8 Essential Steps for Creating a Great Content Marketing Strategy
When creating a content marketing strategy for your business, the focus should be on why you are creating the content and who you are targeting with the content. Usually, businesses use content marketing to build an audience and realize a goal like increased conversion or improved brand reputation. When creating the content for a successful content marketing strategy, you should keep the following steps in mind.
Step 1: Set Your Goals and Mission
You should establish who your target audience is, the kind of content you need to reach them, and how they will benefit. By setting your goals and mission, you give your content marketing strategy a direction. While your mission can be to reach a young audience, your goals should be to increase traffic and improve your SEO efforts.
Step 2: Set Your Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)
You should have a way of measuring your strategy to determine whether you are meeting your goals. Your KPIs may include a given revenue target, a certain number of new blog subscribers, a target of email subscribers, or a measurable increase in site traffic.
Step 3: Research Your Target Audience
You should have a clear picture of your target audience in terms of their demographics, their needs, wants, and how they react to content. A clear picture will enable you to publish the right kind of content and use the right channels to reach them. Some of the ways you can research your audience include collecting their demographic data, seeking their feedback, and interacting with them on social media.
Step 4: Review Your Current Content
Before launching a new strategy, you need to assess your current content and its effectiveness in the market. This involves assessing the content on your website, blog, social media, and other areas of publications. In so doing, you will identify your areas of strength and areas that require improvement. You will also be able to identify gaps in terms of keywords, backlinks, or target audience so you can retarget your new strategy.
Step 5: Narrow Down Your Content-Type and Channels
Based on your initial research, narrow down the content type that appeals the most to your audience and the channels that they use most frequently. Using a simple tool like Google Analytics will show you the content that your audience engages with the most and your sources of traffic. Performing a content analysis with a tool like Buzzsumo will also help you in narrowing down your content type.
Step 6: Allocate Resources and Set up a Calendar
After identifying your target market and the content they need, the next step is allocating resources. You need to identify the people in charge of producing the content, professionals to collaborate with, tools needed, and any other resources required. A content calendar is also needed to ensure that each task is completed in time and that the content is published with reasonable frequency.
Step 7: Create and Market the Content
Once everything has been put in place, it is now time to create and market your content. The content should be relevant and add value to your audience. You should also use the right channels to distribute and market it for viewership.
Step 8: Measure Your Progress
You will need to measure the results of your strategy using KPIs on a regular basis. This allows you to identify areas that are performing as required, and ones that may need improvement. As you continue with your content marketing strategy, make sure to keep testing things to see what type of content works best on your audience.
