The Ultimate Guide to Content Marketing Strategy

Content is King!

There is a substantial reason why such a statement has been used for content. Can you guess what it could be? 

If you can’t, we’ll tell you about it. High-quality content is considered to be one of the most impactful tools for accomplishing your organization’s goal. According to research, When it comes to content, quality wins over quantity as 70% of people feel quality content is essential. Content marketing can help various facets of your business ranging from lead generation to recruitment. 

But among all of this amazing stuff, there is just one major issue!

Without using the right content marketing strategy, tools or tricks, you’ll never be able to get the desirable results.

So, is there any way to keep away from all these wrong content marketing strategies?

Absolutely!  All you have to do is read this ultimate guide to content marketing strategy. Here, we’ve brought you some of the best content marketing strategies to help you market your business with content. But before that, let’s know a bit more about content marketing.

Talking about content marketing, it is a comprehensive process of planning, creating, distributing, sharing, and lastly publishing content for reaching your targeted audiences. It can help you improve various aspects of your business like brand awareness, reach, interactions, sales, etc.

Steps to Create a Perfect Content Marketing Strategy

Have you ever driven to an unknown destination without a physical or Google map? You might have never done so, to avoid being lost in the middle of nowhere. Similarly, if you don’t wish to end up taking wrong turns, then you must have a plan ready before generating content.

Without a proper plan, you might reach your destination but it will take ages to do so. Not only that, but you’ll also get frustrated and waste your precious time and monetary resources.

Planning for the long-term will help you in focusing on your company’s goals, predict the challenges, and put your resources to use in an effective manner. Implementing these seven steps will give you a chance to develop a complete content strategy plan step by step.

So, it’s time to give you those steps to create a perfect content marketing strategy. 

Decide your Mission and Goals 

The first step is to devise the mission of your content marketing. In simple words, it’s all about who are your audiences, what way will you opt for reaching them, and what will they get from your content.

Here, we provide you with an amazing recipe to create your content mission. All you have to do is focus on the target audience, the type of content you’ll provide them, and how it will be helpful for their business. 

While you’re providing content to your audiences, it’s extremely important to tell them about business goals you’ll help them achieve with content marketing. Remember, business goals do play an important role in the process. Because at the end of the day everyone is concerned about their business and its success. 

Generally speaking, content marketing goals consist of boosting sales, driving more traffic, and generating greater leads. Moving on, the above-mentioned formula also works for B2C marketing as the target audience always has some or the other goals. 

Recognize your Audience

No matter what the content strategy is, it’s always necessary to know who you’re marketing to. It will be helpful for selecting your content accordingly. Other than that, marketing works wonders only when it’s pertinent. If you’re generating content for everyone and trying to please them, then you’ll not be able to create it for anyone. 

You can start by acquiring the demographic data through web, social, and email analytics. By having a look at this, you’ll get to know about the age, education, gender, and income of your target audiences.

Otherwise, you can also get some honest feedback from your customers. It will help you to understand your customer’s priorities, likes, and dislikes. With this, you’ll get an overall buyer persona of your customers. Once you have your buyer’s persona, it will be easier for you to know what content to create, the ways this content will help your audience, and why they will care about this content. 

Plan your actions 

Before doing anything you must have a plan of actions. Likewise, you must have a personalized plan of actions for creating your content. 

• Who’s the lead for creating your content
• Who will be maintaining and updating your content
• What do you need for creating content
• What is your schedule for publishing the content
• Who’ll be approving the final content
• What is the workflow of your content production

Start Curating Content

You must always know that your blog or article is the focal point of any content marketing strategy. Content is considered to be an essential part of marketing. So, if your website still doesn’t have any content, it’s high time to start writing one.

Blogging is a great way to strengthen your content market strategy.  One of the successful blog ideas is the tutorials, checklists, how-to guides, case studies, industry news, and expert advice.

If you still wish to go deeper into the essence of blog post idea generation, then you must contemplate posts that are more useful, educational, controversial and most importantly fun. Other than this, you can also put out various personal stories, round-ups, and posts related to lifestyle. 

Audit your present content

Suppose you already have your content with you, then it’s time to focus on other points like if it is meeting your goals and performing on those KPIs. This is the sole reason behind auditing your content. 

