How to Create a Good Content Marketing Strategy

Marketing in this digital era is different. Ads, billboards etc. are no longer in practice. But, there is one thing that might change the game for you. Content marketing strategy is the new talk of the town.

With the help of a smart and organized content marketing strategy, you can target your potential clients in a very short time. Content marketing is focusing on those people who are already searching for the product or service that you are currently selling.

Engaging clients has never been easier. But, what happens if you are new to content marketing? You surely have no or minimum idea on how to create a content strategy. Well, for this we are here.

This is a short guide on content creation strategy and content marketing. This guide will assist you in planning and implement a strong content marketing strategy.

According to the report of the Content Marketing Institute, more than 70% of the surveyed B2B clients said that they are creating more contents in 2019 than 2018. The trend now is to have a strong background of the products or services to allure new clients.

However, most of the small business owners do not understand that value of creating a good strategy. This is why, if you are a new business, you should know the right way to dive-in. Also, you should know your competitors are posting an in-depth blog and PBN posts, launching various podcasts and dipping their toes in video marketing. It might even feel overwhelming to the new start-up owners.

Today, we feel that with this guide your roadmap to creating a good digital content strategy will get simplified.

What is the content marketing strategy?

Content marketing strategy is the administration of any substantial media that you build and own. It can be downloadable, visual or written or combination of types. It is your marketing plan that shows your clients who you are and what services or capability you bring to the industry.

You might already know that proper content creation is essential for the growth and spread of business. But, do you know those appropriate ways of marketing it? Throughout this post, we will tell you how you can develop content that is appropriate to your business niche.

Your content needs to be well-planned, and it must have a purpose. When you are developing a content marketing strategy for the web, you need to have an idea about the key points.

The key points that you should consider are:

1.    Who you are crafting contents for:

Who is the target audience of your content? How many audiences are you aiming for? Using various types of contents under the same niche will facilitate you to engage a wide range of audiences.

2.    The problem is going to solve:

Your company is providing a service or product that will solve a problem your audiences have. Hence, your content should address and educate your audiences through the article. A well-written content supports people on both sides. And, for those who are already your customers should know how your products have evolved and are developing day by day.

3.    Remember the uniqueness of your company

Of course, there are similar services or products in the market right now. This does not mean you stop yourself from doing business. This is the reason; you need to remind the people around you why your products are unique, how they can get benefits from it and how it will affect their lifestyle.

Know your specialty, and this will take you a long way.

4.    The content format you will focus on

There are many forms of contents such as articles, infographics, blog posts, etc. Before creating content, identify the topic and take your position on. In addition to this, determine the budget; it will help you to pick your content form as well.

5.    The channel where it will be published

It is daunting to figure out how and where you will publish the contents. This is because; you need a good channel publishing your content. Channels also include owned properties, for example, your blog, website, or even social media accounts.

Why Content marketing Strategy is Important?

A lot of clients ask us the same question, why should we need a full-proof content marketing strategy? The answer is a bit complicated. Here are the reasons you have to have a good content development strategy.

A success strategy of content marketing comprises of the building, planning, construction, delivery and proper management of it. The core intention is to create meaningful, organized, engaging as well as sustainable content that attracts the target audiences.

In this world of social media, delivering the accurate message to the consumers is important. Touching all the crucial points needs brand specific tactics and strategy.

Content Strategy for web answers the following question. Such as:

•    Why are you passing the information to clients?
•    Who are your intended customers?
•    What will you publish?
•    Who will manage and create the contents?
•    Where the content has the most impact?
•    When your target customers will convert to regular clients?
•    How are you planning carrying out your content?

Remember that it is very important to know the right content development strategy. This is because; this strategy is the map to the goal of your business. Without this, you are sailing a rudderless ship.

According to the latest research from CMI or Content Marketing Institute and MarketingProfs, 63% of the businesses don’t have a proper documented content marketing strategy. Amused? So, we are. Even after knowing the importance of developing a content marketing strategy, most of the business owners do not do it. Here are some vital steps that will help you build a great content promoting strategy.

11 Steps to Develop a Good Content Marketing Strategy

This guide will talk about 11 smart steps to develop website content strategy. You can surely save some time and money with these clever steps.

