It’s what your business does to earn attention, trust, and loyalty from your target markets. Your target market wants content that is valuable to them and that feels natural coming from your business. Content marketing is a process of creating and distributing content that will attract your target market, get their attention, and build trust and loyalty.
Focusing on content marketing can help you improve conversions, brand awareness, revenue, and establish yourself as an industry leader.
What Is a Content Marketing Strategy
A strategy is a plan designed to achieve a specific goal. Let’s distinguish it from a few similar industry terms:
- Content marketing strategy: This high-level strategy deals with mapping out the implementation and distribution of your brand’s content marketing materials.
- Content plan: You will sometimes hear this referred to as a “content calendar.” A content plan helps you organize your material implementation in a neat and orderly fashion.
Why Do You Need a Content Marketing Strategy
Let’s take a look. Around 40% of companies do not have a content marketing strategy that is written down. Even though having a strategy that is mapped out and documented may seem like an extra step, it is actually very important. Lets explore the reasons why.
Creating content can be chaotic, but if you have specific goals, metrics, and processes in place, you can improve your content creation process.
The majority of marketers who felt their content marketing strategy was exceptionally effective in 2021 had documented their strategy.
Why is content marketing important?
- Educate your leads and prospects about the products and services you offer
- Boost conversions
- Build relationships between your customers and business that result in increased loyalty
- Show your audience how your products and services solve their challenges
- Create a sense of community around your brand
Now that we have looked at the different goals of content marketing, let’s explore the different types of content marketing.
The 5 Elements of a Powerful Content Marketing Strategy
An effective Content Marketing strategy must contain five core elements to be successful: audience personas, brand positioning, owned media value proposition, business case, and an action plan.
Each of these elements is essential in order for the strategy to be successful. Here’s a brief overview of each element and how you can start implementing it:
Audience personas: A persona is a fictional representation of your ideal customer. By creating personas, you can better understand your target audience and what content will resonate with them.
Brand positioning: Your brand positioning is how you position your brand in the market. This will be determined by your target audience, your differentiation, and your overall brand strategy.
Owned media value proposition: Your owned media value proposition is the value that your owned media channels (such as your website or blog) provide to your audience. This could be in the form of informative content, helpful resources, or entertainment.
Business case: A business case is an important document that outlines the value of your Content Marketing strategy. This will help you get buy-in from stakeholders and justify your budget.
Action plan: An action plan will help you put your Content Marketing strategy into practice.
1. Audience Personas
You can’t tell your brand’s story effectively if you don’t know your audience. There are multiple ways to do this:
- Survey your existing customers
- Research industry trends
- Know who you aren’t trying to target
- Keep close tabs on whom your competitors are targeting
Once you know your target audience, you can use our free Personas tool to craft profiles of your ideal reader.
You need to be able to explain who your target audience is to anyone who is involved in creating the brand’s message.
2. Positioning Your Brand and Story
Developing a clear brand and product positioning will help you ensure a consistent experience for your audience across all your content marketing channels, and help you build the right image for your brand.
These questions will help you brainstorm your positioning in the market:
- Who are my existing and potential customers, and what are their goals?
- Who are my top competitors, and how do they market their brands?
- What is my brand’s unique value?
- What problems does my product help to solve?
- What makes it a better choice over my competitors?
Use the information to help you create the main ideas for your brand story.
Your brand story is the foundation of your content marketing strategy. It tells your company’s history, mission, purpose, and values. It helps you identify the right messages and topics to communicate with your content.
3. Content Marketing Mission Statement and Owned Media Value Proposition
In order to make your brand more credible as a content publisher, you need to define what kind of value your content offers. To do so, answer the following questions:
- What unique value do you provide to your audience with your content?
- How do you stand out from other content creators?
- Why should readers choose to follow your content channels?
Your content marketing strategy should include a mission statement that summarises why you are creating content, and provides information on who can benefit from it.
4. Business Case and Content Marketing Goals
Your content should provide value to your audience and help to move your business forward.
What are the business goals that your company needs to achieve? How will content marketing bring your company closer to those goals? How many resources do you need to invest in your content strategy? What results do you want to generate?
A business case document will help you understand the benefits, costs, and risks of implementing a content marketing strategy in your company. It will also help convince decision-makers of the value of the strategy for the company.
5. Action Plan
In conclusion, you will list the main content marketing campaigns and projects you have lined up for the year, and add them to your content plan. Consider how these campaigns and projects will help you to achieve the content marketing goals you have set for your business.
Doing this will allow you to think through each content strategy step. Make sure to include the following information:
- Content formats you want to focus on
- High-level content topics and campaigns
- Channels for content distribution and promotion
To determine what content formats and channels will work best for you, look at how your content has performed in the past and examine your audience more closely, which we will talk about later.
Types of Content Marketing
There are many types of content marketing that you may choose to incorporate in your strategy — here are some of the most common:
1. Social Media Content Marketing
There are approximately 3.6 billion social media users globally. This is a large number of potential customers for businesses who invest in social media marketing. There are many social media platforms (e.g. Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, LinkedIn, Snapchat) available, and businesses can use these platforms in various ways (e.g. by sharing photos, live videos, or pre-recorded videos).
