What Is a Content Marketing Strategy

What Is a Content Marketing Strategy?

A content marketing strategy is a plan that defines how you will create and distribute content that promotes your business or cause. It’s a component of your content strategy, which in turn is a part of your digital content marketing strategy. Sounds a tiny bit confusing? It’s not. Keep reading to fully understand what a content marketing strategy is and how it can help you.

Why You Need a Content Marketing Strategy

Content marketing is an effective way to promote a business and engage with your audience by consistently providing valuable information. It supports search engine optimization (SEO), blogging, social media marketing, email marketing, and other digital marketing strategies. For many businesses, these strategies run parallel to more traditional marketing approaches, and in some cases, have even replaced them.

There are many types of content and many channels on which you can publish it. Types of content include website articles, blog posts, social media posts, press releases, infographics, videos, e-books, reports, and more. These can be distributed across a variety of channels including social networks, content platforms, other websites and blogs in your industry.

With so many types of content and content marketing channels around, it’s hard to keep track of things and maximize results without a clear strategy in place.

What is a Content Marketing Strategy – Advantages

Advantages of having a content marketing strategy – More than giving your efforts a clear direction, a content marketing strategy comes with several other benefits. It helps you achieve the following:

• Collaborate more easily with external marketing teams, for example when outsourcing parts of your content.
• Segment your audience more effectively and deliver specific content to each segment.
• Track progress and measure it against your goals every step of the way.
• Optimize costs by identifying content needs and creating the right content and publishing it at the right time.
• Map out your steps so that you always know what you have to do next and so save time.
• Define your audience and content better to deliver more valuable content.
• Manage multiple marketing channels more effectively by developing action plans for each.

What is a Content Marketing Strategy – Core Elements

As with most marketing strategies, content marketing generates the best results when you known your audience, set specific, measurable goals, and define the channels you will be using. Content marketing strategies are scalable—you can keep them simple or make them more complex depending on your needs.

With that in mind, most content marketing strategies tend to include a few core components:

• Audience analysis such as buyer personas.
• Content analysis, including analysis of your current content performance.
• Competitive analysis to see what your competitors are up to.
• Keyword research to understand what type of content people want.
• Key performance indicators like traffic, clicks, views, likes, or shares that help you measure the performance of your content.

What is a Content Marketing Strategy – Summary

Creating a content marketing strategy is not hard or time-consuming. Whether you target one channel or several, taking the time to write down your content marketing goals and define your approach will improve your marketing. You may have heard that saying, “Falling to plan is planning to fail.”

• Audience Analysis
• Content Analysis
• Competitive Analysis
• Keyword Research
• Key Performance Indicators

Additional Content Marketing Strategy Resources

• Google Trends – shows what the world is searching for. It analyzes the popularity of top search queries in Google Search across regions and languages, and presents graphs to compare a query’s search volume over time.
• Market Finder – uncovers new opportunities to take your business global. It analyzes monthly searches, popular market trends, disposable income per capita and number of internet users by country to help you prioritize where your products, services and content will appeal most.