be applied to a situation. Typically, this is content that the viewer was previously unaware of or provides an answer to a specific question. Great content is also applicable within a niche or industry.
• Be something that people are looking for. It is considered organic if the blog traffic comes through search engines, other blog posts, or shares. Viewers who find brands through organic search (usually through high search rankings) will actively search for this valuable content. This means that the content is solving a problem or addressing a question.
• Be recognizable with the brand that produced it. If the article appeals to the reader, it might encourage them to remember the company name and what they do. This might lead the reader to refer back to the website later.

These factors help establish authority, trust, expertise, and experience, which are primary values Google uses when judging content quality.

Establishing Content Development

Your content development strategy involves the type of content you’ll create, posting frequency, and much more.

Most content should be written in plain English for a crowd who is younger, perhaps a fourth-grade reading level, a bit more casual, and for those interested in living space trends. Your readers might be interested in budgeting, life hacks or house maintenance, fabric types, taking care of certain furniture and fabrics, the benefits of certain space designs, and putting together a color palette, among others. Make sure content ideas line up with topics the reader can benefit from.

First, consider the type of content that would make the most sense for your goals:

Blog Posts

Blog posts are articles you publish on your website. Blog posts can be used for sharing information about your products or services, educating consumers, and helping increase your website’s SEO efforts.

Blog posts are a useful way to share great content and get returning visitors to your website. You should be blogging aimlessly and instead should be following a blogging strategy.

Blog posts can, even more, be broken down into types of blogs, including:

• Listicles
• Checklists
• How-to Guides
• Guest posts
• Interviews
• Case Studies

People love social proof. If you sell a higher ticket item or service, people may want to ensure it’s worth it. Case studies are how you can highlight the successes other customers have had.

Like eBooks, this type of content can be gated to aid with lead generation efforts. These are especially useful as the lead moves down your sales funnel.

Infographics and Media

Infographics are a creative way to quickly and visually share information. Infographics allow you to highlight key points and stats related to the topic in an accessible format.

Add infographics to your blogs, web content, email newsletters, and social media.

Authoritative eBook Resources

eBooks are a type of long-form content. These are often gated behind a form that the lead must complete first. Think of these as a digital brochure or book focused on a specific topic.

With the right SEO strategy, these can be powerful lead magnets.

Content Creation and Writing High-Quality Content

Should you be outsourcing my content creation?

Most likely, yes.

Many small-to-medium sized businesses won’t be able to handle the recommended two to three blogs per week. High-quality blogs take time to develop as they require research, editing, posting, and promoting content.

Outsourcing blog creation can alleviate all of this. A content marketing agency like okwrite can handle every level of your content marketing strategy, so you don’t have to plan the content, write it, schedule it on the content calendar, post it, and share it on social media so you can engage with leads and complete normal operations. The entire content strategy and management can also be outsourced, meaning that increasing blog frequency or topic depth is possible in time.

How Often Should You Blog?

Producing original blog content is a proven way to build brand awareness, boost your website traffic, create leads, and increase conversions.

Which makes “how often you should blog?” a common question in content marketing and a highly debated one at that.

Some bloggers say more content is better and are not wrong, while others swear by posting less often. And they’re not wrong, either.

Truly, many agree that blogging on a regular basis (2-4 times a week) offers you the greatest return. Between 11-16 posts, a month is the goal, according to several studies, with some indicating 11 being the sweet spot.

Determining your editorial calendar comes with experience, a byproduct of trial-by-fire, and blogging takes careful planning.

To identify how often you should blog, consider:

• Your available resources (i.e., writers, time, money)
• The quality of content you’re looking to produce
• How much original content vs. optimization content
• Your content strategy (see below), which will determine how often you should post
• Your readers and where you’re distributing your content will also impact how often you should blog

Unfortunately, there is no universal magic number for how often you should blog.

