I’ve been in the marketing business for 10 years. In that time, I’ve worked with all different types of clients, including non-profits, government agencies, and startups. And one thing I can tell you is this: it’s not always easy to get ahead when it comes to content marketing.
That’s because there are a lot of moving parts involved. You have to figure out what type of content you’re going to create, how often you’re going to publish it.
And who your audience is all while trying to keep up with the latest SEO trends and hoping that your competitors don’t steal your ideas. But there’s good news! It doesn’t have to be this complicated if you know how to build an effective content strategy from scratch.
| Takeaways |
|---|
| 1. A well-crafted content marketing strategy is essential for generating leads and sales. |
| 2. Target audience research helps tailor content to address their needs and pain points. |
| 3. Consistent branding across channels enhances brand recognition and customer loyalty. |
| 4. Tracking key metrics enables assessment and optimization of content marketing efforts. |
| 5. Adapting to industry trends keeps your strategy relevant and resonating with the audience. |
Understand Your Target Audience
This is the most important part of your content strategy. Without understanding your target audience, you can’t create effective and relevant content. If you don’t know who you’re talking to, how can you possibly know what they want or need from your business?
To build a solid understanding of your target audience, start by looking at buyer personas the characteristics of people that make up segments within your company’s customer base.
These fictional characters will help guide the creation of all other components in this plan; without them, it’ll be impossible to build something that works for real-life humans who have very specific needs.
Once those personas are created (more on that in a bit), ask yourself: What pain points do they have? What challenges do they face? Are there any goals they’ve expressed an interest in achieving? Is their information coming from one source or many?
These questions will help identify what topics would work best for them when creating content making it easier for better marketing outcomes overall!
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Start With Your Buyers Journey
The first step to creating a content marketing strategy that works is understanding your buyer.
This means getting inside their heads and understanding the problems they face, the questions they have, and the objections they might have when it comes to buying from you or your company.
You can do this by using personas and fictional characters based on specific groups of customers who share similar demographics and purchasing habits.
Personas help you understand how different types of customers think about purchasing your product or service before they even reach out for more information.
Define Your Content Pillar Topics
Your content pillar topics should be the areas of your business where you have a lot of expertise. They’re the topics that you know well and can easily provide valuable information to readers.
Content pillar topics are also known as “keywords” or “search terms.” For example, if you’re a landscaper who specializes in designing xeriscape gardens, one content pillar topic might be: “How To Design Beautiful Xeriscape Gardens That Save Water And Money.”
Why You Need To Have A Clear Strategy For Defining Your Keywords (Content Pillar Topics)
A keyword is just a word or phrase that someone types into Google or another search engine when they’re looking for something to buy or something else related to what your business does.
For example: If someone searches for “buy Rolex watch,” Google will show them several websites featuring Rolex watches that they could purchase online right away (if they wanted).
If they wanted information about how much it costs and where they could buy one locally before making their decision then those results would be at the top of the list instead (because those queries didn’t include any keywords).
Are you looking to boost sales and conversions through content marketing? Learn how to effectively use content marketing to sell your services and create a powerful impact on your target audience.
Map Out Your Buyers Journey Content
Once you’ve defined your buyer journey and fully mapped out the different stages, it’s time to turn that planning into action. Just how do you go about creating content for each stage of the buyer journey? Let’s take a look at some best practices here:
- Start with a simple website audit to identify gaps and opportunities for improvement.
- Create an editorial calendar with all your planned blog posts, whitepapers, and other assets.
- Use tools like CrazyEgg or Google Analytics to help track conversions as well as user engagement and behavior over time.
Analyze The Competition
There are many things that you need to do when building a content marketing strategy, but analyzing the competition is one of the most important.
It’s also one of the easiest steps because you can use a tool like Ahrefs to quickly pull in information on your competitors’ websites.
Here is what you want to know:
- Who are they? What kind of products or services do they offer? How big are they? Are they local or international?
- What are they doing right now that’s working well for them (and why)?
- What could be improved upon (and why)?
