Many years ago, content marketing was simple. If you wanted to attract more attention to your business with content, you could just research keywords and create some content. The competition was weak because not all businesses knew about this type of marketing, and there was no such concept as a content strategy.
Today, there is too much marketing content on the internet, and companies need to put a lot of effort into their content to succeed. If you have an effective strategy, you’ll be able to use content marketing to drive traffic to your website and build relationships with your prospects.
In this guide, we will consider content marketing in detail and share some tips on how to develop a strategy that will demonstrate good performance.
What content marketing is
The concept of content marketing refers to working with different types of textual and visual content, and here are some of its most common types.
The Role of Content in Marketing
Given that 26% of people use ad blockers, and even more people ignore ads, having an outbound marketing strategy is not enough if you want to generate more leads and grow conversions. When it comes to inbound marketing, content is crucial, and you can use it effectively to guide your audience through all the stages of your sales funnel.
You can drive traffic to your website from organic search so you need content optimized for search engines that will make your website rank higher. You can also use organic and paid posts on social media, and you can collaborate with influencers to expand your audience and grow awareness.
Content marketing generates three times as many leads as outbound strategies, and 86% of marketers agree that a strong content strategy is the main secret of their success, with blogging being the top marketing priority for 55% of marketers. The success of your marketing efforts directly depends on the quality of your content.
Using keywords is important, but your main objective should be to deliver value. Your content should be perfectly relevant, informative, and engaging. Therefore, you should think of your audience’s interests and needs.
When dealing with emails, you should also segment your audience and tailor your email content to the specific interests of each segment. Of course, producing high-quality content takes a lot of time and effort, so the best solution is to delegate content creation to professional writers.
For example, you can find experienced writers on websites such as Online Writers Rating.
What a content marketing strategy is
First of all, it’s important to understand the difference between a content strategy, a content marketing strategy, and a content plan.
Even though many marketers use these terms interchangeably, these are different things.
In a content plan, you should also list topics that you’re going to cover, as well as specific calls to action that you will include in each piece of content. As you can see, you need to have a content marketing strategy before you write a content plan.
How to create an effective content marketing strategy
I’ve already mentioned that the quality of your content is crucial for success in content marketing. However, even if you have brilliant content, it won’t fulfill its purpose unless you have a solid marketing strategy behind it. Creating a content marketing strategy is a complex process that requires you to analyze many factors and to have a clear idea of what you want to achieve.
1. Establish clear goals
You can use content marketing for different purposes, and you should formulate clear objectives before you start planning. For most companies, the ultimate goals are increasing the number of customers and making more sales. However, these are not the only goals you can achieve with a good content marketing strategy.
For instance, you can drive more traffic to your website by using SEO and social media. You may also focus your efforts on immediate sales, or you may build brand awareness. Blogging and educational content can help you build a reputation as an industry expert, while media content can boost your website engagement.
If you offer products and services for other businesses, you should have a content marketing strategy for B2B specifically designed to generate leads and sales.
Your marketing strategy may pursue multiple goals, but you should clearly understand the main goals of the entire strategy, as well as the purpose of each specific piece of content. To make sure that your strategy will be well-focused, you can start with a couple of goals and then expand or change them once you’ve got acceptable results in terms of ROI.
2. Determine KPIs
You need to set key performance indicators (KPIs) so that you’ll be able to measure the results of your content marketing strategy and evaluate its overall effectiveness. For example, as much as 89% of content marketers consider increased website traffic the main criteria when evaluating the effectiveness of their content marketing efforts.
Given that you need KPIs to evaluate performance, these KPIs should be easily measurable. For example, if the purpose of your campaign is lead generation, you can use a valuable piece of content, such as a webinar or ebook, and add a data capture form. This way, users will give you some data, such as their names and email addresses, to get access to the content. After this, you’ll be able to use this data to count downloads.
You can also count sales. To do this, you can use the conversion tracking option in Google Analytics. Google Analytics can also provide you with a lot of other data, including the number of website visitors. You can also consider lead sign-ups by tracking email subscriptions. Besides, there are countless additional tools, including click maps and social share counters, which enable you to evaluate your visitors’ on-site behavior.
3. Consider your audience
You won’t be able to come up with an effective content marketing strategy if you don’t know exactly what your audience looks like and what they need. First of all, use web analytics, email analytics, and social media analytics to gather demographic data on your subscribers, followers, and website visitors.
Besides, you can learn about your audience’s key interests by going to Audience > Interests > Overview in your Google Analytics profile. You can also access similar data on social media platforms. For example, you can visit your Facebook Page Insights to get some information about your Facebook followers. Also if you look at your Instagram page, you can figure out how many followers you have. You may set a target to achieve that amount of followers as soon as possible. Therefore, find out more about Instagram automation tools to supervise your account smoothly.
Another great opportunity to learn more about your audience is to collect feedback directly from them. This way, you’ll be able to learn what they think about your content, what they would like to see in the future, and what improvements they would appreciate. For instance, you can use feedback forms on your website, and you can also send emails with quick surveys. Once you’ve gathered enough data, you can create buyer personas and list their needs, motivations, challenges, and content preferences.
4. Create a content strategy document
By documenting the whole process, you’ll be able to follow clear steps and maximize the efficiency of your content strategy instead of starting from scratch over and over again. First of all, you may segment your audience so that you can plan different types of content that will address the needs of each demographic group of customers.
We also recommend that you organize meetings with key members of the team to make sure that everyone’s activity will be aligned with the overall business goals. You should also work with content creators to brainstorm and come up with ideas on increasing engagement and creating content that will resonate with different segments of your audience.
After this, you can divide whole marketing campaigns into specific steps, choosing appropriate tactics and forms of content. At this step, you should also choose those who will be responsible for specific tasks, including content creation, optimization, design, editing, etc. I also recommend that you involve stakeholders so that they can approve the strategy and make their suggestions.
5. Determine the best channels
At this point, you might have some information on what your audience’s preferred channels are. Besides, you can evaluate different aspects of your online presence and see what channels demonstrate the best results.
Focusing your efforts on what’s already working is always a good idea. However, you may also consider web analytics once again. In your Google Analytics profile, go to Acquisition > Social > Overview to see how users share your content on social media. You may also use various third-party tools to get more insights into how different channels perform.
6. Create a content calendar
To come up with an effective content marketing strategy, you should plan exactly when you're going to publish your content on each particular platform. You can either use a premium WordPress plugin like Strive, or use Google Calendar for this purpose, allocating specific dates for each piece of content.
Given that your audience can be more or less active on different days, you can schedule content based on relevance and priority. Google your keywords and check what questions related to your product and industry are the most popular.
Select questions that are most relevant to your audience, choose the appropriate types of content, and add titles to your content calendar. Make sure to plan your content a few months ahead.
7. Measure your success
Once your strategy is working and you’re publishing fresh content regularly, make sure to track your KPIs so that you can evaluate how effective your strategy is. What type of content shows the best performance? What content is shared most often? What topics generate the most clicks? Keep in mind that, while the amount of traffic is important, it’s also important to consider the quality of this traffic and its engagement levels.
For instance, if you get a lot of traffic from social media but these users have a high bounce rate, the quality of this traffic will be low compared to channels that bring less traffic but have better conversion rates. Use A/B testing to improve your content: try different CTAs, test different headlines, etc. Don’t forget that content optimization is a continuous process.
Final thoughts
To make your content marketing strategy effective, you should make sure that it’s flexible. You should update your strategy regularly so that it will reflect your business goals as they change.
The world of content marketing also evolves and changes all the time so it’s important to keep up with the latest trends.