Featured Resource: Social Media Content Calendar
2. Infographic Content Marketing
Infographics are a way of displaying information, data, and content in a graphic format that is easy to understand. They use a combination of simple wording, short statements, and clear images to effectively communicate their message. They are a good way to explain an educational or complex topic to an audience in a way that everyone can understand.
Featured Resource: 15 Free Infographic Templates
3. Blog Content Marketing
Blogs are a powerful and creative way to post internal and external content, promote other articles, and share products.
Featured Resource: Start a Successful Blog
4. Podcast Content Marketing
A recent survey found that almost half of all young people in the US had listened to a podcast within the last month, averaging six hours a week. For this reason, more businesses and media outlets are creating and sharing their own podcasts.
Podcasts give you the freedom to be creative and cover any topics you want. You also get to choose how often new episodes are released, who appears on the show, and where to advertise it. Plus, you can decide how long each episode should be.
Featured Resource: How to Start a Podcast
5. Video Content Marketing
The majority of consumers say they would rather learn about a brand through video content, as opposed to other methods. Additionally, video marketing has been shown to improve conversions, ROI, and customer relationships. You can share your videos on social media, landing pages, or with other businesses.
Featured Resource: The Ultimate Video Marketing Starter Pack
6. Paid Ad Content Marketing
Paying for ads is a good way to get your name out there to a lot of people. When you also do things like inbound marketing, it makes your company more visible in all the places you want to be seen. Some ideas for paid ads are social media, landing pages, banners, and sponsored content.
5 Steps to Creating a Complete Content Strategy
If you want your business to be successful in the long run, you need to start planning now. This means looking ahead to anticipate any challenges you may face and making sure you have the resources you need to overcome them. You can lay the groundwork for success by taking the following seven steps to develop and implement a content strategy that is aligned with your marketing and business goals.
You must document your plan in a way that is easily shared with all essential stakeholders. This could be a slide deck, a Google document, a spreadsheet, or another format that works well for your business model.
Step 1: Determine Your Audience and the Story You Want to Tell with Your Content
If you want to create effective content, you need to start by understanding who your target audience is.
Your audience is not just made up of people who are looking to buy something from you. There are also people who are interested in your brand and interact with it before they have any intention of making a purchase.
It is essential to deliver content that will attract your potential customers before they begin their search for a product or service.
Step 2: Analyze Historical Content Performance and Establish Your Content Marketing Goals
Follow this path to establish your content marketing goals:
- Zoom out and think about your company’s high-level business and marketing objectives. For instance, you might want to become a number solution for improving time management and have a specific marketing revenue goal for this year.
- Consider how content can contribute to these bigger goals, which are usually specific to your business.
- Identify the content marketing metrics that matter to you: What will success look like in numbers? Remember to define a particular success metric for every content piece you are planning to create.
Examples of primary content marketing metrics could include revenue generated or organic traffic and the number of leads. Other, secondary metrics could include organic traffic, ranking, and shares.
Step 3: Audit Your Existing Content
A content audit involves organizing, analyzing, and improving your existing content. It can help you get the most out of your existing pages while potentially saving resources.
It is important to understand what content your audience enjoys, in terms of both topics and formats.
Our research has found that 65% of companies that have been very successful with their content marketing in 2021 have run content audits at least twice a year. Some of the main benefits of a content audit are generating more organic traffic, ranking higher, and boosting engagement.
Step 4: Develop a High-Level Editorial Plan and Content Calendar
Planning your content helps you use your resources efficiently, identify which processes are taking longer than anticipated, and adjust your plans accordingly.
Prioritize Your Actions
An efficient plan priorities the most important tasks. This allows you to focus on what is most critical and easily testable.
This will help shield your strategy from any large-scale failures and give you the chance to try different techniques that could potentially improve your results.
You can choose to prioritize in multiple ways, including:
- Potential gains
- The flow of the campaign you are creating
- What resources you’ll need to create your campaigns
- Product or service launches
Step 5: Develop Your Content
Quality content should be your number one priority, not ranking quickly or producing more content. The following strategies will help you create quality content that your audience will remember.
Focus on Originality
If you want your content to be successful, it needs to be original. This means that you should invest in people and resources that can help you do unique research and come up with fresh ideas. Once you have those ideas, you need to execute them in a way that will capture the attention of your target audience.
It’s important to avoid publishing content that merely regurgitates what other people have already said about a topic. Instead, try to include your own unique experience, data, research, and opinion in every piece of content you create. This will help you build credibility and trust with your audience, laying the groundwork for future organic growth.
Master Your Content Marketing Strategy
Even though the ways that content is delivered to potential customers is always changing, the basic principles are still the same. Creating a great content marketing strategy is built on understanding the customer and having dependable data.
Even if you’re just getting started, don’t be intimidated by the process. Move at the optimal pace. For questions specific to the early stages of the business, consult our definitive guide to content marketing for startups.
As you become more experienced in content marketing, you will discover that automating various aspects of your content workflow and adding data will give you an advantage over the competition.
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