The answer comes by:

• Aligning your content strategy with your marketing objectives and business goals
• Developing blog posts based on topic complexity, promotions, and special events
• Experimenting with different tactics to discover your blog’s best practices

Leverage Email Marketing and Social Media Marketing

Decide when and where your content needs to be shared, and the marketing funnels your leads will take back to your company. Email marketing, social media marketing, and even traditional advertising are a few ways to roll your content out.

Every business is different and will have different marketing channels available to communicate with leads and customers. This is part of your planning where you need to set milestones and build a clear timeline for the campaign.

Emails and newsletters compile resources into an email for quick and direct access. Email marketing is highly successful and useful for connecting with people and sharing information about promotions, company news, resources, and more.

Measuring Your Content Success

Last but not least, how will you measure the campaign’s success? It doesn’t make sense to put all this effort into building a plan and creating assets if you can’t measure if they’re working. In the first stage of this process, you define a goal.

Let’s say you want to increase website traffic. What does that mean exactly? Is it a 20% increase in monthly web traffic or a 200% increase?

By defining your key performance indicators, you’ll be able to define better what success looks like. One way to make this easier is by creating S.M.A.R.T. goals. Your business goal is specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, and time-bound.

If your goal is to increase average monthly website traffic by 50% next quarter, that’s a S.M.A.R.T. goal. You’ve clearly defined how much you want traffic to increase. It’s something realistic that you can measure and attain. And most importantly, it has a date to hit the goal by.

Building Your First Content Marketing Strategy

Blogging is essential to content marketing, and producing quality posts remains a key component to any strategy. Now that you understand the goals of the content marketing strategy and the different strategies to choose let’s build the first content marketing strategy:

Develop 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

Goals are essential 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?

Identify Your Target Audience

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.

The niche market may not be something you are completely familiar with, but if you break down your audience profile further, you should be able also to identify your niche. Finding your target audience will be harder if you aren’t familiar with your niche.

Ask:

Who is your current customer?

Who is the competition?

What types of blog content do they want?

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.

How to Identify Blog Information Buyers Are Looking For

Develop your buyer persona, a detailed description of someone who will represent your business’s target audience. This is the first step to identifying the blog content you will write. A marketing persona is a description of your desired or existing target audience. You may hear it as a customer, audience, or marketing persona. It’s research-based and defines the people most likely to benefit from or use your product or service.

You want to learn as much about them as possible to provide personalized services, relevant content, and helpful sales information. Your buyer persona information is where you can gain insight that can turn into a convincing story for your buyers—through a blog.

You’ll also want to consider search intent. Think about why the reader would search for it. What’s their intent? What are they hoping to get from the information?

There are four main types of searches someone might make online:

• Informational
• Transactional
• Local
• Navigational

Once you understand the intent behind user searches and the topics you want to write about, you can create quality content to fulfill their needs. For instance, if someone is seeking information on a topic, a blog post like this one offers details on the subject and helps the reader learn more about it.

Likewise, if someone wants to purchase something and is doing a transactional search, writing a buyer’s guide that helps someone make a purchasing decision would be the best route.

SEO Keyword Research

Utilize analytics from your website, social media posts, or sales figures to learn about your targets’ interests, pain points, and what matters most. This will allow you to determine what content should resonate with them.

Keywords need to:

• Show users and Google that you are addressing the right search intent
• Showing users and Google that you are relevant and addressing pain points
• Directing your content marketing strategy so that your URLs and content are created in relevant topical clusters
• Including long-tail key phrases for relevance and topical authority

Keyword research is incredibly important. To make sure you get this right, don’t just research what keywords and phrases are used the most. Study other content and think about the person searching.

Business owners need to understand the customer journey and know what a buyer is looking for before buying from them. Buyers spend a lot of time investigating the right company to buy from. The more you understand what your audience is searching for, the better able you will be to provide it.

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.

