The 3 Basic Steps to Establish a Marketing Content Strategy
You have an idea or business with material that you feel should be elevated, shared, and appreciated. So, what do you do? It isn't enough to simply have a concept if you aren't sure exactly how to expand and make a profit.
You need a marketing strategy, but moreover, you need to strategize how to advertise your business plans.
It is always helpful to look at your marketing strategy to make sure your content is relevant, effective, and practical to your potential clients and prospects. Let's examine the best avenues for content marketing strategies and get to the bottom line of the calculated plan for your future business goals.
What is a content marketing strategy?
A content marketing strategy is a strategic method used to navigate the application and circulation of your ideologies in a way that will captivate, secure, and maintain an assembly of your best clientele.
You will essentially be creating assessments that will help you properly coordinate your theories and systems in the most precise way using content such as media, video, audio, malleable pieces of advertisement, and more. There are key points and performance milestones that you need to assimilate so you can captivate and conquer your finest content marketing strategy.
Do you need a content marketing strategy?
The short answer is: duh.
An up-and-coming business might make the mistake of assuming content marketing strategies can be overlooked, but the fact of the matter is that 91% of companies were already using them in the year 2020, and at this point have a leg up in your chosen industry. It's no surprise that these plans are genuinely cost-effective and practically necessary.
Successful content marketing strategies keep everyone on the same wavelength. It warrants your team to feel the vibe of your idea which enlists a motivated approach and dedicated contribution to your overall vision.
Without a set-in-stone strategy, you're just pulling a Hail Mary and taking your great potential for granted. You'll find yourself frantically grasping at straws trying to figure out your next step.
You could eventually fall off the edge and lose everything you worked hard for. This is your baby; you have to nurture and cater to it!
There are several objectives and areas of peeking attention in marketing, and you'll find many articles outlining every painstaking step-by-step movement. Nevertheless, the entire breakdown of a successful content marketing strategy begins with planning, is enforced with organization, and is finalized with continuous maintenance.
1. Plan
Sure, you have a great idea, but you will need to have faith in your business to a fault. After all, if you don't know the ins and outs of your craft, how will you expect anyone else to?
For continuous and unwavering improvement, aimlessly slapping your strategy together or making assumptions will not provide you with any sort of assured progress. Once you have a firm understanding of what you want to do and what you stand for, you can begin to seek out key performance indicators to predict precisely where you will end up and how to get there.
Know Your Business
The more you step into your true brand statement as a creator, the more powerful you will appear to your colleagues, viewers, and competition. Users will want to back the presentation from the company that appears the most confident and supports their shared beliefs.
Being confident in the products and services you provide will instill the positive attitude needed to begin the content creation process.
Be specific.
Ponder the authentic and thorough drive of your business. Remember what you're trying to accomplish and consider what the success of your company means to you. It's best to dodge those ambiguous expressions such as, "I want to change the world.". You will need to dig deeper and think rather philosophically at this point. Seek out the whys and hows of your world-changing mentality.
Practice brainstorming about your environment. Does your idea help solve anything? Is your idea unique? Is there a strong presence of your idea already on the market? Why would someone choose your idea over someone else's? What personality do you want your idea to portray?
Why do you want to increase the visibility of your principles, is it truly attainable, and if so, what will be the approach you take to secure your prosperity? If your ideas begin wavering from the light of achievement, it may be wise to go back to the drawing board until you've undoubtedly figured out the particulars of your desired outcome.
Business Goals
Knowing what you want from your efforts in content marketing is an integral part of setting your business priorities straight. Your goals set the course for how you forecast your future achievements.
Your goals take the embodiment of the broader objectives and align them with the overall drive of your content marketing.
Over time and analysis, you will start to set long-term and short-term goals for your growing business. These may include:
Increasing product prices
This could involve increasing prices by a certain percentage over a distinct amount of time.
