Your content marketing strategy is essentially your "why." It explains why you're generating the content, who you're serving, and how you'll help them in a manner that no one else can. Content marketing is commonly used by businesses to grow their audiences and achieve at least one of the following beneficial outcomes: greater revenue, lower expenses or better customers.
With 70% of marketers putting money into content marketing, it's more important than ever to establish a solid content strategy if you want to compete in your field. But before you dive into developing a content strategy for your business, here are some things you need to keep in mind.
1. Who is going to read your content?
Who is your content's intended audience? How many different audiences are you catering to with your content? Your content strategy can appeal to several types of readers or viewers, just as your business may have multiple types of customers. Using a range of content types and channels will allow you to provide diverse material to different sorts of audiences.
2. What problems will you solve for your audiences?
A good content strategy benefits users on both sides of your product: those who are still finding out their significant issues and those currently utilizing your product to tackle them. Your content should support the solution(s) you're presenting and encourage your consumers to use your product more effectively.
3. What distinguishes you from others?
Because your rivals' products are likely comparable to yours, your potential consumers will want to know what makes yours superior — or at least different. This is where the value of content comes into play. You must first demonstrate why you are worth purchasing before demonstrating why you are worth listening to.
4. What kind of content would you prioritize?
What types of content will you produce? Infographics? Videos? Blogs? After you've decided on the subjects on which you want to take a stand, you'll need to budget for the content forms that will allow you to effectively convey your viewpoint.
5. How will you distribute your content?
You'll be able to publish to a variety of channels, just as you can generate content in a variety of forms. Owned sites, such as your website and blog, as well as social media properties, such as Facebook and Twitter, are examples of channels. In the step-by-step tutorial that follows below, we'll go through social media content strategy in further detail.
6. How will you handle the development and distribution of content?
It might be challenging to figure out how you'll generate and distribute all your material. However, knowing who's developing what, where it's being published, and when it goes live is critical for a content strategy.
Now that we've got the basics cleared let's dive into the specifics of how to create a content marketing plan. Following are some simple steps for developing and implementing a content marketing strategy that can help you expand your business without wasting time or money.
Step 1: Define your mission and objectives.
Setting out a content marketing mission statement is an excellent place to start when planning your content strategy. This is a short statement that helps you focus on what's important – and what's not – when generating the content, ensuring that your content marketing plan stays on track.
Step 2: Decide on your key performance indicators (KPIs).
Making your objectives precise and quantifiable is the greatest approach to attain them. Setting KPIs for your content marketing plan is an excellent example of this. KPIs will let you know when you've met your objectives by giving milestones that you can check off.
Step 3: Identify Your Target Market
As previously said, a good content marketing plan requires a clear understanding of who your target audience is so that you can develop material that speaks to them. You must do three things: collect demographic data, get customer feedback, and create buyer personas.
Step 4: Determine which content channels are the most effective.
You'll get a feel of where your audience hangs out as you move through this process, as well as where you already have a solid online presence. Rather than trying to achieve everything at once, it's preferable to focus on working and growing from there.
Step 5: Make a list of content types.
Next, consider the sorts of material you'll need to provide. Every content marketing plan will incorporate a specific type of material. However, most effective content marketing methods rely on having a central core of material published on your own site (or "home base") that can then be reused and shared on other sites (outposts).
Step 6: Create a Content Calendar
You'll need to know precisely when you want to post your material on each platform you wish to use as part of your content strategy. Because a lack of preparation is a common content marketing error, using a content calendar to schedule all of your material is critical. This can be accomplished in a variety of ways.
Step 7: Develop Content
As you can see, there's a lot of planning that goes into creating content for your content marketing strategy. But now is the moment to act.
Step 8: Market and distribute
Distribution and marketing are the essential components of your content strategy. Because until things are managed appropriately, you won't achieve the outcomes you seek.
Step 9: Evaluate the outcomes
Finally, evaluate the effectiveness of your content marketing approach. To do so, go back to the KPIs you defined at the outset of the content strategy plan and assess what has changed and if you are on track to meet your goals.
An effective content marketing strategy requires an in-depth understanding of customers – their problems, their online behaviour, etc. By delving deeply into their lives, you can understand their pain points and customize your content to address them.
Log on to www.pulpstrategy.com for assistance in developing a content marketing strategy that delivers the desired results now!
