Achieving unprecedented growth requires an accurate strategy and framework. The same applies to content marketing as well, where having a strategy before moving forward is essential to get the desired outcome. An innovative Content Marketing Strategy is the need of the hour to propel your business to the next level.
Are you using content marketing to grow your business and earn more profits? Most successful businesses do that. Currently, content marketing is one of the most vital tools used to generate brand awareness and draw prospective clients to your website. Content marketing is a valuable tool to increase web traffic and convert visitors into customers.
The most crucial point to keep in mind is that without having an efficient strategy you won’t be able to build an imposing online presence to draw customer’s attention. Relax, there is no need to panic. We have a list of tried and tested strategies that can help you exceed your business goals.
What is Content Marketing?
Content marketing is the best marketing strategy with the intent of creating and distributing useful and relevant content consistently. The goal is to attract and retain the target audience. The key to getting customers’ attention and keeping them hooked lies in providing stellar content.
Visitors looking for particular services will read your content and decide whether they want to do business with you or not. When you provide them with crisp, clear & meaningful content, it will arouse their curiosity and generate inquiries.
Previously (less than a decade ago) the goal of content marketing was restricted to information sharing. All it required was a direct message to urge customers to buy your products or services.
Things have drastically changed since then. In this new era of digital marketing, brands focus on ideas, solving problems, and connecting with people’s emotions. This goal can be accomplished through text or videos.
The secret to a robust content marketing strategy lies in creating an innovative business plan for content marketing, keeping in mind the target audience and their specific needs. Next, you need to find a way to tell your brand story.
Here, you need to have a unique approach and be clear about the message you want to communicate and what sets you apart from the competition. Lastly, you need to have a channel plan, meaning you need to figure out which social media platform you will use to tell your brand story & encourage stimulating conversation.
Importance of Content Marketing Strategy
Creating content without a strategy or plan is like entering a warzone without a lieutenant commander. Without a concrete plan of action, you will encounter countless interruptions and obstacles with no escape route.
Similarly, in the content marketing world, you need a powerful content management strategy that removes all obstacles and helps you sail smoothly. Most importantly, consistent, exceptional, and engaging content lingers in people’s minds. Eventually, it compels them to make decisions and engage with your brand.
With a strong content marketing strategy, you can accomplish tasks with ease without wasting any time because you already have clear-cut business objectives. Additionally, since you are required to stick to a plan, there is no room for confusion or things going astray.
Upon seeing relatable content, customers will engage with your brand and in time become loyal customers. Posting gripping content on social media will increase your brand following, and encourage word-of-mouth publicity, thereby leading to increased customer trust & fruitful leads.
At this point, it is crucial to understand that your content should be unique because that is what will improve conversions and increase online visibility. Original and polished content will complement your SEO efforts, yielding more returns. With continuous & channelized efforts, you may emerge as a market leader in your industry.
It does not end there. An inventive content management strategy helps you save money on your market strategy in the long run. Paid advertising, video marketing, and conventional marketing have their place but content marketing is the new king.
According to the latest survey by CMI (Content Marketing Institute),- Seventy-eight (78%) marketers stated that their organization implements a strategic approach to manage content; of those, 99% of them revealed that they are involved (directly or indirectly) with some aspect of strategic content management at their organization.
The Way To Create Groundbreaking Content Marketing Strategy
Now that we understand how pivotal a content marketing strategy is, it is time to move forward & learn how to create a state-of-the-art SEO content marketing strategy to win the race. Let’s have an intensive look: Below is some foolproof strategies that can transform your business without you having to spend too much time, money, and resources.
Have a Clear Target/Goal insight
Having a clear goal in sight is crucial while developing a content marketing strategy. An abstract message, jokes, or pushing the product won’t help. Also, certain types of content are more effective to reach specific goals than others. How do you define success? What steps will you take to improve customer engagement? Think clearly and don’t waste time on efforts that won’t be fruitful for your organization. Most companies have goals like the ones below.