Increase the number of visitors to your company website
For example, adding an average of 100 more viewers to your blog
Hiring more help
Like employing 3 new media managers in the next quarter
Generate leads for your email marketing
These are individuals from your target audience that are willing to share their contact information with you for more quality content.
When you're entirely aware of your purpose and business goals, you can begin to contemplate your individualized objectives. Research the best pathways for expansion based on your idea and implement the most useful areas of business branding.
This next part will teach you about a critical part of your branding that will be a fun aspect to sink your teeth into so your personality can take off.
Branding
With the aforementioned techniques, you can comprehensively establish a branding identity that can capture the eye of your desired prospects.
By now you've been able to determine the kind of charisma you want your target audience to empathize with. This means creating a collection of elements that totally encompasses your grand scheme using the smallest attention to detail. In simpler terms, this is the logo, color scheme, motto, and overall face of your message.
It's important to be unique in your branding identity mockup. You can take a peek at what your adversaries are taking advantage of, but make sure your customer persona stands out from the rest.
Construct visual aspects that directly affect the initial judgment of your content. In the end, it's all about your first impression.
Know Your Audience
It's understandable to make the broad and ambitious statement that you want everyone to be a part of your audience. However desirable, if you want a successful content strategy, it isn't a very pragmatic definition for your target audience
Set the intention of seeking out a particular set of eyes. Who would be interested in what you're trying to do? Knowing the overall persona of your typical client will help you create relevant content marketing efforts.
First, check out your competitors. Whatever the nature of your business, there is or will be another one out there trying to do the same thing and provide the same benefits to their niche crowd.
Competitive research implores you to look into what type of techniques, images, search terms, taglines, and forums they're using, so you can expand on them. Figure out what they're missing. What could you do better? Conceptualize what you could be doing to pick up their slack.
Next, run an analysis of the demographic of your audience. Get a little personal and zoom in on the particulars of your clientele to give you a direction to point your user-generated content. Look for details like cultural groups, age ranges, genders, education levels, and economic characteristics.
Simply put, you should become familiar with your group of existing customers and potential customers by taking an even closer look at what they're into.
What are their usual lifestyle choices? What are their belief systems and closest values, ethics, and ideals? If they have a strong internet presence, inquire about their most trafficked sites and apps.
You can seek out this kind of information with just a little bit of research. Coupled with competitive research, you can use search engines to find blog posts, social media posts, articles, surveys, and main content formats that coincide with your key demographic.
What are they searching for? What sort of content do they engage with the most? What do they listen to? What do they watch? Where do they listen to and watch their content? What are their ambitions? What are they afraid of? What will turn them away?
With this bit of insight into their customer journey, you'll be able to utilize the proper social media channels, digital marketing, and email marketing to increase comprehensive customer satisfaction. Think of it as a sort of mental algorithm.
You will be able to encompass your branding around this information by giving your people specifically the content that they want to see and hear.
Will your onlookers be in an internet forum or social media site? If so, which ones? Maybe they're more of business card people. How simple or eccentric does your content need to be to really capture their eye? If your color palette included blue and green, what psychological message will that send them?
Let's say your business contains the aspect of a healthy food marketing sales team. The color yellow is thought to heighten one's appetite, and green shares connotations with being eco-friendly. On the other hand, the color blue isn't seen much in food, (other than blueberries, of course) so combining blue hues in a food marketing strategy will likely drive clients away.
Have a Support System
If you haven't already, take some time to think about whether or not you need to outsource professionals or keep in-house professionals like a chief marketing officer to help you produce content. Face it, no matter how attached you are to your business, you're going to need a support system.
The most successful and profitable corporations understand the importance of encompassing themselves with like-minded individuals who are smarter or better than them in their chosen trade. If you choose to scale your business, you’ll need a devoted content team to help you push a successful content marketing mission statement.
This is done by employing and recruiting the best content marketers.
Your marketing team will be the group capable of keeping your business goals and marketing tactics relevant and consistent. They will hold the important content marketing strategies dear and ultimately drive the business to grow further by governing all your content marketing goals and procedures.
