Have you ever wondered how to create fantastic content? Or where to find help when you’re just starting out with your content marketing efforts? We all face these challenges on a regular basis, no matter what the size or scope of our business.
If your company is eager to become a content marketing machine, but you feel like you’re lacking inspiration (or even any real tools for putting things into action), this is the guide for you . I’ll show you how to develop an effective strategy and make sure it’s staying fresh, relevant and engaging.
Confused about content strategy? Don’t worry, you’re not alone. It’s one of the most important aspects of online marketing and business but it can be difficult to wrap your head around. Content strategy is a structured and organized approach to creating, publishing and promoting content on your website.
Your organization’s content strategy should facilitate the creation of high-quality content that helps you achieve your business goals. This post will take you step by step through a process for creating an effective content marketing strategy for your business.
What is Content Strategy?
Content strategy is a style of online marketing that uses content to engage customers at every stage of the buyer’s journey. Content strategy helps you improve your sales funnel by providing helpful information to your customers that relates to your company.
Content strategy is the creation and executed rollout of an approach to how your team creates and delivers content to improve the visibility and engagement of your website. It’s a road map you follow that strives to get your web design agency more leads and sales. This guide will help you understand what content strategy is, how it can help improve SEO, and how to implement it.
Content strategy can be a confusing concept, especially for new business owners. But that shouldn’t stop you from understanding how you can gain an edge over your competition by incorporating this important skill in your work.
Content marketing strategy is the backbone of modern marketing. Most buyers now go through an inbound marketing journey where content plays a crucial role in acquiring leads and turning them into loyal customers. In order to create value for your audience and attract more prospects, you will have to develop a coherent and consistent content marketing strategy for your brand.
Furthermore, with 70% of marketers actively spending in content marketing, developing a robust content strategy is vital if you want to compete in your business.
There are a few questions to consider while creating a content strategy. Let’s have a look at them right now.
1. Who is Going to Read your Content?
When creating content, you should think about who your target audience is. Is it one type of person, or multiple? Or maybe even all of them? A content strategy that caters to single segments at a time will help you speak to each persona in their language and in the style of their choosing.
2. What Problem Will you be Solving?
At your business, you can clearly see your customers searching for a solution to their problems. They have needs, and even if you can’t solve all of them, you can solve a few — and make it happen. But the first step is knowing what those problems are.
A sound content strategy is challenging to develop. Instead of going out on a limb and taking a chance on an untested product or service, you want to offer your prospects what they are currently searching for. Even if you have an amazing idea that has not yet been done before, you’ll want to identify keywords related to the challenges your prospect is currently facing — or could potentially face in the future.
Your content helps you create credibility with your target audience by reinforcing the solution(s) you’re delivering.
3. What Makes you Unique?
Are you competing with other brands to acquire your target customers? Does their product look just like yours? If so, you need to tell them how your product is different from others .
You have a unique brand voice: You are a trustworthy and genuine local business with a friendly contact tone. Your customers trust you and feel assured that you’ll be right there to help them.
To convince others to buy from you, you must demonstrate why you are worth buying from and listening to. Once you’ve figured it out, incorporate it into your article.
4. What Content Formats will you Focus on?
There are many different formats where you can engage with your audience. It’s important to meet them where they’re at. Maybe they like videos, maybe they want blog posts or photos. Use the survey you plan on sending out as a guide when brainstorming ideas for content. The survey will also help you figure out how to prioritize the different formats.
There are several different formats you can use to create and deliver your content. If a format doesn’t work for your audience, it’s useless. Most companies should focus on video, white papers, and infographics because this is where their audience will be the most receptive and receptive audiences mean more conversions.
5. What Channels will you Publish on?
A good SEO will post on a variety of channels to best reach and attract their audience. With over 3 billion views a day, YouTube is the second largest search engine in the world. This means that a good portion of traffic comes from videos on this video-sharing platform. If your website has a video section, you may decide to publish some of your articles to YouTube as well.
For a younger audience, Instagram has grown in popularity, boasting over 1 billion active users every month as of 2017. If you want to reach this audience, you would want to post content to this platform as well. The best strategy is get all your content posted across all the platforms you can — from HuffPo and LinkedIn to Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn — then watch your traffic soar!
In the step-by-step method that continues this article, we’ll go over social media content strategy in further detail.
6. How will you Handle the Development and Distribution of Content?
Creating content is both challenging and intriguing.
To begin, you should create a content road map and launch it. The initial creation of this content road map should be used to gain approval from the heads of your organization. Additionally, this road map will also define the key messaging that your organization’s marketing team can use as a guideline for their everyday tasks.
It’s a must if your company has a startup blog or an established brand. Content creation and publication isn’t something you can ignore as it enables your audience to interact with your company on a more personal level. Having the right social tools in place can also help manage content creation, monitor the latest industry trends, and track performance metrics.
Why Should Marketers Develop a Content Marketing Strategy?
Content marketing is not just a buzzword. It can be best described as the master plan for how you’re going to get traffic to your business through organic search, social media and other channels. You should create a content marketing strategy, even if it only includes one piece of content or one campaign. Fail to plan, plan to fail.
Your content marketing will provide a consistent source of visitors and leads, allowing you to experiment with additional revenue-generating strategies such as sponsored content, social media advertising, and distributed content.