Content Planning Example

Once you understand the intent behind user searches and the topics you want to write about, you can create quality content to fulfill their needs. For instance, if someone is seeking information on a topic, a blog post like this one offers details on the subject and helps the reader learn more about it.

With this research, you can plan out the content based on your goal, frequency, and other factors. Here is an example of content planning:

Content Planning for Cookie Shop in Downtown Toronto

Established target audience: Local shopgoers in the Toronto area within the demographics of the price of the product and product style

Buyer Persona: Someone likely to live within walking distance of the cookie shop who’s either purchased from nearby stores, other cookie stores, or shops online (for targeted advertising).

SEO Keyword: Seed keywords will include: cookie shop Toronto, cookies little italy Toronto, best chocolate chip cookies

Seed SEO Topics can include:

Where To Find the Best Chococlate Chip Cookies in Toronto

As well as other low-hanging fruit, like:

Boutique cookies Little Italy
Red Velvet cookies
Affordable cookies near me

With these seed topics and keywords, you can start to plan out based on your strategy. If you’re looking to increase sales through local marketing, then you’ll use local marketing techniques, linking techniques to build authority, and social media marketing.

Content Planning Template

Making High-quality Content

High-quality content achieves its marketing goals. To do this, it comprehensively covers the topic, is useful to the audience, and educates on the topic. On top of this, it should be engaging, accurate, and answer the searcher’s query.

Technically, what makes high-quality content in one industry can vary drastically from another. Nonetheless, high-quality content is not mass-produced content. It is unique to your brand, topic, and goals.

Developing high-quality content that will effectively rank on search engines like Google is commonly discussed in content marketing. But what is high-quality content exactly?

What is the ideal blog length for your goals? In short, a blog should be long enough to complete the article’s purpose. A longer post might not be read all the way through. In this example, the company should aim for at least 1000 words. Over 2000 may be your max limit. Keep the writing style concise, but allow for colloquialisms.

Writing Authoritative Content

Authoritative content establishes your website as an expert on the subject and a trusted voice. It’s a piece of content that will help the reader answer their question or find the information they’re searching for.

According to Google, expertise, authoritativeness, and trust are three essential factors in how their algorithm ranks content. Therefore, when writing content with authority, you should consider these three factors to be extremely important.

You’ll want to establish your expertise and become an authority in other areas of your website.

There are several ways to demonstrate expertise on your website and through your content. Make sure to fact-check everything and reference different facts throughout your content. Through this you can establish trust.

If you want your website to be an authority and position yourself as a subject expert, you need to build trust with your visitors. There are a few easy ways to do this.

• Make your contact details easy to find on the website
• Credit each article to an author
• Reference facts and link to other content supporting it
• Provide customer FAQs and make it easy to request support help (if you offer a product or service)
• Limit any third-party ad placements

High-Quality Content for SEO and Google’s Quality Ranking

High-quality content is important for search engine optimization (SEO). The term high-quality content emerged through Google’s quality ranking factors, which rank web content based on its expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness. This acronym, E-A-T, was also expanded to include experience or E-E-A-T.

E-E-A-T is about trust rating, and raters use experience, expertise, and authoritativeness to determine trust. Trust may vary depending on the page type. For example, online stores focusing on eCommerce and collecting payments need more trust since they are processing sensitive banking information. Product listings should provide accurate product information, and including reviews on the page that openly and honestly review the product improves visitor trust.

In addition to numerous factors, SEO Rankers look at the following to judge site quality:

• Quality of main site content
• The extent to which the content creator has the necessary first-hand or life experience for the topic
• The extent to which the content creator has the necessary knowledge or skill for the topic
• The extent to which the content creator or the website is known as a go-to source for the topic
• Other factors like the about us page, the site’s reputation, the accuracy of the main page with the main content, and more.

What Does an Effective Content Marketing Strategy Look Like?