Documented Content Marketing Strategy
A documented content strategy (DCS) is a blueprint of the business objectives you want to accomplish with content, and the approach you’ll take to get there. This isn't the same as a content calendar, which we'll get more into later.
This documented strategy will dive into all of the important content marketing assets that we just covered.
You (and/or your content team) will go over your plans and objectives and iron out all the details based on everything you've encountered through your research and write down the content marketing tactics and strategies you plan to enforce to achieve your principles.
Don't miss any details when you outline your DCS. Record every idea you have, whether good or bad and you can always revise when you find out what doesn't work or isn't practical. At the end of the day, you'll be kicking yourself if you forget a key part of your planning due to the simplest oversight.
Build SEO Enhanced content
Search Engine Optimization (or SEO) is the practice of improving your site to the point where visibility is increased when potential viewers use search engines to find services relevant to your business.
Search engines use software to sift through each website and accumulate information. They put this data in certain categories which help you specifically come across what you're looking for when you type in your query.
Algorithms evaluate sites by their set categories and use organic search analysis to determine the order in which pages should appear when you type in an inquiry and hit "enter" on your keyboard.
For instance, if you have read a book cover to cover that had a billion chapters, you would be able to pinpoint precisely which chapter has the information you're looking for. These same types of algorithms can assess which pages give the viewer the most relevant content based on their search.
SEO begins by building content that will improve your rankings based on the organic search. This is done by assembling the proper keywords into your own site and content, writing, recording, and publishing quality content regularly, and using digital tools to make sure your hyperlinks and sub-content are permeated with keywords.
Content Writing
Your content writer(s) will be managing the various types of productive online content in the form of informative and engaging articles, blog posts, press releases, social media posts, e-books, and any other written content used to help professionally showcase your brand.
Using content management systems. Your organization of content writers will research various topics relative to your industry and views as a business to draw in prospective viewers
Content Management Systems
A CMS, or Content Management System, is a tool that allows you to write content for a website without the hassle of coding. When it comes to small businesses that might not necessarily be tech savvy, this kind of software helps them write, and store images, imbed videos, links, and other content to their site pages.
Content Management Systems are versatile and easy to use. Many of them have features like syncing capabilities that provide you with the ability to work together with your team of content writers. They also have a media library where you can rummage through an assortment of pictures and other correspondence, so you don’t have to shift your focus to your web browser as much.
When a business utilizes a CMS to write, manage, and publish their websites, it diminishes the dependence on software developers, web designers, or other front-end developers who make direct changes to a page using several coding and programming languages.
2. Organize
Each facet of your marketing objectives needs to be taken from the big picture and given a certain time and place to act upon, so you won't run into any surprises along the way. It's imperative to keep your affairs in order so nothing slips through the cracks or gets lost in translation.
Your team will need to regularly check and evaluate the organization of your entire perspective, as financial and cultural events can be everchanging. In the event of a market crash or other great global event (2020 let us see what that could be like firsthand), you have to be on your toes and know when and where every idea has been scheduled or filed.
Marketing Content Calendar
By either creating your own or utilizing actual marketing project calendar software with asset management and proofing tools, you can build a marketing calendar (a.k.a. editorial calendar) that circulates your needs and realistic long-term and short-term goals. Your marketing calendar should contain scheduled activities that take pre-planned events like holidays into account.
It makes sense for your marketing schedule to contain detailed start dates and due dates for each individualized project, like the publishing of articles or blog posts or the launching of your newest idea or campaign.
You will have to use your market research expertise to proactively think about planning events far in advance, so you don't have to scramble last minute to keep up with the rest of the world.
The best content calendar will have ease of access. This might include the ability to sync with other users to keep everyone aligned and simpatico according to their own individual agendas. Likewise, it would be prudential to utilize the ability to filter through categories and teams so each department can construct a focused view of its most important job functions.