Step 1: Establishing the mission and goal

The proper starting point of right content planning is planning a content marketing mission statement. It is a short and snappy statement that helps you to focus on the important stuff of your business. It helps your content to stay relevant and on track.

The content marketing mission statement should have the following outline:

•    You target customers/audience
•    The content you are using to reach them
•    The benefit they will get

While you are telling the clients what benefits they will get, you should also think what the business will receive from it. This will help you to determine your business goals.

Typical business goals are:

•    Using the content marketing strategy to improve revenue
•    Making new sales and receiving high-quality leads
•    Getting more organic traffic to the website which will lead to more sale
•    Developing business perception, so you get authority and influence
•    SEO success leading to more target audiences
•    Decreased marketing cost as your contents are effective
•    More engagement of social media which helps in both traffic as well as authority

Once you know your business goal, it’s time for the next step

Step 2: Setting up the KPIs

The best way of achieving a business goal is to make them measurable and specific. This means, setting KPI or Key Performance Indicators for the content marketing strategy.

The KPI helps you in understanding what you have achieved through your goals and milestones you can check off. This may also consist of what you planned to attain such as organic traffic, search engine e optimization, sales, revenue or any other aspect of digital marketing.

You might want to:

•    Hit a specific revenue target within a certain period of time (It can be a week, month, or year)
•    Get more signups for the lead magnet as a sign that you are getting higher leads
•    Get a certain amount of new email subscribers
•    See a rise in the engagement and site traffic with your content
•    Get accelerated shares, mentions, and comments for your contents
•    Get an invitation from your niche industry events

With this, you need to focus on marketing expenditure, tracking the total expenses on campaigns and keeping an eye on the total cost of sales and leads.

Step 3: Knowing the audiences

Like we have already said, it is important to know your clients just like the back of your hand. Consequently, from the beginning be sure who your clients are, so that, you can reach them easily.

Here are the actions you need to take:

1.    Collecting the demographic data

The chief step here is collecting the demographics on the visitors, social media followers as well as the email subscribers. Email subscriber analytics, social media analytics, and web analytics will present the data of your audiences’ age, gender, education status, and income. You will also get to know their key interests as well.

2.    Getting feedback from customers

Gathering feedback from the existing audience is essential to learn about your target audience. Wondering how? Well, this will tell you about:

•    How the current customers feel about your service or product  
•    What is their urgent need?
•    How you can solve the problem with your content

Getting customer feedback will help you in:
•    Understanding subscribers’ and readers’ top priority
•    Deciding the ideal place to reach them
•    Embellish the buyer persona

3.    Creating the buyer persona

When you have the proper demographic data along with the customer feedback, you can now create right buyer person. The buyer persona also called customer avatar. This describes your ideal customers and readers so you can target better.

This will help you in understanding the type of contents audiences are responding more, how it is helping them and what development or changes will make them care more about it.

Step 4: Assess the current position of your business

You will get hundreds of business contents out there. This will include content that is on your social media, blogs, videos, podcasts or so on.

The next step is finding out how the content is serving you to meet your business goals. For doing this, you need to do a content audit. This means:

•    Logging content such as guest posts, blog posts, etc. all together
•    Assessing whether they are of use or not
•    Spotting out the gaps

With these, you can also find out how your content works in comparison to your competitors. You can also see how the new content is hitting the market.

Step 5: Figure out the top content channels

When you start working through the process, you will understand where your audiences are more available and where you can have a booming online presence. Rather than trying all options together, focus on what is working and expand from there.

However, to be assured about your next move, you need to look at the web analytics. In Google Analytics, go to Acquisition>Social>Overview for seeing where your contents are being shared.

You can also try Buzzsumo for finding the same data. Navigate to the Content Analysis tool and input your business domain name on the search box. You will get to see the following:

•    Shared by networks
•    Shared by content types
•    Shared by content lengths
•    Top contents in the past year
For the more detailed result, refine your search.

Therefore, with this, you can easily target the right network for social media engagement.

Step 6: Picking the right content types

Next, decide the types of contents you would like to create for your business. Some prefer videos, some prefer articles, and some prefer a balance of both.