- Adding new subscribers
- Attracting website traffic
- Amplifying your content’s reach
- Getting more hits on videos
- Reach your targeted audience
- Explain your products/services & their benefits to people
- Accelerating sales
- Increasing revenue & ROI
- Better SEO optimization
- Building customer trust
- Building Brand Authority
- Building a marketing funnel with content that nurtures prospects
- Gain valuable customer insights
- Strengthening customer relationships
A content marketing strategy can help you achieve the above goals and more. If you are unsure how to go about it, our Content Marketing Strategy Guide can be of immense help.
Read Also: Influencer Marketing for Business Growth
Know Your Audience and Their Requirements
‘Good content is not storytelling, it tells your story well, this should be your main focus. Would you approach a bald man and try to sell him combs or hairdryers? Obviously not.
Know your audience and their requirements well. Focus on providing them with the services and products they need. This is why you need valuable insights regarding customer behavior and preferences.
Using a cookie-cutter approach can have disastrous consequences. It will do more harm than good. Know your customers, understand their behavior, and implement strategies accordingly. What can you do to learn more about customer behavior?
Use Demographics- A demographic analysis is what will give you useful and insightful information about your customer’s age, race, sex, and so on. With the help of this information, you can determine which social media channels will work best for you.
Knowing customer location can help you understand community culture, local trends & patterns that can influence their behavior. Based on location, you can also create personalized mobile marketing and direct marketing campaigns.
Psychographics- It is a qualitative method used to know about the personality traits, psychological attributes, attitudes, aspirations, and other behavior of your target audience. Information about their likes, dislikes, income, education level, etc are useful but they are incomplete until they are combined with demographic data. Integrating both will give us a clearer picture of who they are and build more detailed, complete & sophisticated profiles.
Feedback – Collecting feedback from your existing customers can be advantageous as It can help you gain great insights such as:
- Their experiences & opinions about the content you provide them
- What more do they expect from you?
- If your content is not relevant, how can you improve yourself?
- Are they satisfied with your current products and services?
Measure Your Existing Content
Don’t forget to evaluate your existing content on digital platforms and measure its performance. It will tell you about how your content is performing on the website. Know if your content strikes a chord with the target audience, is it relevant, outdated or does it need more details?
A regular content audit process can give you an insight into your existing content’s performance on digital platforms. Through a performance analysis, you can optimize your content and tweak to meet customer needs/preferences. There are some tools that can be used to measure your existing content’s performance.
Screaming Frog SEO Spider – The screaming frog SEO spider is a fast and state-of-the-art SEO site edit tool used to crawl small and large websites to make them user-oriented. Checking every page manually is a time-consuming process, but this tool does the job quickly, and that too with razor-sharp accuracy.
Not only that, the screaming frog SEO spider tool also allows you to view, analyze and filter the crawled data till it’s collected and updated completely in the program’s user interface. Using another amazing feature of this tool, you can export key onsite SEO elements onto a spreadsheet that can be used as a basis for SEO recommendations.
Research your Rivals
Gone are the days when you could dominate the market single-handedly without any competition. There is cut-throat competition in every industry. When you create a strategy to woo your target audience, identify your competitors and if they have an edge over you.
Apart from traditional competitors, check if other websites like news, entertainment, business, and blogging sites post similar material to yours. If their content is similar to yours, think about what you can do to differentiate yourself from them. It doesn’t have to be a drastic change. Share your personal experiences, and invite experts to contribute to your blogs, podcasts, videos, etc. Inject some freshness into your content through such methods.
In your quest to produce something authentic and fresh, don’t disregard what is trending. If your competitors are following a trend, pay attention to it but don’t copy them blindly. Add a few tweaks to it in a way that the content reflects your brand’s personality.
