Do you know, According to Content Marketing Institute (CMI), content marketing generates over 3x as many leads as outbound marketing and costs 62% less?
Content marketing is the most effective, reliable, and result-oriented marketing strategy of the Internet era. The consumers from B2B and B2C industry heavily depends upon the research before making purchasing decisions. Therefore, they are more likely to buy from the organizations helping them make purchase decisions through valuable content.
Consumers expect brands to help, guide, and educate them, making content Marketing an incredible marketing activity to build credibility, trust, and generate leads.
Even though it is crucial for businesses, research by CMI says that 63% of companies don’t have a documented content marketing strategy. One of the biggest reasons for this surprising number is the lack of knowledge. Even in a survey by Marketing charts, 64% of marketers said, “Learning how to build a content strategy is one of their greatest educational needs.”
Here are the 7 Steps method you need to follow to create your Content Marketing Strategy –
Step 1 – Determine your Goal
The first thing before starting any business or new strategy is to set the objectives and goals. Simon Sinek, in his Famous book, “Start with Why,” stresses over asking the “Why” before laying any foundation. Asking your “Why” gives you crystal clear clarity behind the objective of your content strategy.
The goal of creating a Content marketing strategy can be –
- Increasing website traffic.
- Attracting more high-quality leads to your website.
- Better conversions on the website.
- Improve SEO ranking of the website.
- Reduced marketing costs and better lead generation.
List down your goals to always keep track of your business hitting those goals.
2. Recognise your Target Audience
Next comes the Target Audience.
Each business has a different set of target audiences. Content marketing is all about providing value to your target customer. Therefore, identify your target audience and then create the content strategy according to their pain points, problems, and needs.
You can create a survey for your existing customers to understand the demographics of your target audience. The information you may need would be your customer’s
- Age
- Qualification
- Salary
- Profession
Or, if you have existing data of your customers, you can leverage it to understand your target audience. You can also use Google Analytics to understand the demographics in depth. In Google Analytics, go to Audience » Interests » Overview. You’ll see the market segments your web visitors fit into.
Once you have the above information, you can create your Buyer Persona. It is typically your customer avatar. Typical Buyers persona include –
- Customer’s pain points
- Challenges
- Sources of Information
3. Set your KPIs
To hit the goals created in the first step, you need to measure and track your efforts and activities. To do so, you have to specify your Key performing indicators. Based on these indicators, you can follow the ROI of your content marketing activities. KPIs will be the numbers your will associate with your goals. Your KPIs maybe –
- Building up a certain number of new subscribers for the email lists by this quarter.
- Generating a specific number oh High quality leads this month
- Increasing the SEO rank of the website by a particular number this quarter.
It is also essential to keep track of the expenditures to measure the ROI of the campaigns. Keep an eye on the customer acquisition cost to have measurable efforts of the Content marketing strategy.
4. Content Channel & Content-Type
It is essential to identify the platforms where your target audience spends most of their time. Just randomly creating content and sharing it on various media won’t be effective. The presence of your audience depends a lot upon the nature of the business.
For example, if you have a B2B business, most of your target audience will be on Linkedin and Twitter, and if you are a B2C, then your audience may be hanging on Facebook and Instagram.
Once finalizing the content channels, it would be easier to decide upon the content types. Then, based upon your customer types and likings, you can complete the content type you want to focus, and get the best results.
There can be multiple content types like blogs, podcasts, videos, infographics, etc. You can also repurpose the content in various forms by working on pillar content at once.
5. Content Calendar
Creating a content calendar is essential for creating a proper content marketing strategy. A content calendar helps you to stay organized. You can schedule content for each platform in advance. It ensures that you don’t miss any important dates.
You can use Google Calendar. In addition, multiple scheduling tools like Buzzsumo, Spoutsocial, etc., help you schedule your content on various platforms.
Creating Content
To create content, you need to figure out what your target audience is looking for and trending in your industry. Then, you can use tools like Answer the Public, Google Trends, Quora, Linkedin, etc.
You can easily find out the pain points of your target audience, and what conversations are going on in your industry using these tools. Then, answering the solutions to their problems will deliver the maximum value to your audience.
You can also reverse engineer your competitors. Analyze their content strategy using tools like Ubersuggest and identity what topics are working for them, and start creating content for it.
6. Distribute
Now your content is ready to serve your audience, but how will it reach its target audience?
Distribution!
Creating top-quality content and not focusing on delivering it is a sure sign of a failed content strategy. Here are the ways how you can distribute your content –
- Use your mailing list and send them valuable content to the right people
- Leverage the social media platforms to distribute and repurpose the content.
- Create micro-content of the pillar content to bring people to the pillar content.
7. Measure
To determine the success of any marketing campaign or activity, it is essential to measure the outcomes. The KPIs you have set initially will help you identify the strategy’s points of improvement and success. You can use the following tools to measure the KPIs –
- Google Analytics, to measure the web traffic, high-performing articles, and content.
- Social media analytics tools like Buzzsumo measure social media sharing and success.
- Tools like SEMrush to track the SEO rankings of your website.
Track the outcomes and performance of the strategy, analyze the gaps, and tweak the strategy to optimize for maximum results.
That’s it! This is your success formula for creating a high-performing Content strategy to generate unlimited leads, traffics, and sales.
What is your current content marketing strategy?