Are you ready to build a content marketing strategy? You’ll need one if you want to meet your content marketing goals, create phenomenal content experiences for your target audience, and build brand loyalty.
Sadly, most companies still don’t have a documented content strategy. According to 2018 research by the Content Marketing Institute, only 38% of B2C companies and 37% of B2B organizations have a written strategy. Let’s not make your business one of them. Instead, plan your strategy, write it down, execute it, measure it, analyze it, and tweak it. Rinse and repeat.
Before You Begin
I recently discussed the value of setting goals, creating your buyer personas, and doing some keyword research as the pre-strategy legwork. Now that you’ve laid down the foundation, you can build an effective content marketing strategy.
Moreover, this strategy will be an actual document you create that brings it all together to map out your content path. And simply by writing it down, you’re increasing your chance for success in reaching your marketing goals.
For starters, realize that no two content marketing strategies are the same. Your approach will depend on your business, goals, marketing needs, budgets, products/services, current customers, and potential customers. If you’re a small to mid-size business, your strategy will vary greatly from a Fortune 500 company. (However, you don’t need a big budget to do content marketing effectively.)
Think of your content marketing strategy as “an outline of your key business and customer needs, plus a detailed plan for how you will use content to address them,” says Content Marketing Institute. Although a one-size-fits-all content marketing strategy won’t work, you can ensure your strategy covers a few core steps.
5 Steps to Build a Content Marketing Strategy
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1. Know your audience.
Your content strategy should start with your audience first, as this drives everything else. Who are you writing content for—and why? First, think of one representative person rather than a large, homogenous group. Go beyond the basic demographics of occupation, gender, age, and education level and dig deeper. What worries her? Motivates her? What are her objections? Does what she want differ from what she really needs? How can your product or service help her? Once you’ve got a solid grasp on whom you’re writing for, then you can start developing content for every stage of the sales funnel.
2. Define your goals.
You need to identify what you want your content to accomplish. You might want to increase website traffic, build brand awareness, generate more leads, or boost customer loyalty and retention. Maybe you want to accomplish multiple goals. That’s okay, as long as you’ve got a specific strategy for each goal. Just be careful you don’t stretch your efforts to thin, especially if you’ve got limited resources. And make sure you set S.M.A.R.T. goals: Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Timely. For example, if you want to increase your newsletter subscriber list, your goal might be “to increase the number of newsletter subscribers by 5% by the end of first quarter 2019.”
3. Map out your strategies and channels.
With audience in mind and goals in hand, how will you achieve each goal? You might determine you need a twice-weekly blog and a monthly newsletter. Or you want to create a better customer experience through explainer videos on your own YouTube channel. Perhaps you want to boost engagement through daily social media posts on key platforms. You might decide that creating gated content, like a few eBooks, will help meet your audience’s needs and your marketing goals. No matter what tactics will work best for your specific needs, you need to outline the specific actions you’ll take to achieve the goals you just set. And, you need to know how you’ll deliver this content on the right channel.
4. Measure your results.
Simply put, your goals dictate your metrics. Look at what you set out to achieve, as well as the strategies you’re using, to figure out how you’re going to measure your goals. Did your organic traffic jump 10 percent since the same time last year? Did the number of leads generated from blog posts double in a six-month time frame? Know what your baseline numbers were before you began your content marketing efforts so you can measure the results after you’ve begun, keeping in mind it takes months to build trust and grow your audience. Examples of what to measure include number of subscribers to your newsletter, comments/engagement on your blog, rank in Google searches, social media shares, marketing-qualified leads, program registrations, eBook downloads, and amount of revenue generated.
5. Refine your efforts.
The last step involves figuring out what’s working and what’s not. Look to the metrics you set up and review regularly—perhaps monthly. What content is resonating with your audience and why? Here’s where you play to your strengths and minimize your weaknesses. When you tweak your strategy, you’re optimizing your results for a better outcome. For instance, if you discover that your case studies are resonating but your social media posts aren’t, tweak until you get the results you want. You might feature case studies more frequently in your newsletter and dig into the analytics of your social media to uncover ways to strengthen your social presence. When you know better, you do better.
Now that you’ve created a content marketing strategy, what’s the next step? You’ll need to know what to write about and then plan content to deliver throughout the buyer’s journey—both of which I’ll talk about in upcoming blogs. To make sure you don’t miss either of these posts, sign up for my newsletter at the top of the page.