Measuring and analyzing KPIs is the only way to know if you’ve made high-quality content. Your KPIs should include:

• The content’s ranking on Google
• Specifically, if your content is ranking in the topic 3 search items on local or language-based search queries for your target keyword
• Click-through-rates
• Low bounce rates
• High overall web traffic
• Customer retention or customer loyalty
• More leads and more sales
• Increased referrals by word of mouth or referring backlinks from authoritative domains
• Overall good or improved site conversion
• Social shares if that is part of your plan
• Improved bottom-line revenue

Looking at the content, here’s the anatomy of the most successful blogs online:

Citations and Sources: Cite your sources and stay modest.

Consistent Content:  Try to post regularly, that way, Google sees your brand as active and has an engaged digital presence.

Appropriate SEO Schema: Proper indexing and off-page SEO traits will look good to Google and other search engines, improving the page’s likelihood of high rankings.

Shared on Social Media: Your blogs should be shared widely and prominently on social media sites. Where you share this content will depend on your company overall. Find a social avenue that makes sense for your brand.

Readable and Well Written: Google likes SEO-friendly content. It should not be manufactured, keyword-stuffed, or full of jargon.

Unique and Not Copied: Create custom content. Always! You can always mix it up. Incorporate infographics, and animations, or outsource a guest blog!

Engaging and Personable: Don’t put all this time and energy into producing a dull and boring blog. Keep the content light, fresh, and engaging. And we believe your content should be fun on some level! Be sure to keep it appropriate for the content format, audience persona, and your business goal, however!

Directly Relevant to Content Strategy: Your blog should align with your current content marketing strategy and your overall marketing goals.

8 Reasons Why Your Content Isn’t Working and Troubleshooting Techniques

There can be several reasons why your content isn’t working. From production problems to SEO problems, this can be challenging to figure out.

Here are some steps for troubleshooting content challenges:

1. Establish if your content is aligned with your content strategy
2. Conduct an SEO audit to see where your content may be falling short
3. Research competitors to see if your content is still relevant and engagement
4. Seek outside reviews to identify content your audience is expecting
5. Review your marketing funnel – is your blog leading to anything or drawing traffic in from anything?
6. Optimize your content
7. Your blog format is hard to read and now user friendly
8. You’re not taking advantage of any software or tools such as WordPress plugins

All too often, and with the best of intentions, CEOs and business leaders can have a habit of micro-managing every aspect of their business, including insisting that they write all of their content marketing material themselves.

Being a successful CEO means you are a great leader, but it doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re a great writer.

Creating processes and tracking your content strategy, results, goals, and measurables, keeping writers on track and happy and tying it all together is not an easy task (trust me).

You should ideally hire a professional content writer or agency to troubleshoot these marketing challenges.

3 Marketing Strategies for Organic Traffic in 2023

Organic traffic is driven by building domain authority through improving webpage quality, improving E-E-A-T, and gaining reliable links to your content.

Organic traffic strategies, like hub and spoke models, are vital in SEO to assert your authority through linking relevant content and ranking keywords.

Building content through a marketing strategy will boost your page’s Google ranking and make you seem more credible in the eyes of consumers. And it starts with understanding that marketing is not simply focused on selling a product but on developing meaningful, long-term customer engagement, leading to acquisition.

Hub and Spoke Model Linking Strategy

The hub-and-spoke marketing model is a strategy in which you have a central point, typically a landing page or primary blog, which links to other pages that are relevant to that central page. The hub and spoke model helps create a website structure and achieve long-term traffic growth.

A hub and spoke content strategy starts with your hub content or pillar content. This content is a substantive piece that provides informative content on a specific topic or theme. The topic should be a bit broader rather than specific so that more than one spoke page could be derived from that topic.

Hub content consists of whitepapers, guides, report, or eBook.

This content should be on a subject that the business or brand is not only familiar with but also an expert in. The hub piece will convey brand authority on the topic.

