Content marketing is a valuable strategy when used correctly. You can generate more leads and sales from your content than just paying for advertising or using conventional methods. It helps connect with your target audience, build relationships & trust, and get organic traffic to your site.
To succeed in Content Marketing Strategy, you need to think about leadership that will ensure desired results. Carefully crafted content must have the correct tone; it must offer value to your audience.
Content marketing is a broad term that covers all aspects of the promotion process involving the creation & distribution of useful information. It’s about creating great content for your target customers that they can find useful and eventually share with their friends.
Content Marketing Strategy is a systematic approach to building trust, credibility, and authority. It involves creating valuable content & distributing it consistently through various channels, which convert the readers into subscribers for future updates and eventually lead them to your site.
Any content marketing strategy aims to create more exposure, bring traffic to your site or blog, drive engagement, and create new leads or customers.
A successful content marketing strategy requires well-thought-out research, develops an effective plan, makes the right mix of content, and builds awareness through social media engagement. You should analyze the needs of your audience & wants, identify the way to increase traffic, and generate leads from your website.
Content Marketing Strategy will help you build business growth and generate more leads, giving you good ROI.
Step 1: Define the Target Audience
The first step is to define your target audience; your ideal clients/customers are who you want to attract with your content marketing strategy.
Before deciding what kind of content to create for them, find out all details of your target audience. Find out things like:
- What are their needs & wants?
- Who are their competitors? Where do they hang out online?
- What topics interest them most, or what kind of information can they use the most? Which social media channels do they often visit, how much time they spend on these sites, etc.
Step 2: Define the Objective
The objective can be to increase traffic, improve conversion rate, create new leads/customers – whatever you want to achieve with your content marketing strategy. Make sure you carefully define your goal; otherwise, it will be difficult for you to track success metrics.
After defining the goal for each channel, decide where is the best place to post this kind of content. For example, you want to reach out to a much larger audience than your current customer base. Or you want to increase your brand awareness across a global level. Or maybe the goal is to drive traffic & improve the conversion rate on your site.
Step 3: Select The Channels
Here you have to figure out the best content channels for reaching your target audience. It’s not as simple as merely posting information on a blog or updating social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, etc., but it requires more effort and creativity from you.
You should decide where to publish blogs, whether its own website or other sites (on paid basis) where readers are most likely to be interested in this kind of content. Also, think about what kind of media/services you should use to distribute your content and find the right tools for tracking results.
All channels have pros & cons that you need to take into consideration before deciding where to publish your content:
1) Own Blog – The advantage is that it’s free and gives your readers a true inside look at your business. You can share all kinds of details about products, services, or behind-the-scenes stuff that people love to read on blogs.
The disadvantage is branding; management of different profiles takes time & effort. Blogging is not SEO friendly compared with other channels like videos or photos, which are on their own platforms/pages.
2) Facebook page – Advantage is easy branding through profile photo, cover photo, fan pages, etc., and easy management of multiple posts.
The disadvantage is that only businesses with many likes and engagement will get good exposure on Facebook because they will show up in people’s news feed. Also, you can’t simply start by asking people for likes because it doesn’t work like that.
You need to build your brand with engaging content first and then seek more engagement through contests, events, or other promotional activities.
3) Twitter – Advantage is easy branding & great exposure if you have a large follower base. The disadvantage is little improvement in search engine rankings compared with blogs due to links being broken on the Twitter platform, limited content 140 characters per post limit, less SEO friendly.
Step 4: Define Content Strategy
Once you have decided on the best content channels, then it’s time for you to create a strategy that will help you reach your target audience with ease and convert them into sales opportunities. Here are few things that you need to keep in mind:
Define the kind of content that would be easily found & shared by people who are interested in your services or products.
Distribute content across various platforms according to how frequently they are used; find out what is most popular at certain times and where your target audience hangs out online during their free time.
Write different kinds of posts based on the interests & needs of your audiences – informational posts, entertaining/interesting videos, contests, etc. Find out which type of post converts into leads or sales better.
Start a blog and publish all your new posts there first so that it’s easier to track the kind of traffic you’re getting from it; writing blogs also allow you to link them on other platforms like Facebook & Twitter, thereby giving more exposure for your website.
Keep an eye out on social media sites regularly, respond to comments promptly and ask questions now and then about certain things related to your business – this will help build trust with people who are following you.
Final Step: Measure results
After publishing content across multiple platforms, it’s time for you as a marketing manager/analyst/owner to understand how well these strategies worked, which platform gave more traffic or conversions, and when they were. This is where you will find out how well your content strategy worked.
For this, you need a dashboard that gives you a clear picture of all the activities related to your website (social media, link building, etc.) and shows where people are viewing your web pages from & what kind of devices they’re using.
Another important feature in any analytics platform is a conversion tracking which helps you track clicks on different links and guide users easily.
A/B testing allows you to run tests – like changing landing page images to see which one generates more traffic or conversions, can also be performed using an analytics tool by creating 2 landing pages with different versions of the image and then comparing results with each other.
You can do an A/B test on emails by sending emails to different segments of your customer base with images or video links, seeing which version works better and what kind of results you get.
A/B testing helps you understand how people respond to different kinds of marketing material and gives them a personalized experience.
Conclusion:
As “Content is the King” when it comes to running an online business successfully in today’s digital world, our content must do more than just selling to customers.
As marketers & content publishers, it is necessary to understand the target audience first, then cater our contents according to their needs and build trust with them through frequent personal interaction through likes, comments, etc.
This will follow up on every sale made by giving the customer a memorable experience with your brand.
To many, Content Strategy may not seem like an exciting piece of content, but this 5 step guide will surely help you create an effective content strategy for your organization and increase its digital reach & growth and help you garner more success in a short span.
