A business’ content marketing strategy is an important element in digital marketing success. This high-level plan outlines how a business will create and distribute content as a means of sustaining and growing an audience, and it should align with other business goals. However, designing and executing a content marketing strategy is about more than simple content creation.
Let’s look at the step-by-step process for creating a content marketing strategy that drives results. We cover everything from identifying your target audience to creating compelling content that attracts and engages the ideal customers for growing your business.
The Ultimate Guide to Crafting a Killer Content Marketing Strategy
Developing a content marketing strategy starts and ends with the customer or audience. In fact, long before anyone’s fingers hit a keyboard in the content creation process, a good content marketing plan takes time to articulate the highest levels of strategy: audience, goals, and value proposition.
Defining Your Target Audience and Buyer Personas
The underlying purpose of any content marketing plan, whether it consists of blogs, videos, or social media posts, is to tell the story of a particular brand. However, it’s hard to tell an effective story when the audience is unknown. Therefore, the first step in developing your content marketing strategy is taking time to identify your brand’s audience and develop buyer personas so you can tailor your storytelling to those specific groups.
There are several effective ways to begin identifying your brand’s audience, including conducting surveys of existing customers, researching industry trends, and noting who your competitors are targeting. Once you have completed this analysis, ask yourself some key questions about each group. For example, what are their general demographics? What do they do for fun? What are their motivations and pain points?
Setting Clear and Realistic Goals for Your Content Marketing Efforts
Once you know who you are targeting, the next step is to consider what you want to achieve by sending them specific content. Defining a business’s goals and making them quantifiable when possible is the only way to assess the effectiveness of any content strategy in the first place (more on that later).
To begin this process, ask yourself some critical questions, such as:
- Do you want to increase sales? By how much?
- Do you want to increase web traffic? By what percent?
- Are you simply using content marketing to establish your brand’s authority or persona and stand out from the competition?
Conducting a Competitor Analysis and Understanding Your Unique Value Proposition
The final high-level analysis you need to conduct to generate a killer content marketing strategy is positioning yourself within your market and defining your company through its value proposition. This starts by researching competitors to find out what they offer and what they are doing to command people’s time, attention, and money. Once you understand this dynamic compared to yours, you are ready to consider your own value proposition.
A business’ value proposition is a simple statement that summarizes the reasons why a customer would choose that business over the competition. For example, Apple’s value proposition for iPhone is “The experience is the product.” Once you understand and articulate your business’ value proposition, you can then harness it as a means to create content that stands out from the competition.
The Key Components of a Successful Content Marketing Strategy
Once businesses understand the overarching purpose of their content marketing strategy, it’s time to start establishing clear ideas for content marketing. This stage of the process consists of several components, including considering themes, channels, and a distribution plan.
Developing a Strong Content Marketing Theme
Building off the information gained by defining your business’ value proposition, developing a strong content marketing theme is essential for sticking in potential customers’ minds. Cohesive messaging ensures that your audience recognizes your content as uniquely yours and connects it to the value you offer. The other benefit of developing a strong theme in a content marketing strategy is that it allows you to repurpose assets, such as graphics and even text in multiple media, which simplifies the planning and production processes.
Creating a Diverse Mix of Content Types and Channels
Another critical consideration at this point in your content marketing plan is the type and diversity of media that you intend to use. The way that your business delivers its message and where an audience sees it differs according to content goals and throughout the sales process. A good content marketing plan needs to include a mix of different media targeted to a specific audience at all stages of the engagement cycle.
This does not mean you need to do it all, but you do need to understand what to focus on and why. From blogs and emails to social media posts and videos, the type of media your target audience consumes the most and how that affects their buying decisions are important details. Once you know that information, make sure to integrate those media types as a cornerstone of your content strategy.
Building an Effective Content Promotion and Distribution Plan
Finally, after deciding on the right message and media, it’s time to consider how to get those ideas out there and in front of the folks who need to see them. Promotion and distribution are critical aspects of content marketing, and they include so much more than just posting a blog or a video online. Instead, it’s necessary to understand your media mix, including owned vs. paid vs. earned distribution channels as well as the desired audience’s use of each type of content. From there, focus on the channels that your audience uses the most. In general, these channels are social media (organic and paid), email marketing, and organic search.
Measuring and Optimizing Your Content Marketing Results
Finally, no good content marketing strategy is complete without ways to check its effectiveness. In the digital age, tracking customer engagement is easier than ever before. Using simple tools and strategies, such as knowing your performance indicators and generating a plan for analysis and improvement, it’s easy to make sure that all the effort you put into your content marketing plan was time well spent.
Establishing Key Performance Indicators
Part of the goal-setting process discussed earlier is coming up with quantifiable performance indicators that help you understand the relative effectiveness of your content marketing efforts. These metrics are critical, as they provide clear numbers that show how well your strategy is working and alert you to time (and money) that may be wasted. Besides these key performance indicators, consider setting up Google Analytics to monitor and track important aspects of your website’s performance, including user behavior and SEO outcomes.
Analyzing and Improving Your Content Marketing Efforts Over Time
After analyzing your content marketing strategy’s effectiveness, it’s important to use that knowledge to tweak what doesn’t work and boost what does. A great content marketing plan evolves constantly and takes into account the changing environment of the digital space, search engine algorithms, and customer trends. Make sure that you schedule routine meetings with your content marketing team to reassess and redouble your efforts as part of your content marketing calendar.
Take Your Content Marketing to the Next Level
Learning the ins and outs of content marketing can be daunting, but the good news is that there is a clear process that you can follow to get your content marketing strategy started on the right track. In addition, whether you need help understanding your audience, analyzing your results, or just simply writing, there are solutions out there for you.
Content Marketing Help from Elevation Ten Thousand
The content marketing professionals at Elevation Ten Thousand (E10K) are standing by to help you understand and move through each phase of developing a great content marketing plan. Whether you need help with one step or access to a full-service content marketing team, we have solutions ready for you. Contact us today to learn more about what we can do to take your content marketing strategy to the next level.