The idea is that the page offshoots “branch out” like the spokes on a wheel while informing page visitors and Google that this hub and spoke is a topic of authority on your page. The “spokes” represent all the additional content related to our main topic. You direct your viewers to your page by ranking the hub with a primary keyword, with spokes containing relevant secondary keywords.

Spokes can be blog posts, infographics, video content, and social media or email marketing.

Spoke: Use long-tail keywords, which provide more definitive search queries. While they often have fewer searches, they are ideal for high-conversion-rate jobs because they are likely to draw in a broad range of audiences looking for specific solutions.
Your content hubs are websites where the main points of published expertise are gathered. Anyone can visit these sites to engage with you on whatever topic interests them, but the content you post will ensure that you are viewed as an authority.

Steps to Build a Hub and Spoke Model

When developing a hub and spoke model content plan, you’ll want to sit down and ask questions about that pillar page. Because this is your driving page, you must ensure it speaks to your target audience and hits all deliverables while fitting into your spoke strategy.

Ask yourself:

• What information can your company provide that your viewers would be interested in?
• In what way will that information or blog benefit your viewers?
• What information do you have expertise in?
• What is the goal of that content?

Content Cluster vs. Hub & Spoke

Content clusters are very similar to the hub and spoke marketing model and often used interchangeably. A content cluster comprises a pillar page and subpages dedicated to one key topic. The pillar content takes readers on a detailed yet brief overview of the big picture, while subpages delve into the individual details of that big idea.

Compared to a less structured approach to content creation (such as random keyword-driven blog posting without any internal linking), content clustering has impressive benefits that boost site rankings and increase customer engagement.

Here are just a few reasons why your business website could probably use a topic cluster content creation strategy:

• Improve SEO and Page Desirability: Linking topic-related pages together gives your blog more topic authority, increasing the SEO ranking of your site pages.
• Increased Content Creation Ideas: Once you have chosen a specific topic, content cluster subtopics fall into place.
• Prioritize, High-value Content: With cluster planning, you already know that the topic you’re addressing in each post brings value to readers. So start with the foundational pieces as much as you can. This will also eliminate going back in to fix the linking strategy.

Lots of brands have used content clusters and the hub and spoke models successfully:

The White House’s blog uses emotional connections and up-to-date topical posts to draw readers to the website to learn about issues facing Americans and invites visitors to read more about the government, available programs, and more.

Makeup.com, run by L’Oreal, is a brilliant example of a consumer brand dominating the industry, answering makeup, hair, and skincare questions, providing tutorials, offering samples, and linking to their own products.

The Honestly Blog, run by the Honest Company, features clean living, frequently asked questions, parenting tips, makeup ideas, and more.

REI offers outdoor activity advice, insight, and recipes alongside selling their camping, hiking, and other outdoor gear.

Brands trying to win on traditional, marketing-led strategies must redefine their approach, like these 4 real-world examples.

Thought Leadership Strategy

Thought leadership is when a business or an individual is recognized as an authority in a specialized field and their expertise is sought after and valuable.

Showcasing your knowledge in a particular topic or field, in turn, positions you and your company as the expert your audience will come to for advice, leading to increased web traffic, sales, and leads.

You give your audience added value when you write from the thought leadership perspective. This added value has a ripple effect, leading to added value in many different sectors of your business.

• Offers a unique and valuable perspective to your customers
• Establishes your business’ credibility in your field
• Boosts your industry presence
• Increases blog traffic
• Increases sales

Showing up in your industry in the relevant ways and sharing these ideas is a critical aspect of thought leadership. The more people know about your business, the more likely they will seek to purchase your product or service.

Thought leadership strategies showcase:

• Experts in their niche
• Credibility in the subject
• Ongoing involvement in the topic or niche
• And a loyal audience

If you’re thinking of thought leadership, consider researching other thought leadership. You’ll want this information to strategize how to boost your industry presence and start this marketing campaign.