Being able to view your objectives this way will provide you with a visualized outlook for your clear-cut checkpoints along the way. Furthermore, when you can actually see your plans taking wing, you gain more confidence in the longevity of your business outlook. Take it piece by piece and analyze each angle for consideration in terms of time, management, and practicality.
Content Audit
At some point, you could introduce a content audit on your current marketing tactics. A content audit can provide an attractive framework for the future of your content creation. It allows you to refer back to your previous content engagement so you can plot your next step.
A content audit in its simplest form is just compartmentalizing all of your strategies tried over time and finding which ones are flush and which ones are bust. Over time being a busy business owner, you might not be aware that a simple keyword can increase the number of web visitors to your site.
In this case, you can optimize your keyword research from an audit that shows you which keywords in your articles bring the most traffic. This can make the difference between 200 visitors last week to 500 next week.
Another great and probably obvious benefit to content auditing is that it shows you which content your viewers like or dislike the most. You'll find more interaction with certain features than you will with others, and from there you can determine which ones you need to lay to rest for now and which ones to push.
Even more so, you can see when these encounters occurred the most frequently so you're aware of what time of day, month, year, or occasion to pursue your next operation.
Once you've progressed and shown promising performance, you'll be able to analyze past engagement. With historical content, you can create statistical figures which project the future of your important data such as profits, and level them with your chosen channels of client engagement.
Create Topic Clusters
You can ascertain a more frequent user interface by creating sub-topics of your main idea. Creating topic clusters means thinking of subject matter that harmonizes with your general business impression.
Your pillar page will give readers the satisfaction of clicking through your main point. Then, the related content within cluster topics has a better chance of persuading them to make further use of your product.
Topic clusters will make it easier for users of other sites to find you. Here's an example:
You're in the business of organic cat food. (Just go with it.) After using the keyword "organic" or "food" in a search engine, a true-to-type vegan finds their commonly frequented blog post about organic vegan meal delivery. They begin merrily sifting through a company's brand when they come across a hyperlink highlighting your content about organic cat food.
Imagine this die-hard vegan has a fur baby who they've been dying to coerce into the organic food lifestyle. What a coincidence! Just like that, your page was a part of a content cluster that gained you a potential customer and increased your overall customer journey and satisfaction.
You can use these techniques on your own pages by adding hyperlinks and sub-topics that lead to your personal posts to increase the search engine optimization of your content.
As we mentioned earlier, search engine optimization is literally the entire drive dedicated to providing your viewers with your relevant content based on what they want to search for. Content clusters give you a chance to change those keywords up a bit so you can better match the content they’re looking for.
You can exploit your content audit in a way that will show you which of your subtopics are viewed more, and which ones are hardly ever visited. This will help you get rid of the topic clusters that could be damaging your marketing strategy.
Keep up With Your Milestones
You have the ambition, the plan, the schedule, and the team. Now it's time to act. To actively push your content marketing strategy, you have to stay on top of all of your moving pieces and make certain that everything is going according to your pre-proposed and produced content.
Be certain that you don't miss any of the objectives of your content marketing goals. If you have inherited a calendar to remind you of all the major bullet points you've outlined, there shouldn't be any excuse not to conquer them.
Social Media Strategy
Social media platforms are brimming with tried-and-true content marketing tactics. Use your prior personal knowledge of your audience to implicate the most comparable implications of social media.
Your potential customers enjoy expressing their individuality, networking and connecting with peers, discussing their ideas and opinions, sharing their favorite content, and expanding their careers.
These days, social media platforms grow massively more popular and plentiful. The best networking platforms keep up with the revolving world and constantly provide updates and new features to boost their appearance in the industry of overwhelming choices.
While various, maybe not every type of platform is best for your content marketing strategy. There are many types of social media, and each inundates certain variables that are important for some, but not all. The best and most popular examples include:
With over 2.93 billion worldwide users, Facebook is the most commonly used social media platform out there. Facebook provides an assortment of ways to interact including the sharing of posts, photos, polls, recommendations, and video sharing, the creation of business pages, marketplace sales, games, news, and even dating. 68% of American adults have reported using Facebook regularly.
