Marketing professionals report an increase in content creation and distribution today. Spending on content creation and distribution is rising, but the key challenge is creating content that resonates with your audience. In the modern world, businesses need content like blogs, videos, infographics, animations, images, etc to connect with their audiences. However, without an effective content marketing strategy, it’s less likely to achieve both the short-term and long-term business goals efficiently.
Sure, you can post your videos on social media platforms or websites, but if you do that without proper planning, the results will not be satisfactory. Even creating content without a strategy is futile. Once you note down your goals and plan content creation accordingly, it will help you increase brand awareness and generate more leads.
In this article today, we will explain how to develop an effective content marketing strategy, but before that let’s look into its benefits.
Benefits of Having a Content Marketing Strategy
Here’s how a great content marketing strategy benefits your business.
- It provides you with a roadmap for achieving business goals that you want to accomplish with regular content creation.
- Since you brainstorm content ideas ahead of time, you will never run out of ideas to post. When you plan content creation in accordance with your posting schedule, you will always have things lined up.
- An effective content marketing strategy enables you to study analytics, and identify which kind of content brings in great results. You will know which topics your audience loves the most. A well planned marketing strategy will help you figure out the preferences of your audiences so you can create content accordingly.
- You will always know what to post about. Thanks to the content marketing strategy, you will learn how to analyze the latest trends so you can create relevant content and attract potential customers to your website.
- You can learn about tools that post on social media profiles automatically. As a result, even if you forget to post, the content will automatically get shared with your audience.
Once you learn about the benefits of having a content marketing strategy, you will start working on developing one for your company straight away.
How to Develop a Content Marketing Strategy?
It varies depending upon the target audience, your product/service, and its usefulness. As we analyze the content creation trends over the different social media platforms, websites, email, and other forms of content, we note that the content creation strategy varies for businesses and there is no one-size-fits-all formula since each business has a different set of audience.
While quality has to be prioritized every time, successful businesses keep a balance between quality and quantity. And, that’s why they follow a certain frequency to keep the audience engaged without getting them spammed.
There are a few steps that you can follow to develop a basic content marketing strategy and then modify it according to your business requirements.
Establish Your Goals
The first step in developing a content marketing strategy is establishing your goals. Your goals are what you wish to accomplish with the help of content marketing, which is why they should dictate your strategy as well.
The most common business goals could be:
- Improving revenue
- Increasing brand awareness
- Generating more leads
- Providing information
By keeping your goals in mind, you can create a content marketing strategy that will be best suited to your business.
Set KPIs
The second step is setting key performance indicators or KPIs for your content marketing strategy. You can keep track of the progress of your marketing plan with the help of KPIs. You will know when you have achieved certain milestones.
Typically, KPIs are measured in numbers. For instance, you can set the following KPIs:
- Increase in onsite traffic.
- Hit a revenue target in a specific amount of time.
- Get a set number of new email subscribers.
KPIs allow you to decide whether a certain type of content is generating great results or not. For example, if your email campaign helped you achieve a 10% increase in sales or onboard new subscribers you will surely work on improving the email campaign strategy by creating high-quality content without missing out on your schedule.
Get to Know Your Audience
Paying attention to the various parameters and segmenting your audience will help you design an effective content marketing strategy. Take time, and do your research to understand customer psychology. It will help you plan & implement a great strategy. Identify the social media channels they use most frequently. Stay parameters like audience age, income, geography, hobbies, and education.
Before knowing what you want to deliver, you have to get clear about who you want to deliver this message and that’s when it’s important to understand your audience. Knowing your audience for a successful marketing strategy is a complex, & multi-step process, yet it can bring great results.
Keep in mind the following things as you study your audience,
- Empathize with your prospective clients
- Use your content strategy to reconnect with your readers
- Conduct in-depth market research
- Engaging your readers emotionally
- Build an authentic connection between the content and your audience, and it should resonate with your audience
Decide on Content-Type
Once you identify the goal of the content and the needs of your target audience, work on identifying the content type. The type of content you create should decide what goals you want to achieve with your content marketing strategy. You can either create a long-form of content including guides, in-depth blog posts, user manuals, eBooks, or short forms of content for marketing and advertising.
You can choose among the following kinds of content;
- Blog posts
- Marketing copy for social media
- Content for the landing pages, & sales pages
- Reels
- Live videos
- YouTube videos
- User manuals
- Emails
- eBooks
- Webinar
- Case studies
Identify Resources
If you have a creative team of individuals you will have an effortless procedure creating content. Identify your resources on your team for developing an effective content marketing strategy. Start by establishing who is in charge of the content production team. You will also have to assign duties related to content production to your employees or hire new ones.
Depending on the type of content you have decided to create, you will also need to buy some tools. These tools can make the process of content production easier and make it possible for you to achieve your business goals seamlessly.
Make a Calendar
A content calendar is not just about the content type that you will be creating, it’s an overall strategy of how you would be organizing your content. A content calendar helps you organize and plan all your content needs. Lack of planning is one of the biggest reasons behind the failure of content marketing.
A calendar helps you have a library of content that’s diverse and well balanced. Once you have a calendar, you can schedule your content accordingly so you can keep on sharing your content with your audience regularly. To make the process easier you can use a content calendar template for your marketing strategy that you can customize to your business needs.
Create Content
This is the last part before you could work on distributing the content. Choose tools to get the creative juice flowing. You can dig deeper into the following tools to study the trending topics in your specific industry.
Brainstorming ideas takes time, and real effort. You can also study platforms like Quora and Reddit to study the hot topics under discussion in your niche. You can identify both the specific topics and general trends under the discussion using the following tools.
- Feedly
- BlogAbout
- Buzzsumo
- CoSchedule Headline Analyzer
Each tool has different features and helps you in a different way. You should also make sure that your content has something helpful to offer to your audience. It is important to do keyword research when creating content in order to improve search ranking.
Distribute Your Content
Content distribution includes sharing, and promoting your content organically and paid ads. It helps you with improving brand awareness, increasing fan following, and getting more leads. High-quality content that’s distributed in the right way helps your audience to move ahead in the sales funnel. It engages your audiences and entices them to click, act, and become customers.
In addition to distributing your content, you can repurpose it creatively so that you will not have to put time and effort into generating original content every time. Strategize your content distribution by choosing the right platforms where your audience hangs out. Schedule your content for social media, website, and email, or follow any other plans you have designed for distributing content. Remember, distributing your content in the right way will amplify your brand reach and help you achieve both your short and long business goals.
Final Thoughts
When you have a content marketing strategy, you will be prepared for everything from content creation to content distribution and marketing. It will also help you figure out what kind of content you should create to please your audience. If you follow the steps mentioned above, you will be able to develop a content marketing strategy that could help you achieve your business goals.