Brand Awareness and Loyalty Strategies

Brand awareness strategies enter into broader content marketing strategies instead of blogging strategies because they cannot exist on blogs alone. To work, they must develop a distinct distribution plan and a strategy for aligning with other marketing campaigns.

Relationship Marketing

If you want to build customer loyalty, relationship marketing is the solution.

This type of marketing focuses on building long-term relationships with customers rather than attracting new ones all the time. It’s a lot more challenging to keep customers than attract them in the first place, so investing in relationship marketing strategies is crucial.

What’s the difference between marketing and relationship marketing? Marketing is all about surface-level tactics for acquiring customers who may not stick with you, while relationship marketing uses content and connections to help keep your customers loyal.

Where people were once limited to shopping within their local area, many more options are available worldwide, reflecting the importance of providing good customer service, products, and flexibility to avoid being marginalized in this day and age.

Consumers are constantly looking for something better and cheaper than what they currently have, meaning that brands need to work harder than ever to keep their customers happy and coming back.

Cause Marketing

Cause marketing takes an empathetic approach to connecting with a target audience. Sparked by American Express in the 1980s, cause marketing is a marketing tactic that encourages sales through charitable giving or expressing other forms of corporate social responsibility.

It follows the basic structure of regular content marketing in which your content—blogs, social media posts, website copy, etc.—generates website traffic, increases sales, and generates brand awareness but it focuses specifically on a specific cause or belief that is important to the target audience.

Instead of telling people to “buy, buy, buy,” cause-driven marketing shows consumers that your brand is on the same side of an issue, and clearly demonstrates what you are doing, as a brand, to assist or create solutions to the wider social concern.

Human beings are social animals and we like to join together and be a part of movements larger than ourselves. Cause marketing can rally people to a cause AND your brand at the same time.

Is Empathetic Marketing Right For You?

Empathetic marketing is informing a user of the value of a product or service and provide using empathy as a pathway to purchasing (or interacting) with the product or service.

There’s a fascinating article published by the American Marketing Association (AMA) that describes how empathetic marketing makes you feel. It outlines a lot of the basics of what we understand as empathy and marketing: empathetic marketing in general, is marketing materials that are rooted in empathizing with a target consumer or target audience. Author Sarah Steimer provided some wonderful examples, including a study on the ingenuity of empathetic creativity in product design.

At the root of empathetic marketing is the definition of empathy itself: don’t just feel bad that another person (i.e., potential customer) is going through an experience, instead try to feel what they feel. Empathy is a difficult ability for many of us to conceptualize let alone adopt. On the one hand, we understand that it is actually impossible to perform the literary trick of “getting in someone else’s shoes,” but on the other, we can imagine what it might be like to go through an experience that someone else is going through.

For marketers, empathy can provide a space for exploration in creative brainstorming and development. This means that empathy will overlap with problem-solving throughout all development processes.

10 Awesome Strategies to Leverage Content For More Leads

Information marketing through hub and spoke linking strategies alone can promote brands online and garner organic traffic. However, they are more effective when the content is combined with marketing distribution strategies.

Looking for Tips to get started? You can take note of these 10 Startups That Crushed Their Content Marketing and these 6 Insanely Good Marketing Examples.

Read these 10 tips for leveraging your content marketing strategy

1. First, Establish Your Brand Identity

Before you start anything, you need to establish your brand identity, an often overlooked aspect of marketing. A lot of brands think that because you have a name or logo, your job is done and can be promoted.

How would describe a brand? Normally marketers think of a logo, slogan, or individual product. While all of these do play into branding, tone and voice are other important branding elements that play into brand awareness. For example, if you stripped the logo from a piece of content, could readers tell it’s you?

Think of tone as how you convey individual messages. How you speak to a customer over will be slightly different than how a blog post is written, for example. Voice—on the other hand—is your company’s personality.

Try summing up your brand in three words. An example would be positive, authoritative, and friendly. Reference those every time you publish content to create a unique tone of voice.