Much like Facebook, Twitter contains a variety of ways to explore your content marketing. Twitter has become more of a beacon for breaking news posts and celebrity interactions; however, you will see that you can still engage an audience with a witty tweet and connections with popular (or as the kids say, viral) posts and users.
This platform focuses on the posting and sharing of visual content rather than written content. Like the platforms mentioned previously, it allows users to interact with posts with likes, comments, shares, and follows. Many visually focused brands like clothing or food-based businesses use Instagram to capture their niche with appetizing and eye-catching photos, videos, and reels.
YouTube
YouTube is an entire platform used for posting short and long videos. With a wide variety of content to search for, the mass of YouTube videos varies from instructional and educational tutorials, recordings of individual experiences in everyday life, recorded podcasts, commercials, news updates, and entertainment for all ages. You can create content and use this platform to captivate your audience visually for hours on end.
TikTok
This is one of the newer platforms which took the internet by storm. A lot like YouTube, this app takes advantage of video content to allure viewers and enjoyers of many different types of content. Most of its users are full of a younger audience, so keep that in mind when engaging in your marketing strategy. TikTok contains the ability to upload compelling content in the form of short videos (up to 3 minutes long) and a majority of the content is trendy and conforms to a group of individuals typically 35 and younger.
This is an interesting social media site, as it is one of the only popular sites considered to be a professional social media platform focused solely on networking. It has made a name for itself as one of the best ways for professional career advancement, job opportunities, and branding growth. You can post job propositions here, gain the respect and attention of your competitors, and likely be able to employ quality performers and prospects to assist in the marketing of your business.
Spreading nearly equally across all age groups, Pinterest is a popular social media site amongst women. It is known majorly for its content containing inspirational brands in fashion, DIY, quotes, lifestyle, and décor. Users can "pin" their favorite content in a categorical manner to view later and make use of its purpose.
What's Best for You?
If you've used content audits to find that your most frequent visitors prefer to watch your video content, you might think about creating a YouTube channel and TikTok profile. This can encourage your company to create content that visually represents your brand and keeps your client base interested.
This might entice the customers of a business that is focused on influence or toys and products especially targeted towards an adolescent group of individuals who will want to share the content with their friends and parents.
If you have a food-based business, it makes more sense to create a Facebook and Instagram page. Facebook would hold your business page for customer interaction, ratings, reviews, order processing, and sales, while Instagram will focus thoroughly on the visual representation of your brand. On Instagram, you're sure to appeal to foodies with mouthwatering pictures of your best dishes and treats.
For a clothing company, it would be smart to create content for Instagram and Pinterest pages. The visual aspect of these platforms will allure the target audience into following, pinning, sharing, and otherwise interacting with the company responsible for their favorite fashion line. It would be safe to assume they would also visit your articles and blog posts so they can read all about what makes your styles unique and personal.
Regardless of the direction of your business, it will be beneficial to create a LinkedIn account either professionally or as an individual looking to improve your network. As an employer, you can scroll through potential workers' profiles to see their strengths, experiences, previous jobs, and future aspirations. You will be able to create content that will attract other businesses like yours with the same goals and create a healthy environment for competitive marketing.
Podcasts
Podcasts are usually audio but are sometimes also visually recorded for users who prefer to view their content. These are episodes of spoken word which focus on your specific theme. You can imagine podcasts are listened to by individuals who don't have time to physically sit and read content from blogs or e-books. They're found on many different platforms like Spotify, Apple Music, and other audio streaming services.
Case Studies
A case study can take the form of an e-book, blog post, or podcast.
This is a form of content that will allow you to use real-life proclamations from a person or group of people. In turn, it could give credibility to how your product will help and bring purpose to a community based on a study performed.
For example, you can collect a quality dataset about people who have animals and allergies to promote a business based on the reduction of airborne household pollutants.
