A content marketing strategy is a must for every business, even a small one-person outfit.
The reason is simple. It’s a competitive world out there and your business needs to stand out so that your target audience can find you, learn more about your products and/or services and feel good about engaging with your brand.
An effective content marketing strategy can:
- Attract visitors or followers
- Generate sales leads
- Drive purchases and revenue
- Generate brand awareness and engagement
- Educate your audience
- Build trust
Before we take a deep dive into how to create a content marketing strategy, let’s first look at what content marketing actually involves.
What is content marketing?
Content marketing essentially helps a business plan cost-effective ways to create, publish and promote various forms of content (audio, visual and written) to generate website traffic, increase the number of sources through which leads can be generated and ultimately increase revenue. Examples of content types include blogs, emails, podcasts, social media posts and videos.
In a nutshell, a content strategy should help you achieve your business goals.
Five steps to create a content marketing strategy
Your aim should be to build strong relationships with your target audience by delivering a consistent stream of high-quality content that is relevant to them. Think of it as a long-term strategy in which content is tailored to your audience’s specific needs – and which resonates with them through every phase of the sales funnel (even post-purchase).
Even if you’re starting out in business, your focus should be on high quality content. This will help you build trust with new audiences, establish a strong reputation and enable readers or followers differentiate you from the competition. Quality counts – every time.
Step 1: Identify your target audience and the best content types to reach them
Who are you creating content for? Customers from different demographics will use different platforms and their buying habits may vary, so your content type needs to cater for different audiences and meet their needs wherever they are along their sales journey.
For example, Tik Tok may be the best way to engage with a younger audience while FaceBook, blogs on your website and email marketing may be better for other buyers.
If your business goal is to increase brand awareness on a more general scale, your content strategy should focus on SEO to increase your online visibility.
Step 2: Identify your audience’s needs
You need to understand your audience’s needs and tailor your content accordingly.
For example, someone who is considering buying a product from you will be interested in content that discusses the benefits of that particular item, whereas a customer who has already made a purchase is likely to appreciate a ‘how-to’ video tutorial on the product.
Someone who is investigating options and doing some research will find a case study useful. It’s about matching your audience’s needs with targeted, useful and engaging content.
Step 3: Identify your own communication strengths
Prefer facing a computer screen rather than a camera lens? Are you more comfortable with the written or spoken word rather than an audio-visual presentation? Focus on your strengths and if necessary, you can always outsource jobs like copywriting and creative content production to experts.
Step 4: Use data to inform your content strategy and measure results
Your website analytics should be a key element in the creation of your content marketing strategy. Where do most of your referrals come from? How are your social media channels performing? Are the search engines a big factor in how people find you online?
This will help prevent time and money being wasted on creating content that won’t hit the mark.
Data analysis is also crucial in unpacking the performance of your published content. Use the information to track progress against your business goals and revise and adjust your strategy as necessary.
Step 5: Plan a content calendar
As mentioned earlier, a content marketing strategy is a long-term endeavour. A calendar will help you plan your topics, the timing of how the content is to be released, who is responsible and how each piece of content performs after it has been distributed.
A calendar is particularly helpful when you are publishing and promoting content on multiple channels.
Step 6: Produce high quality content
Whether it’s a written blog, an opinion piece for an external website, a video, a podcast, TikTok video, an Instagram post, FaceBook story or a Tweet – your content needs to be the best it can be. Remember, you should always look to extract maximum value from content by repurposing it into other types and sharing it.
A final word on creating a content marketing strategy
Whether you’ve got a start-up or an established business, a well-planned content strategy is a must. And it’s also a must to revisit your strategy once in a while to make sure it remains relevant, is innovative and engaging, answers your audience’s questions, provides them with solutions and whch ultimately supports leads, sales and customer satisfaction.