With your brand style or guidelines established, you can then consider launching your marketing campaing.

2. Prioritize High Quality Content

Original, creative content is at the heart of inbound marketing (also known as B2C Content Marketing). And, next year’s trends suggest that this isn’t likely to change any time soon; in fact, it will only become increasingly important.

High-quality, authoritative, and educational (yet engaging) content tailored to your audience will drive traffic. This type of content informs Google of your authority to speak on certain topics and trusts that you are solving pain paints.

The key here is not to produce content just for the hell of it, but instead, to take the time to produce high-quality content with a purpose.

Trends suggest that customers prefer search engine ranked content over paid advertisements. So, stick to the keys of crafting highly desirable and relevant content.

3. Take an Omnichannel Approach to Content Distribution

It’s not enough to be on a single channel. Traditionally, some businesses only blog, create videos or publish podcasts, for example. Nowadays, you need to be everywhere. This increases the number of users that will be exposed to your brand, content, and thought leadership. In fact, it’s been found that using three or more channels can increase engagement by 18.96%.

You can achieve this by beginning to expand onto other channels and create different forms of content. For example, perhaps you only publish articles on a company blog. In that case, it’d be effective to expand into producing videos for YouTube and infographics for platforms like Pinterest.

The fact is, social media is continuing to be a #1 lead generation tool. In fact, 66% of marketers use social media for lead generation. Social media is a great way to connect more intimately with current consumers and nurture genuine prospects.

If anything, your business needs to be on social media for brand awareness and basic SEO. Take the time to research the various social media platforms, so you know where to spend your time best. For example, if you have a B2B business, it might be best to focus on LinkedIn, while a direct-to-consumer brand may benefit more from Instagram.

Utilizing social media capabilities does not mean “selling” through social media. It’s best sometimes to leave out your product or service completely or engage through soft marketing like product themes.

Similarly, optimize your email marketing strategies while you’re at it. You can consider growing your email marketing list through your social media platform, personal networks, or eBook tripwire.

4. Leverage Social Media Influencers and Brand Ambassadors

Content marketing is 20% creation and 80% promotion. That’s why partnering with influencers is a powerful way to propel your brand awareness. You can promote your content to a large and relevant audience doing so. In fact, 49% of consumers depend on influencer recommendations to make purchases.

While you can, and should, promote content yourself, why not let your customers help? You can turn them into brand ambassadors thanks to user-generated content.

This is content customers create which helps start a viral effect. It also acts as social proof. As a matter of fact, 85% of consumers find user-generated content more influential than traditional product photos or videos..

5. Optimize and Repurpose Content to Keep it Relevant and Evergreen

If you’re like us and you’ve been using content marketing strategies for some time now, you may have noticed that some of your content is no longer engaging or relevant. This is where a solid optimization strategy comes into play.

An optimization strategy led by a Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Content Audit will help direct your current content and give you a framework for reoptimizing it and reposting it. This not only saves time and money but also ensures that the content representing your brand is still doing so in the way that you want.

If you are having trouble establishing evergreen content, you may want to consider hiring a content strategist who is aware of market and SEO trends.

You also want to reoptimize your landing pages from time to time. Your website landing page needs to do at least three things: it needs to be functional, it needs to tell visitors enough about you, and it needs to be visually pleasing. Take time to assess your landing page, why it exists, and ways it can improve the customer experience.

Your landing page cannot, by any means, be confusing. Hire a web dev team, secure a designer and videographer, and keep it clean. If your landing page is confusing, it’ll turn away prospective leads.

One easy fix is to add a simple, educational video to your landing page. According to Hubspot, 30% of the top landing pages use video, and 80% of video marketers say that using video has directly improved sales.

And, one of the most efficient things you can do to increase brand awareness with content is repurposing. This is the process of taking a piece of content and reformatting it into another. Most of the hard work is already done since you’re simply reformatting a completed piece of content.