E-books
E-Books are much what they sound like. They're tools that your website visitors can download usually after they submit their contact information in exchange for more of the same content. They're longer and more concentrated than blog posts but will ultimately engage your reader with more information they're interested in. This interaction has the potential to attract even more visitors to your website.
These in-depth versions of your blogs are created mainly to bring knowledge and information to certain sub-topics that circulate your brand. After reading your main content, a client will likely want a comprehensive collection of similar educational reads for their future use.
3. Maintain
You've been able to intricately deliberate on the ins and outs, the hows and why's, and the best and worst parts of your business plans, marketing strategies, and content creation. You've surrounded yourself with the right people, found the best avenues for success, documented your well-thought-out plans, and now your business plans and existing content have made a name for yourself.
At this point, it’s essential to keep it up and properly maintain your path to victory. Your baby company is now a child, able to perform many tasks on its own and speak for itself, but you are still there to monitor and nurture your ideas and make sure it reaches its maturity and ensure nothing bad happens. Or at least, if something unfortunate happens, you're there to pick up the pieces and keep moving without missing a beat.
Stay Relevant
Inevitably, your business environment will eventually change. Staying relevant should constantly be a goal so you can keep your business important to your base from beginning to end.
Keep up with your customers.
As they evolve, so should your business. It's essential to understand their current preferences so you can adjust and always have the content they're looking for without breaking the original theme that your business is trying to convey.
Consistently stay tuned in to their needs and desires from your services. Think about using a sort of digital suggestion box or feedback comment section so you can always cater to their ideas and frequently asked questions.
This type of interaction is called User Generated Content, or UGC. It usually comes in the form of reviews, comments, ratings, and photos that provide an added touch of attention to your audience. Collecting content from your users in turn helps you collect other resources like competition you may have overlooked or underestimated or items that will help revolutionize and even perfect your product.
You can use your data analysis and content auditing to constantly discover the ways your customers move.
Keep up with the Trends
Keep pace with the world as we know it, and don't get stuck in the stone ages. Technology is always changing and creating new ways to engage your client base.
A great example of adapting to new ideas and tech is how we graduated from records, tapes, CDs, and MP3s over the years. Some of your products may be going out of style or practicality. Stay on top of the fads and crazes to make sure your products and content don't become completely obsolete - like broadband internet.
Keep observing your competition. They could be already implementing trendy ideas that customers enjoy. Use this to your advantage by taking their idea and making it better so you can create your own trend that users engage with even more. You have to be fast, though. Trends are flighty and can come and go without notice.
Many trends come back into rotation. Over an extended amount of time, you can use your historical data from a certain trendy period and resurface those past content marketing efforts.
Repurpose & Diversify
When your content is officially published, you can repurpose it to reach out to readers who may be into other types of content formatting. Take your e-book and break it down into digestible pieces to turn into blogs or podcasts that span over time.
Additionally, you can take your shorter TikToks or blog posts and compile them to create longer YouTube videos or lengthy articles that appeal to the viewers who prefer them and have more time to spend on weightier pieces of content.
Try using other channels to focus your content marketing. Take your original content and shift it from social media to email marketing, or maybe consider paid channels like influencer marketing or sponsorships.
This will turn your business around with actual advertisements and promos that will pop up anywhere you want them to.
Your Content Marketing Strategy
Your content marketing strategy should be an all-enveloping, drive-focused, and strategic marketing approach that is dedicated to producing and publishing relevant, useful, and dependable content that arouses and retains your idealistic target audience as they move and grow.
Your approach should establish expertise, promote your promising brand awareness, and make your business the first thought when it’s time for your audience to use your services or buy your products.
Your content marketing will provide you with the needed advantage over your allies and help demonstrate a healthy market in your industry. Knowing what it takes to keep you and your colleagues guided and controlled through your journey is the key to a successful content marketing strategy that will promise the longevity of your business endeavors.