The process of auditing content consists of three steps:

• Recording your existing content
• Evaluating what you own
• Discover gaps in the content

One of the best SEO tools to both log your content and attract several URLs from your site is none other than Screaming Frog. This tool also lets you detect the duplicate pages and recognize the missing titles and descriptions.

Another tool which is hugely loved by audiences is SEMrush. This SEO tool can help you analyze the content which is connected to your audiences. Post that, you can also decide upon the content you’ll prepare next. 

SEMrush consists of a content audit tool that looks at various factors of content such as the length of content, social shares, and the inbound links.

You can use any of these tools to get a compiled data of all your content. Once you’ve done this, it’ll be easier for you to realize the things that are working for you, things that might need a bit change and the one that needs to be changed entirely.

Besides this, you can also recognize several content gaps and other places where creating content could be of help for reaching your goals.

Initiate Keyword Research

Performing keyword research is one of the most important and unavoidable parts of generating quality content. Because you want people to come across your content and then stop by your site. 

To make it simpler, Keyword is the terminology used by people while looking out for content. Even Google uses this term to find out what your overall content is about. 

Specifically, you must add these three types of keywords in your content.

Foremost, there are short keywords. These keywords are associated with wider concepts. 

Eg: “Shirt”

The next ones are the medium keywords. These keywords are of 2 or 3 words and help in narrowing down the topic a bit.  Eg: “Men’s shirt”

The last one is known as the long-tail keywords. These keywords are a bit longer and more specific when compared to the previous ones. Eg: “Men’s silk shirt”

Focus keywords used in your content will help your audiences and Google in matching your content to what they’re searching for. This simple thing is known as search intent. Majorly, there are four types of search intent such as Informational, Transactional, Investigational, and Navigational.  

The process of researching keywords for content marketing requires:

• Deliberating over good ideas
• Making use of keyword research tools to find the perfect keywords for your content. The most loved tools for finding keywords are SEMrush.
• Looking over Google Search Console and Google Analytics to know which keywords bring people to your site.

Some of the best places to use your keywords are as follows:

• The title of your content and the page.
• The meta description of your content.
• The overall body of your content
• The SEO title of your content and page

Generate More Content 

Mostly when people are facing issues relating to content, all they think about is creating more content as a solution. But just once think about the content that already exists on your site. This content can be of great value just with a few tweaks here and there.

Reuse content

You can give your existing content a new lease of life by remixing it quickly. It consists of updating content that is still relevant with some new information, or either converting an infographic into an animated video. 

User-generated content (UGC)

All you have to do is check into your social community or customers for getting some additional piece of content or ideas.

Create content

Why wait when there is such great content out there? Start creating content from trusted sources. But, don’t ever forget to give them credit wherever they deserve. Last but not least, always add some or other perspective of yours in the content.

Opt for Atomization

Take a big content piece and fragment it into almost eight small pieces of content. 

Create a Content Calendar 

Here are the reasons for what, how and why one must create a content calendar.

Start with the most essential activity

It refers to the activity that you carry out at least twice in a month. Such activities will be added first in your calendar as a priority. Always pay attention to any of the important dates or upcoming events. 

Including your one-time activity

Now your attention should be on how your one-time content activity or one-time-specific activity is impacting your priority activities. 

Try to fix these activities in your regular activity

Once you know all the priorities, it’s time to add all your regularly scheduled activities. These will eliminate any of the content gaps and also keep your content consistent.

Add upcoming content to your content deposit

If you’re unable to find any place for a great piece of content in your calendar, then you must add it to your depository. It will be helpful to you when you’re out of any ideas for content.

Choose your Lead Magnet 

The best lead generation tool available is content. Another amazing way of generating more leads with content is generating a lead magnet.

A perfect lead magnet is, 

• The one that solves a big problem of your audiences
• Provides a solution that is easy to implement and quicker
• The one which is extremely valuable and easy to understand
• Showcases your expertise in the particular field

   The best lead magnets are considered to be case studies, ebooks, and webinar marketing. Another impactful lead magnets are:

• Reports
• Quizzes
• Mini-courses
• Checklists
• List of resources
• Free trials

Carry Out Content Promotion 

Now that you have created your content, it is time to make sure that it reaches the targeted audiences. Here comes another important aspect of content marketing strategy which is promoting your content.

