Why do Marketers Need to Create a Content Marketing Strategy
Content marketing helps you prepare and plan for robust, scalable and cost-effective sources of website traffic, engagements and new leads which ultimately translate into revenue for your business.
In short, If you have the resources to simply create even one single blog post that gets a steady amount of organic traffic, something like a free tool or an embedded link to an e-book will gradually generate leads and continue yielding results even long after you have Published.
Once you have a reliable source of traffic and leads from such content, your confidence of having developed it in the first place, will allow you the flexibility to experiment with other marketing tactics to generate revenue, like co-created content, sponsored stories, social media advertising, and distributed content. Your content will not only help educate your target prospects and generate awareness for your brand it will also help attract leads that have a higher propensity to convert into sales.
7 highly important steps that Marketers should make a note of, to Create a Content Marketing Strategy
1. Define your goal.
What’s your purpose of developing a content marketing plan? Exactly Why do you want to produce content, what will it mean for your business and how will it help increase your revenues ? Clearly defining your ambitions even before you begin planning will ensure that you’ll have an easier time determining what’s best for your strategy.
2. Take cognisance of you Consumer Dynamic.
To develop a plan that ultimately works, you will first need understand who your content’s target audience is most likely to be — also known as your buyer persona.
For those who are starting out or are new to marketing this step is extremely critical. Knowing your target audience, allows you to focus on producing more relevant and valuable content that your audience will want to read and engage with.
If you’ve been in the game for a while and you feel that your target may have changed. Ask yourself these questions before you begin, Do you want to target a new group of people or expand your current target market? Do you want to keep the same target audience?
Re-assessing your audience parameters by conducting market research every year is crucial to growing your audience.
3. Do a content audit.
It is easy to start out with simple blog posts, but before you can get down to creating other forms of content and investing time, effort and monies it would be good to consider exactly which formats of content that you will most likely focus on.
e.g. If you run a blog and have been posting stuff consistently for a year now, creating an e-book or a video that summarises key messages from all your blog posts into one ultimate guide or video would be one way to offer information in a different format.
Experienced marketers should make it a point to review content marketing efforts and the results from it in the last year by doing a content audit. This will help them understand what can be done differently in the coming year and gives them a sense of what new goals they would want to achieve.
4. Pick a content management system.
Invest in a system that helps you create, manage, and track your content, otherwise known as a content management system (CMS). A few important components of content management include content creation, content curation, content publication, and content analytics.
5. Brainstorm content ideas.
Now, it’s time to start coming up with ideas for your next content project.
Here are some tools to get the wheels turning:
Google Trends
Google Ads Keyword tool
HubSpot’s Website Grader
Feedspot / Feeder.co
BuzzSumo
Blog Post Headline Analyzer
TubeBuddy
Canva
6. Identify the types of content you want to create.
There are a many options out there for content formats you can create. Blogs, Infographics, Videos, Case Studies & Infographics are few most widely consumed content formats.
Think of which type of content will deliver your message to your audiences most effectively and on which platform.
7. Publish and manage your content.
Your content marketing plan should go beyond the types of content you’ll create be sure to also cover how you will eventually organize and schedule your content. With the help of an editorial calendar, you’ll be on the right track for publishing a well-balanced and diverse content library on your website. Then, create a social media content calendar so you can promote and manage your content on other sites.
Many of the ideas you think of will be evergreen — they’re just as relevant months from now as they are today. That being said, you shouldn’t ignore timely topics either. While they may not be the bulk of your editorial calendar, they can help you generate spikes of traffic.
Most people count on incorporating popular holidays such as New Year’s and Diwali in their marketing efforts, but you don’t have to limit yourself to these important marketing dates.
If there are events that might appeal to your audience, it could be worth publishing content on your blog or on social media around this period as well.
Content Strategy Examples
To understand what a content strategy is, it’s probably helpful if we explore some examples of real-life content strategies based off a few various business goals.
To start, let’s explore an example of a content strategy used for SEO purposes (with the ultimate goal of attracting new prospects to a website).
Evernote’s blog offers a wealth of knowledge around the topic of productivity. The blog post, How To Stay Disciplined When Times Are Tough, made me laugh out loud — and then incentivized me to grab a pen and write down some of the tips I liked best.
But why is a company that sells a note-taking app writing about discipline?
Because it’s how we found their website, when we searched “How to stay disciplined” on Google.
Evernote is a good example of a content strategy used to attract new leads. People interested in reading content related to productivity are likely the same people interested in downloading Evernote’s note-taking product (because what’s better than a to-do list for helping you stay on-task?).
On the contrary, if Evernote’s marketing team simply created content for the sake of increasing traffic — like publishing “Our 10 Favorite Beyonce Songs” — it wouldn’t be considered a content strategy at all; it would just be content.
A strategy needs to align content with business goals — in Evernote’s case, the strategy aligns content (blog posts on productivity) with the business goal of attracting leads (people interested in note-taking) to their site.
