Content Marketing Strategy

How to Create a Content Marketing Strategy

What sets apart businesses who succeed at content marketing from those that get only average results? Often, it’s the fact that they have a content marketing strategy in place. Having a plan of action makes your marketing more focused and also measurable. Here’s20 a quick guide on how to create a content marketing strategy.

Step 1 – Define Your Goals

What do you want to achieve with your content marketing strategy? To increase organic traffic to your site? Grow your social media following? Generate more leads?

Decide on the main goal and then set a few secondary goals. Remember that your content marketing strategy goals should support your business mission.

Step 2 – Set Your Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)

Following from your goals, establish your main KPIs. You will be measuring your success against them to determine the performance of your campaign during every step of the way. Some essential KPIs you may want to track include:

• Organic website traffic
• Search ranking
• New email subscribers
• Social media likes and shares
• Page views
• Blog comments
• Backlinks from reputable sites

Your KPIs should always be specific and measurable. They need to be time-bound and actionable, too.

Step 3 – Target the Right Audience

Now it’s time to bring together all the data you have about your audience to make sure your content strategy will engage them. If you’re not confident in the data you have, run surveys and polls to find out what kind of content your audience would like to see more of.

Take the time to create buyer personas that define the key demographic data, goals and values, pain points, and preferred channels of your audience. Buyer personas enable you to create content that will elicit a genuine response in your audience.

Step 4 – Audit Your Content

You know your goals and you know your audience. But before you start creating more content, assess your existing content, including website, blog, and social media channels. Are there any content gaps? What type of content do you need more of?

Step 5 – See What Your Competitors Are Doing

Check out your competitors’ websites, blogs, and social presence. Note what content they are creating and how they use it to interact with your audience. Focus on more established competitors, those that you can learn from. It can give you a better idea of what you should be doing more of.

Step 6 – Choose Your Channels and Content Types

Maybe you want to focus on website content. Or maybe you want to grow your blog or social media following. Either way, narrow down the channels to the ones your audience is most active on—go back to your buyer personas for inspiration.

The channels you choose will influence the type of content you create. For example, Instagram is mostly visual eye-candy, while Twitter is mostly short and snappy text.

Step 7 – Create a Content Calendar

Plan out the content before you create it. Create outlines, scripts, and other guidelines you may need to keep your content consistent. Add all of these to your content calendar.

Step 8 – Create and Distribute Content

Whether you create your content in-house, outsource it, or a combination of both, publishing it manually across channels is time-consuming. Look into content automation tools to get your content out there with less effort.

Step 9 – Measure and Adapt

Your content marketing strategy doesn’t end when your content gets published. Keep track of your KPIs and adjust your strategy as you go to optimize results. That way you can make the most of it—you can grow your business one piece of content at a time.

Quick Summary

1. Define Your Goals
2. Setup Your Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)
3. Target the Right Audience
4. Audit Your Content
5. See What Your Competitors are Doing
6. Choose Your Channels and Content Types
7. Create a Content Calendar
8. Create and Distribute Content
9. Measure and Adapt