6. Establish a Consistent Publishing Schedule

Content marketing can take a while to pay off. As a matter of fact, Content Marketing Institue estimates that it takes 15–17 months to yield an ROI. This is simply the nature of search engines, generating email subscribers, and building a following.

It’s also why publishing consistently is crucial. This maximizes the number of users that are exposed to your brand while building trust. Describe on a regular publishing schedule, whether it’s once per week, per day, or somewhere in-between.

When crafting your strategy, be sure to set up a schedule that makes sense for both your capacity and your industry. Many in the blogging industry believe that they need to post daily, but we’ve found that consistent, higher-quality blog posts posted less frequently do the trick.

Stick with a moderate posting schedule to tell Google that you are here for consistency and not trying to promote poor-quality blogs.

Consistently blogging 4 times a month, for months or years, is better than 100 blogs in two months. Over time, Google will promote your content to the right channels for more qualified lead generation.

7. Leverage Automation and AI Where Applicable

Marketing automation cuts costs and brings new consistency, speed, and scalability to business processes. We recommend visiting this article on the 12 ways AI can be leveraged in a CMS.

As a CMO, you likely already know all this. In fact, you understand that Google uses AI through NLP in every search query. So it may be no surprise that we are urging CMOs to look to AI in content marketing.

With AI technologies, CMOs can do the following and much more:

• Properly identify strategic, competitive opportunities, including keyword gaps, strategic linking campaigns, and strategic topical coverage
• Predictive analytics for understanding the customer journey
• Properly optimize content production, content editing, and content distribution to hit and even exceed target goals
• Test and retest strategic keywords, email subject lines, and headers for optimal reception and audience interest through AI-powered efforts

The bottom line is that a strong content marketing strategy aptly captures the interest of that company’s target audience, successfully addresses the company’s marketing goals, and continues to evolve as markets change.

AI is the only way that companies can accurately do this. AI is a critical source of business value and innovation when used accurately, boosting customer conversions and growing revenue.

8. Create a Distributed Portfolio of Paid and Organic

According to Hubspot, 73% of people dislike pop-up ads. Another 72% of consumers say they would have a lower opinion of a brand if represented in a pop-up ad. SEO trends also suggest that ad spending is down, which means that Google searchers choose organically relevant content over paid relevancy.

However, we have yet to see an extremely successful portfolio that does not invest in paid platforms. Think beyond PPC though as content marketing trends are shifting towards more organic forms of advertising compared to traditional PPC.

Certain types of advertising don’t make sense anymore. There are certain types of pop-up ads that, perhaps, might feel less intrusive to a consumer, and these might appear to potential leads while they are already on your web page or blog, for example.

And engagement works differently in different industries, marketing channels, and company types. B2B companies might benefit from Google Ads instead of an Instagram ads. Look at your ideal customer and find ways of engaging that make sense.

9. Restrategize as Your Audience and Market Changes

As your company grows, so too does your target audience. The type of person your product or service is tailored to (i.e., buyer persona) may remain the same at its core, but your consumers have.

If you haven’t reevaluated your buyer personas to establish core needs and wants, pain points, and updated demographics, then you’re getting behind, and that’s likely why your leads are turning away!

Be sure to stay on top of the SEO trends and shifting markets so that your content and inbound marketing methodology aren’t left behind.

10. Hire an Expert Content Marketing Agency

As mentioned earlier, sometimes it’s easier to outsource your work. Hiring an agency means that your marketing strategy is in good hands and, more importantly, they are being handled by someone more experienced.

Sometimes focusing too much on your marketing campaign will take you away from creating the best product or service you want. Do yourself a favor: hire an agency.

Now, if you’re currently working with a strategic marketing team, you may want to evaluate that relationship. Sometimes digital marketing companies don’t have the best relationship with their writers, don’t understand good content, or aren’t aligned with your goals.

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