26 Jun 7 Steps to Create Your Content Marketing Strategy in 2020
What is Content Marketing Strategy?
A Content Marketing Strategy is a guide that not just mentions to you what content pieces you will make, but also how you will make them & advance them—and at last utilise your content to draw in, hold and convert more readers and viewers into clients for your business.
Why Do You Need a Content Marketing Strategy?
Content Marketing Strategy offers an opportunity for businesses to boost results. Delivering valuable, relatable content that corresponds to your audience & their experiences helps improve your online reputation, build a strong online community & multiply the advocates of the brand.
By definition, content marketing strategy proves itself as a powerful approach for growing online visibility. Some of the best content marketing strategies gave brands the privilege of being able to attract and engage with an accurate & compatible audience. The content marketing strategy will remain a thriving example of how digital marketing techniques can change the course of any brand in today’s most popular global marketplace a.k.The Internet. Ultimately, a good content marketing strategy generates a profitable customer action and facilitates a platform for your brand to have a conversation with its consumers, readers, acquaintances & advocates.
3 Pillars Of A Content Marketing Strategy
Brand Positioning
Positioning your brand & products on a well-defined framework helps generate a consistent consumer experience. At the same time, accurate brand positioning also contributes to building a credible, trustworthy & welcoming brand personality across the various social media platforms.
You can use the following questions in order to determine effective brand positioning details:
- Who are my existing and potential customers?
- What kind of digital experience are they looking for? What are the strategies used by competitors?
- What kind of content do the competitors use to market their brands? What is my brand’s unique value or selling points?
- What problems does my product offer to solve?
- What gives my product any edge over its competitors? How can I emphasise my brand’s personality?
Value Proposition
To get a favourable outcome from a content marketing strategy, you need to conduct a campaign. Subsequently, you also need to follow your campaign’s performance. In all cases, you need various metrics to follow campaign performance based on your goals. Since when the objectives for your campaign change, so do the metrics used to gauge the goals’ success.
In other words, the metrics you use to track campaign performance will rely upon your goals. Which metrics demonstrate brand awareness? Which measurements show lead generation? You have to indicate these metrics in your campaign plan so that you can begin following the results as soon as you start your campaign.
Moreover, metrics can create statistics & insights to improve the content marketing strategy for further campaigns.
Strategy
Content strategy plan should focus on your goals and how exactly you will achieve them. A good content marketing strategy will demand thinking through each step of your content – from formats, platforms, etc. This plan helps you zero-in on whom you want to reach with your Content Marketing efforts, how you will deliver that content to them and, finally, how you will achieve and measure your content marketing goals.
Essential Traditional Marketing Tactics
Traditional, conventional techniques like Direct mail (brochures, flyers, coupons, cards, etc.), Print advertising (magazines, trade publications, billboards, etc.), Radio or TV commercials, Telemarketing (cold calls, etc.) have been used both in the past and even today. These content marketing channels were perfected decades ago, but due to various limitations, these formats don’t serve effectively to a digital audience. At their core, these techniques disrupt the user experience and prove relevant only for a minimal amount of time. At the same time, they lack cost- efficiency & generate low-quality leads.
On the contrast present-day content marketing strategies let consumers find quality at their own time, convenience & in the comfort of their own private smart devices. What makes content marketing different is that it operates on the basis of an inbound model. Instead of pushing your messaging onto leads (via ads), you pull leads to your message (via organic information about your products/services). It utilises the principle of inbound marketing that drives the web traffic from search engines, social media, email and online domains to your brand message.
How to plan the perfect Content Marketing Strategy for your business?
Audit current content
While creating an effective marketing strategy, we must begin by some current data that helps determine what kind of content world for your brand’s online target audience. This data will help in planning a relevant content strategy for your brand. Look out for details such as :
- Top-performing content
- Low-performing content
- Current publishing frequency
- Ranking keywords
Set Goals Specific To Content Marketing
Without goals, your marketing activities are like ships lost at the sea. Here are a few online marketing goals content marketing can help you to achieve :
- Brand aware
- Lead acquisition
- Lead nurturing
- Customer acquisition
- Sales
The content marketing goals you choose to set for your brand ultimately helps you take all the decisions that concern, for instance, the kind of content you will create for your brand or how you will promote the content and so on.
Know Your Audience
Knowing the target group of consumers who might be interested in your brand is an essential element in content creation. The target audience determines whom you are writing to and that proves quite helpful when you need to decide on content topics, styles, mediums that will attract the kind of people who will be interested in your products/services.
Upon conducting research, you will obtain various details that describe an ideal customer, prototype personality to write to. Putting together buyer/ audience personas can help brands in developing relevant and engaging content for their reader and viewers for a different type of ideal customers. Alternatively, you can also examine your current customer base and build target profiles based on your best customers/leads.
Decide On The Content-Type
Various other content formats have grown in popularity apart from written content – visual content, video content, infographics, podcasts, webinars, presentations etc.
The type of content you should go for will depend a lot on the audience you are targeting. Ideally, it is recommended to use multiple content formats that receive a favourable response from your audience.
Design A Content Calendar
While producing content to attract your audience, one of the main determinants of your success is consistency. It’s one to thing to create content and a completely different one to make sure that it helps your brand achieve noteworthy results; great content delivered consistently is mandatory in order to execute a successful content marketing strategy.
With a well-planned content schedule, you can publish your content at any preferred frequency. Here are a few details to include in your content marketing calendar:
- Team members responsible for content
- Content format
- Due dates for content’s first draft
- Publishing date
- Promotion channels
To create a content calendar, you can either try Google Sheets and create it yourself, or you can use a specialized tool. If you need more functionality, a tool like content Content Cory will allow you to plan content across various social media channels.
A content calendar, helps you produce content consistently to achieve pre-defined goals & intended results.
Content Promotion Plan
Creating content is a part of content marketing; another vital part in promoting your content. These are many platforms to promote your content and picking the ones which are suitable to reach your target audience is crucial.
You can use the following platforms to promote your content:
- Guest posts
- Social media
- Search engines
- Emails
- Forums
- Advertising
Measuring The ROI of Your Content Marketing Strategy
To get any value from your content marketing strategy, you need to execute a campaign. Subsequently, you need to follow your campaign’s performance.
Tracking the performance of your campaigns may need different metrics. To measure the campaign’s success in different goals, different metrics need to be used.
In other words, the metrics depend on your campaign goals. For instance, Which metrics demonstrate brand awareness? Which measurements show leads obtained?
Moreover, these metrics can also be used to determine how to improve future content marketing strategies.
Conclusion
Keep in mind that your content marketing efforts as best rewarded when you drive thoughtful web traffic that has the potential to convert into real revenue one day.
”Without a strategy, content is just stuff & the world has enough stuff”
-Arjun Basu
If you have any questions about how to develop a content marketing strategy, feel free to ask us in the comments below and we will answer every single question you have.
Create Content. Stay Content.
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