Content marketing is nowadays a buzzword but it can also help your company to get traffic to your website, build your image as an expert in the field, gain customers’ trust and much more.
You need a proper content marketing strategy to realize your company’s business goals. Once you have an idea on what you want to achieve and how you want to do it, you will be ready to create and distribute your content. Check out what your content marketing strategy should include!
Define your goals
It is not surprising that you should know the purpose of your content marketing activities. Only that way you can get a return on investment from it, and at the end that what matters in business. On the one hand, there are also goals that are hard to measure, like brand’s recognition or building trust, but you should anyway set up KPI’s based on goals.
Remember SMART goals criteria? Try to present your goals in a way that they are:
- Specific
- Measurable
- Achievable
- Relevant
- Time-bound
It will be easier to meet such goals and analyze your strategy performance.
Example: Increase organic traffic on a company’s blog of 100% during 12 months.
Do your research
It is worth to check out your competition. Find out with whom you are competing in search engine results. You can either follow content trends in your industry or fill the niche to reach a specific audience. Find out not only what kind of content your competitors publish but also how they distribute it.
Moreover, check out brands outside your industry. You can get inspired by any brand and adjust its ideas to your needs.
TOOL: SimilarWeb will help you identify your competitors besides the ones you are already familiar with.
Identify your audience
Before you start planning your content is it important to know for whom you will write articles or record podcasts. You can use information from your website and social media to analyze your current audience. Find out if the result matches with your desired target group.
Create a marketing persona (a profile of an ideal client) to realize how to communicate with your potential customers. You can prepare a few personas, do not limit yourself. That will help you look at your target group as a group of people with desires, needs, interests, problems, etc.
TOOL: MakeMyPersona enables creating marketing personas.
Brainstorm content ideas
How to get content ideas?
- talk to your sales team and find out what are your customers’ problems
- find out what users are looking for in the search engines in the context of your products, brand or industry (AnswerThePublic)
- analyze what content performs best for any topic (BuzzSumo)
While brainstorming about content ideas keep in mind that you need to deliver value to your target group, solve their problems, entertain them, advise in the purchasing process and so on.
Popular types of articles:
- 10 ideas for …
- Buyer guide
- How-to
- Cheat sheet
- Comparison with competition
- Industry trends
Set up a plan
Now is the time to conceptualize your content plan. Use a calendar slide to schedule when do you want to publish every piece of content. An order should be logic so that your (let’s say) articles will be a part of a coherent story. If you don’t know where to begin, you can publish content according to a marketing strategy calendar. Start from more general topics, more educational and ones that build customer awareness in the field. Then, plan more detailed guides and products recommendations. That way you will have the time to create your brand’s image as an expert in the industry. Your content plan should be adjusted to your sales funnel. That way you can catch your audience at the best moment!
It is also the time to assume how much time you need for content creation, do you need help from your coworkers and in which aspects or if you should hire a new person to your team. Remember, that you will also need a workforce for content distribution. Take your time to create the most valuable content and maximize benefits from these efforts.
Distribute your content like a pro
Prepare also a strategy for content distribution. Use many channels to get to your target audience.
Take advantage of marketing automation to personalize content distribution. Via e-mail marketing or web push notification platforms you can create target campaigns to deliver content based on your knowledge about a given visitor. For example, send an article to a person who has already read in a given category of blog posts on your website.
Use social media for sharing your content. Choose the right platforms where your target group is active. You can post several times about once a piece of content but use different visuals: images, infographics, PowerPoint slides, videos.
Promote your content also on Facebook or LinkedIn groups if you think you can find there your audience. You can try out niche social media like Quora.
Remember: when you share any content on social media use facebook URL shortener like RocketLink to add pixels to links you share. That way you can retarget your ads to people who clicked a certain link. It is a great idea, for example, to present an offer to people who read your buyer’s guide.
And one more idea…
Redistribute! From time to time you can use your content again to reach another audience. You can, for example, update your older blog posts, record a podcast based on an article, create an e-book based on many articles – the sky is the limit!
PROTIP: When you share other content other than yours on social media you can still promote your own articles. With branded URL shortener you can embed a Call-to-Action modal with redirection to your blog. That way you win your traffic back. Pay attention to use this option for the content which is suitable for your blog posts.
Once you start publishing and distributing your content according to your plan do not forget about optimizing your strategy. Observe stats and analyze your performance to find out which content types work best for your audience. Let the content marketing strategy developed alongside with your viewers. Try out new forms of content and distribution to make the most of your efforts. Good luck!