- What does their website look like (is it good)? Do their social media channels look good too, or do they have little engagement on Twitter and Facebook?
How often do people comment on their blog posts and YouTube videos – if at all?
What Type Of Content Will do You Create?
Now that you’ve decided what your content strategy will be, it’s time to determine what type of content you’ll create.
Blog posts: These can include how-to articles, reviews and tips, tutorials, visual guides, and more. They’re great for showcasing expertise in a specific area as well as engaging with readers by answering their questions or speaking directly to them.
Infographics: If you don’t know already, infographics are images that are created with text embedded within them so they can be easily shared across social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter (which often have character limits).
Infographics can help communicate complex ideas visually and get people interested in the subject matter.
Social media posts: Your social media accounts should always have fresh content on them so people see new things when they visit or follow your page(s).
You should post regularly about industry news updates; share other people’s great content; host giveaways; engage with customers; ask questions; respond quickly if someone needs help or has a question about something they’re seeing online then respond immediately!
This way leads will turn into sales!
Examples are a great way to understand successful content marketing techniques. Explore our collection of 19 examples of content marketing done right and gain inspiration for your own content marketing endeavors.
Choose The Right Content Formats For Goals And Buyer Persona
The first step to identifying the right content formats is to understand your goals and buyer persona.
To do this, you’ll need to know your company’s business goals, how much money you want to make per day or month, who your customers are, and what they’re looking for (i.e., their pain points).
This will help you figure out what types of content will resonate with them. For example: If a company wants to increase brand awareness by 20%.
Then creating long-format blog posts would be a good idea because it will allow them time to explain their brand story in detail without being interrupted by ads or affiliate links which would annoy visitors who are only there for information about that specific topic anyway!
So if those visitors do decide they like what they see enough to click one of those links at least 70% of the time their chances are good that most people who visit each post will convert into leads downline…or maybe even customers–depending on how well crafted each piece is.”
Figure Out Where To Publish Each Piece Of Content
The next step is to figure out where you want to publish each piece of content. Content can be published on a variety of different platforms and it’s important to know what platform would best suit the type of content you’re creating.
For example, a blog post might be best suited for your website while an ebook or whitepaper may work best as an email-based lead magnet. You can also share this information with your team so they know where their efforts should go!
Here’s a list of some popular places where you might publish your content:
Blog – A blog is probably one of the most common places that businesses put their content. It gives readers access to new information about your brand, products/services, and industry at large.
You can also use it as an archive for older posts that continue to get traffic from search engines like Google or Bing (if done properly).
This makes sure no one forgets about old articles that still have value even though they might not have been written recently enough for social media updates (which tend not to be indexed by search engines).
Mapping Out Your Entire Marketing Funnel And Channel Strategy
To design your content marketing strategy, you need to create a channel strategy. Then, create a sales strategy and customer service strategy. After that, develop a social media strategy to help you achieve your goals.
You can then follow up with an email marketing campaign that drives leads to the top of your funnel and get them converting into sales at the bottom of it.
Once this is done, create an SEO (search engine optimization) plan for all of these channels so they can be easily found by potential customers when they search for what you offer online!
Develop Content Distribution Plan
Once you’ve created a content marketing strategy and identified your target audience, it’s time to develop a distribution plan. Your distribution plan should include the following elements:
- Identify the channels that will work best for your content
- Figure out how you will promote your content
- Consider the time it will take to create and promote the content
- Identify the formats of your specific types of content (written, video, podcast)
- Find out what format works best for each type of content
Videos are a compelling tool in modern marketing. Discover 10 ways to make stunning B2C marketing videos and unlock strategies to captivate your audience through visual storytelling.
Create Editorial Calendar And Start Creating Content!
Now that you have a content marketing strategy, it’s time to get started.
The next step is to create an editorial calendar and start creating content!
An editorial calendar is a schedule of all the things you plan to publish on your site or blog for one year. It helps you plan your strategy and stay on track with your goals.
A content calendar is similar to an editorial calendar but focuses more on individual pieces of content articles, blog posts, social media updates, and even product descriptions for eCommerce sites instead of their overall purpose.