Most of the booming content strategies depend on having a foundation of content published on the home base. From this, it can be repurposed and shared on outposts.

All these blog posts are a key part of content marketing.

What to include in the content?

As per the research of our expert team, video marketing works the best. This is because; it engages more visitors for keeping them on the website for a longer time. And, this results in the improved lead generation as well as the reduced abandonment.

You can also add other types of visual contents for improving audience engagement.

The next step is figuring out what you really require for creating good content.

Step 7: Identifying and allocating the resources

By now you know what content type you are planning to create, who it is for and what platform you are planning to share it. Accordingly, you need to find out whether you have all you need to deliver or not. This entails important questions such as:

•    Who is in charge of maintaining and producing the content?

•    What type (digital, physical or human) of the tool are you looking for creating the content?

•    How are you going to figure out the content workflow? 

Who is in charge of maintaining and producing the content?

You need to distribute roles for this question. For driving individual content and having an overall charge, be certain that you have selected someone who is experienced in this field.

This depends on the company size and the content team.

As the CEO of the company, you can ask your content strategists to approve the content from you. Or else, if you think your team is experienced enough then, they can handle the whole process themselves. However, it is recommended for the business owners to go through the strategies before publishing online.

What resources or tools you need?

In this question, you need to figure out how you are going to build the content. The procedure for content creation may include:

•    In-house content creators
•    Video, graphic design or podcasting specialists
•    Freelancers

Content Workflow

Here you will decide which process of content production is suitable for the business. For the regular blog posts, you might need to:

•    Create a content outline and approve it
•    Write the post
•    Find out or create relevant images
•    Send the post to the editors
•    Decide whether it needs change or not
•    Upload
•    Publish
Now, let’s jump to the next step.

Step 8: Forming the content calendar

As an essential part of content strategy, you need to know the publishing time of contents. This is because; lack of proper planning may lead to content marketing mistakes. Therefore, it is necessary to use the content calendar. The content calendar will help you to maintain the content schedule.

There are many ways of constructing the content calendar.  

Firstly, you can use Google calendar and put the dates for publishing the content. This works great in case you are not publishing hundreds of articles in one week,

Now, what will happen if you have a large number of contents to publish? In such cases, it is important to hire a team that keeps the workflow going.

As you are posting contents, you will get queries and questions from customers. You need to lure your audiences to buy a product here. Answer the public and make sure that the replies are fast and brief yet detailed.

Step 9: Create content

After all these prep works, you need to head to content creation. When you are done with all the first 8 steps to develop a good content strategy, content creation will be easier.

Research the content

When you are ready to write the content, you will need to find out:

•    What is already published?

•    How your content will add value

This means that you need to apply the skyscraper technique. In this technique, you reach on Google, check out the first few contents and see how you can improve your content.

However, you can also try for original research. This is an option in case you are collecting data.

For writing better content and ranking it on Google, include keywords. Keyword research helps in improved search engine result page ranking.

Creating the content

Lastly, you are done with everything. Now, you will just write the article. At this point, you will need to think about how you want to reflect the personality of your brand through the content. You might be new, casual or super-professional, but you have to balance the content writer to get more traffic.

Step 10: Dealing with distribute and market

This comes right after you are done with content writing. This is the key part. This step tells you the proper distribution and marketing of the content. As the business owner, you will not get proper result unless these are correctly handled.

•    Set a proper schedule for sharing the content

•    You can use email marketing for distributing the content to the subscribers

•    You can mention any influencers for spreading the word wider

Step 11: Measuring the total results

Finally, this is the time you need to assess your content strategy. For this, return back to KPIs and see what has changed and how far or close you are to your business goals. SEMRush help in reviewing the KPIs for the search ranking of the website contents. Along with this, you will also be able to track the email signups through analytics in the email marketing software.

By monitoring the progress, you can change or update the strategy at standard intervals.

Nevertheless, make sure your content is updated and suitable for the current time.

Conclusion

Are you ready to build your own site? Does your business lack the right content strategy? Are you a small business owner looking for a way in this era of technology?

With this guide, you can now plan your contents as per your requirements. You know about the successful content marketing strategy, you will not wander aimlessly on the internet.

Follow this guide step by step to make the most of your website contents.