There are several ways to promote your content like,

• Link building
• Social media marketing
• Email marketing

Elements of a Content Marketing Strategy 

Brand Identity

Brand identity acts as a key feature of your content marketing strategy. The best way to make your content marketing success is to communicate your brand identity with the help of content.

Various attributes create a brand identity. We would like to break them into three parts as below:

Brand story

It’s all about communicating the main purpose of your brand through storytelling, mission, and vision. A brand story plays an essential role in the content you generate. Generally, you work towards solving people’s problems and lessen their pain. Every problem and solutions have a story behind it. This particular thing forms a connection between your brand and the customers.

Visual brand 

In recent times, the world has shifted to digital platforms. So, it is extremely important to give importance to brand colours, your writing style, and the logo of your company or business.

Brand Value

It refers to the USP (Unique Value Proposition) of your offers that people can’t get from any other brand. 

Here are some ways to create and execute brand identity recommendations for the content you generate as follows:

• Try making a Do’s or Don’ts List and lay out the rules that should be followed by everyone.
• Create a Highlights List that exhibits your vision for social profiles
• A style guide would be great for showcasing the way brand visuals should be used.
• Create a How-To Tutorial regarding the brand presentation in content and ads.

Specific customer persona and target market

One of the essential elements that form the foundation of a content marketing strategy is to know for whom it is. This is the point where you’ll have to define your customer persona and target market.

Before deciding any feature of the content marketing strategy, it is important to ascertain who will be your target in the market. Generally, the target market is considered to be demographics that might be interested in purchasing your product or service. 

Describing customer personas will surely provide you with a strong start as content marketing is focused on serving the audience’s values, interests, and challenges. One thing that you must always keep in mind is to keep updating these customer personas with new or changing marketing trends.

Goals and objectives 

If you’re having a documented marketing strategy with you then you’ll be able to look at the bigger edge. Setting your goals in prior will help you in creating content regularly without any hiccups. Other than that, it will also be helpful in measuring the results over time.

There are several goals of content marketing such as improving brand awareness, producing content for a niche audience, and content acting as a way of supporting the launch of a new product or service.

The most competent practice for setting goals is opting for the SMART framework. The term SMART refers to each goal being specific, measurable, attainable, relevant and time-bound.

Specific

Focuses on things that you want to achieve.

Measurable

Ascertain the metrics right for success.

Attainable

Move towards the challenging, but an attainable result.

Relevant

Ensure that your decided goals will be helpful to your marketing strategy.

Time-bound

Figure out the time in which you will start working on your decided goals.

It is extremely important to define the expectations of both sides. As it will help in lining up your content marketing goals with your audiences. If you want to make your goal-reaching process easier, then you must also work on your content making process. 

Constant quality content production

Another important element of a content marketing strategy is constantly producing quality content as per the plan. You must always decide a timeline for which the content marketing strategy is created. Not only that but the way it will be performed in the pre-decided time.

In the race of being with the decided content strategy, you must not forget to make sure that every content is prepared to help the target market in some or the other way.

Every piece of content must be highly informative, entertaining, interesting, relevant to the digital campaigns. It is a must to provide flawless content to the people using the internet.

Performing optimization 

When content marketing strategies fail miserably, most people choose to get rid of it. They wish to work on a new one from the scratch rather than investing time in the present one. This one thing leads to a situation known as resource mismanagement.

Just like any other marketing effort, even content strategies need to be measured in an interval of time. If some things are not working, then you must try optimizing your content and make it SEO-friendly.

Using your present data and current market data will help you create better campaigns rather than starting everything from scratch.

Analysis and Reporting

Today, the digital world consists of a handful of data. The content generated by your brand accumulates data points and information that will be useful for measuring performance in the process of creating an efficacious content strategy.

With the help of digital platforms, it has become possible to have hands-on a large amount of data. If you’ll make the right use of it, then this data can help you in making the right decisions regarding your brand’s content strategy.

These are some ways of analyzing,

• Market research
• Running experiments
• Social listening
• Web analytics data
• Collecting data

Conclusion

A quality content marketing strategy provides timelines for accomplishing a particular objective and also the steps for achieving it. One important thing a marketer and business need to acknowledge is that a content strategy is vulnerable to changing quite faster as per the interests of target audiences.

We hope this blog on content marketing strategy will help in performing your content marketing process. 

If you have any questions, please feel free to ask in the comments section.