Furthermore, your material will not only assist you get leads, but it will also educate your prospects and raise brand recognition.
How to Create a Content Strategy Framework?
For a long time, content marketing has been around. No matter how many times you’ve heard the term, it still leaves a lot of people scratching their heads. Even if you’re a seasoned content marketing pro, there’s always room to learn more about strategy and implementation.
1. Define your objective.
If you want to develop a strategy for content marketing, you first need to know what your goals are. Goals are specific and are something that will be reached or accomplished at a certain time. If you don’t know what your goals are, or if they’re too general, it will be difficult to determine what will work best for your business strategy.
2. Conduct persona research.
You must precisely define your content’s target audience — also known as your buyer persona — in order to create a successful plan.To determine this information, you’ll have to do some persona research. Persona research is the process of gathering relevant and valuable data that helps you better understand your target audience from their demographics to their online behavior, goals, and interests.
This data can be collected through surveys, one-on-one interviews, and even observational studies which means you’ll have to know who’s going to conduct these studies in order for them to be accurate.
Target market research can provide you with insight into the demographics and psychographics (personality) of your primary audience. Personas are realistic yet fictional representations of your core customers based on market research, including detailed backstories, behaviors, needs and motivations, that allow you to create marketing campaigns that closely resonate with target audiences. Refining your target audience can help you bolster brand messages, offerings and campaigns.
3. Run a content audit.
A content audit is a process of reviewing your content and identifying what works, what needs improving or what needs to be deleted. It will help inform the direction that your content-marketing strategy takes going forward. A well-conducted content audit can show you where you’ve been successful in driving traffic and conversions from your website, and pinpoint areas that you need to improve on.
Determine how you can improve in the following year and set new goals for yourself. Now is an excellent time to match your team’s objectives with those of your corporation.
A content audit will help you evaluate what resonates best with your audience, uncover gaps in your topic clusters, and develop new content ideas, regardless of where you are in the process.
4. Choose a content management system.
When it comes to content management, you want to avoid going back and forth between several platforms and applications. This can lead to a waste of time, especially when you’re trying to focus on creating your content. Your best bet is to choose a CMS that’s easy to work with, intuitive, and even comes with its own analytics. And while there are plenty of great options out there, the best one is WordPress.
5. Decide exactly what type of content you’d like to make.
Now comes the fun part — deciding what type of content you want to create. If you’re looking for a more visual approach rather than text-heavy articles and blog posts, you might consider creating videos or podcasts. Or perhaps, you’d prefer to create an eBook or white paper to help supplement your blog posts with additional information. What’s most important is that you choose a format that helps you to be consistent and meet the goals you have for your content marketing strategy.
Types of Content Marketing
1. Blog Posts
Blog posts are amazingly versatile content tools. Why? Because they have the ability to reach a massive audience by using methods like SEO and social media sharing. Blogs are also great because they can be updated as often as new information becomes available, plus they can become a kind of ‘hub’ for articles relating to your niche or industry.
Blog posts should be between 1,000 and 2,000 words long, but you should test to discover whether your readership prefers longer or shorter reads.
2. Case Studies
Case studies typically follow one of two formats: Problem/solution or before and after. A problem/solution case study provides a detailed look at the problem that was faced by your customer and the solution that you provided. This type of case study focuses on the benefits of your product to the customer. A before and after case study is a content format that shows how your product solved a real problem for a customer — preferably one with measurable results.
The idea is to show how your product has helped real-world businesses prosper. You should decide which business sector you’re seeking to deliver value to before choosing a customer for a case study.
3. Ebooks
Ebooks are being used to nurture existing customers, build thought leadership, and create brand awareness. They’re the pieces of content that can lay the foundations for a successful marketing strategy by giving marketers more opportunities to make sales and engage with their audience.
We love ebooks. They’re nurturing leads through the buyer’s journey with helpful educational content. We believe that books, in general, are the next step in the inbound marketing process: After reading a blog post, such as this one, you want more information.
That’s where calls-to-action (CTAs) come into play, directing people to a landing page where they can submit their contact information and download an ebook to learn more valuable information for their personal or professional needs. In turn, the business providing the ebook has a new lead for the sales team to contact.
4. Infographics
Infographics are great for presenting data in a clear, illustration-based manner. They help break down complex ideas into easier to understand information. Infographics may stimulate more of our brain, helping readers understand and retain the information better, and find it more engaging.
5. Videos
Supporting media can help your audience understand and engage with your content more easily. Videos are a highly engaging medium, but taking the time to shoot and edit them can seem overwhelming. Give your video a purpose: what do you want your audience to do as a result? How-to videos, product demonstrations and testimonials deliver the highest returns.
6. Podcasts
Podcasting is an audio format that enables you to share engaging and informative conversations with your audience. Starting a podcast can help your audience find your brand if they do not have time or interest in reading content every day. The number of podcast listeners is growing, and the number grows day by day.
7. Social Media
Social media is where people spend more of their time online today than any other activity. It’s become such an integral part of our daily lives that people report feeling anxious, lost, or upset when they can’t get online. Social Media has, in many ways, changed how we communicate and how companies interact with their customers.
It is an excellent marketing tool that is relatively inexpensive, and when used well, it can drive traffic to your site and increase sales. Regular posting on social media is thought to build customer loyalty by keeping your content fresh, drive traffic through more leads to your website, and get more shares for increased brand recognition.