How to Create a Content Marketing Strategy

Creating a content marketing strategy allows you to put your business in front of relevant people in a cost-effective manner.

It enables you to achieve your business goals using the power of valuable, useful content. The goal could be to increase brand awareness, maximize sales, capture leads, and more.

Building trust with the prospects is necessary if you want them to do business with you. Targeted and high-quality content allows you to do that.

Importance of Creating a Content Marketing Strategy

Did you know that 70% of digital marketers are actively using content marketing to promote their businesses? So, if you aren’t, you’ll most probably lag behind your competitors.

Content allows you to go beyond the traditional marketing tactics and connect with your potential customers personally. You can address your audience’s pain points by offering helpful content, building trust with them. And, trust is an asset that can bring you the most conversions.

But, you’ll have to put some effort into creating an effective content marketing strategy. Let’s see how you can do that.

Define Your Goals

Defining your goals is imperative if you want to reap the benefits of content marketing. Otherwise, how would you measure, analyze, and improve your results? Moreover, a goal gives you a sense of direction and keeps you motivated.

Ask yourself “what’s your aim of producing content or what do you want to achieve?” So, have a clear goal in mind before diving into content creation.

Create Your Buyer Persona

Creating content for the general public will not only drain your resources, but it won’t bring enough conversions either. Why? Because your audience is too wide.

Attracting people that are interested in your business brings more leads and eventually profits for your business.

If it feels overwhelming, you can get help from a reputable content marketing agency.

Choosing the Type of Content

Most content marketers use blogging to educate, inform, and eventually convert their audience.

While a blog offers a great way to address the pain points of prospects, there are other ways to effectively attract people as well.

For instance, you can curate an email marketing strategy to nurture leads and get them to act on an offer. You can use video, infographics, eBooks, etc. to add value to your prospects’ lives and build trust with them.

Generate Content Ideas

Choosing your content topics, whether they be for a blog or a video, is a key part of a content marketing strategy. You don’t want to create content that no one wants to consume.

As a business, you want to write on topics that can prove to be profitable down the road. But, how do you do that?

There are a few useful tools that tell you the search volumes of keywords. Find those keywords in your industry and produce high-quality content around them.

What’s My SERP is a great content idea generator tool. It shows you the search volume of the keywords you want to target.

All you have to do is put a keyword into Google search and it will pull out a list of keywords that you can confidently target to attract prospects.

Another great way of generating content ideas is by using Google’s autocomplete. It’s effective because Google shows only those phrases that are being searched on it.

Let’s see what we get with the term “content marketing”.

Using these keywords in your blog posts will get you visitors that are searching for them.

Not only that, Google’s “related searches” section at the end of the search results page is an awesome source of profitable keywords as well.

Create a Content Calendar

Your content marketing strategy should include a detailed plan of when and where you want to post your content.

If you are not planning your content, you’re making a content marketing mistake. A plan keeps you motivated and consistent.

How do you create a content calendar?

You can use a content calendar tool like Google Calendar to pre-schedule your content pieces. It’s a basic content planning tool, especially helpful when you don’t have a lot of content to schedule.

But, if you want to produce a lot of content and have a team to manage, CoSchedule would be a great option.

Market and Spread Your Content

Sure, you can wait for your content to get ranked in search engines like Google and YouTube, but that would take time.

In addition to publishing blog posts, identify social media channels that can get you relevant eyeballs and post content on them regularly.

Email marketing provides a great return on investment; use it to accomplish your marketing goals. Use an email marketing tool like Mailchimp to automate your content spread.

Analyze Your Content

Creating high-quality, SEO-friendly content is only part of the equation. If you want to get the most out of it, you’d need to keep on evaluating and updating it.

Getting traffic on your website is great. But, is the traffic relevant? Is it helping you accomplish your marketing goals?

It’s important to analyze your content for bounce rate, conversions, and dwell time (the time a visitor spends on your page). No business model would want its website visitors to leave before taking profitable action, right?

You can use Google Analytics to keep yourself informed about your content’s performance. The metrics it shows will help you modify your content marketing strategy for better results.

Conclusion

Your content marketing strategy should be focused on your marketing goals and outline your prospects’ needs.

Identifying your audience and targeting them with high-quality content is key to any successful content marketing strategy.

Brainstorming content ideas is also important as you can only attract people to your business if you talk about what they are searching for.

So, perform keyword research, produce high-quality content around those keywords, maintain a content calendar, and keep analyzing your content for better results.