Focus on Topic and Keyword Research
Have you figured out what your objectives are and who is your target audience? The next step is to find out what they are searching for online. Research the keywords that people used to find goods/services or information on Google and other search engines.
Once you have the list of keywords in front of you, analyze the search volume for each of those keywords. Figure out which of those keywords are the most relevant for your location, industry, and business in particular. Never neglect the research aspect. You may even get some brilliant ideas for your next content piece.
Focus on The Post That Attracted The Most Traffic
Sometimes, the answer lies within ourselves but we fail to notice it. Examine your previous content, and see what has worked for you previously. Not all blogs or social media posts get equal attention. Some strike a chord with people while some go completely unnoticed.
Check what kind of posts have got the most engagement, web-pages that bring in the most traffic. Besides, research the keywords that visitors use to find your website. Your existing content’s performance metrics will shed light on what type of content appeals to your target audience.
Develop a Unique Strategy
Merely having the insights and information is of no use until you apply it to your business. Now, you need to devise a creative strategy to use the information you got out of all that research.
Which social media platforms will you use to post your content? How will you promote your content? What techniques will you use? How much budget should you allocate towards each platform, post, video or advertisement?
What kind of content does your target audience prefer? Pay special attention to this question. All your visitors/customers are not the same. Some may like to read blogs while some may like short social media posts with attractive images.
On the other hand, there is a particular segment of people that connects through videos or infographics only. What will you do in such a scenario? The best strategy to employ in this case would be to have a healthy mix of all kinds of content.
Allocate your Resources Correctly
You have conducted extensive research and now you have a bunch of ideas, which is good but what can you achieve with the resources at hand? Not being pessimistic or anything but you need to be realistic while implementing a content marketing strategy.
Do you have content writers in your organization or each task? Do you think it would be wiser to outsource these tasks to an agency or a third party? Your decisions will depend on our budget, availability of resources, time constraints, specialization, and several other factors.
Furthermore, you also need to appoint an experienced and knowledgeable person who can manage your content marketing campaign. To build customer engagement, it is necessary to respond to customer queries, comments, and feedback. The person appointed to manage your marketing campaign needs to manage this task as well.
Content management can take up a lot of your time. Are you ready to make that kind of investment? We are not just talking in financial terms here. Apart from money, you also need to invest time and resources. It is crucial to be realistic while developing a strategy.
Plan your Content Production Schedule
Integrate all your ideas and bring them together in a content production schedule. What should this schedule contain? The schedule should have a detailed calendar with the publication dates and the details of the persons responsible for the creation of each content piece. Having a publication calendar is extremely essential because it enables you to publish content as per the schedule.
Your Content Must Align With your Company Goal
Bear in mind that each content piece created by you should be in line with the organization’s goals and objectives. Incorporating the keywords from your research is also a must. Meeting deadlines and delivering work on time is laudable but it should not come at the cost of accuracy & quality.
After the content is published, it needs to be promoted as well. Share your posts on relevant social media accounts, and tag people who can expand your reach by sharing/promoting it. Don’t hesitate to send it to big names. Who knows, they may like it or even comment on it?
Create Publish & Promote our Content
You have done all the hard work but it is not time to sit back and relax yet. Monitor your content marketing campaign’s success. Based on what was worked, make the necessary tweaks and get rid of what is unnecessary. You won’t figure it out overnight, it will take time but content marketing is a continuous learning process.
Refine your strategy, learn from your mistakes, and adapt constantly. Keep an open mind, be flexible and the results will follow.
Final Thoughts
To sum it up, content marketing is a constant process, not a one-time fix. In digital marketing, nothing is forever. Things change continuously like trends, people’s preferences, and requirements. What may have worked a year ago might not work now. Practice attentive social listening, pay attention to emerging trends, and also what your competitors are doing.
Keep evolving and the greens will continue to pour in. That’s the secret to success with a content market strategy. Stay hungry and focused while making adjustments to cope with the ever-changing scenarios.