Using both tools together makes sure that everything gets published at the right time so that leads can find it in search results and purchase accordingly.
Define Metrics For Measuring Success
Defining metrics is an important part of building a content marketing strategy. You want to be able to measure how your content is performing, and if it’s meeting your goals.
Here are some things you can consider:
What does success look like to you? How will you know when the campaign has been successful?
Are there several leads or sales that need to be reached before it can be considered successful, or do you have more creative goals in mind (like getting more comments on Reddit)?
Do you have the resources available for this type of campaign? It may sound obvious, but if you’re planning on creating 30 blog posts in 30 days, but don’t have anyone who can write them yet then there’s no point in planning just yet!
Instead, focus on finding writers first so that when they start producing content they’ll hit their deadlines instead of falling behind because they didn’t get enough notice about what was expected from them.
Repurpose Existing Content And Scale The Results
Repurpose Content
One of the easiest ways to increase your content marketing strategy is to repurpose existing content. This will save you time and money, as you don’t have to spend as much time creating new pieces of content from scratch.
You can also build upon what’s already working for you, which means that it will get even better results!
Repurposing content is a great way to scale results because it allows you to share your best work on multiple platforms instead of trying (and failing) at spreading yourself too thin across all of them at once.
For example: if an article gets shared on LinkedIn 50 times but only gets 5 shares on Facebook, then why not just focus more energy on promoting it there?
In this way, social media also becomes a powerful tool for connecting people with high-quality educational material that they might otherwise never get exposed to in their “newsfeeds.”
Or inboxes due purely based upon chance encounters with other pieces posted by friends/colleagues who happen to share similar interests and values…
Becoming a successful marketer requires a blend of skills and strategies. Delve into the details of the secret ingredients to becoming a marketer hero and gain insights that can elevate your marketing efforts to the next level.
Conclusion
You should now have a solid understanding of the steps you need to take to get started on your content marketing strategy. It’s important that you remember not all strategies will work for everyone so it’s best to find one that works well with your business or product.
Further Reading
Explore these additional resources to deepen your understanding of content marketing strategies:
WordStream’s Guide to Crafting an Effective Content Marketing Strategy Short Description: Learn how to create a powerful content marketing strategy that drives results and engages your target audience.
HubSpot’s Comprehensive Content Marketing Plan Short Description: Dive into a detailed content marketing plan to enhance your online presence, attract leads, and boost conversions.
Outbrain’s Insights on Building a Winning Content Strategy Short Description: Discover key elements of a successful content strategy that can help you effectively reach and engage your audience.
FAQs
What is the importance of a well-defined content marketing strategy?
A well-defined content marketing strategy serves as a roadmap for creating and distributing valuable content that resonates with your target audience, ultimately driving brand awareness, lead generation, and customer loyalty.
How can I align my content marketing plan with my business goals?
To align your content marketing plan with your business goals, start by clearly defining your objectives and identifying your target audience. Tailor your content to address their needs and challenges while also highlighting your unique value proposition.
What are some effective ways to measure the success of my content marketing efforts?
Measuring content marketing success involves tracking key performance indicators (KPIs) such as website traffic, engagement metrics, conversion rates, and social media interactions. Analyzing these metrics helps you gauge the effectiveness of your strategy and make informed adjustments.
How can I ensure consistency in my content marketing strategy across different channels?
Consistency is vital in content marketing. Develop a clear brand voice, style, and messaging guidelines that align with your overall branding. Maintain uniformity in visuals, tone, and messaging across various channels to establish a cohesive brand presence.
How do I adapt my content marketing strategy to evolving trends in the industry?
To adapt to evolving industry trends, stay updated on the latest developments in your field through market research and competitor analysis. Regularly revisit and revise your content strategy to incorporate new topics, formats, and technologies that resonate with your audience.
Costantine Edward is a digital marketing expert, freelance writer, and entrepreneur who helps people attain financial freedom. I’ve been working in marketing since I was 18 years old and have managed to build a successful career doing what I love.