What is a Content Marketing Strategy?
Simply put, a content marketing strategy is an approach taken by a business to ensure that their marketing actions have the effect of attracting, engaging, and retaining potential customers. An effective content marketing strategy will help create and retain brand awareness when it comes to your target audience.
By taking steps such as sharing well-curated content like articles and videos, you can ensure that your business remains top of mind whenever a targeted customer is deciding on a product or service. To effectively capture your intended customers, your content marketing approach should be consistent in its execution and ensure that the information you share is relevant and valuable.
Why is a Content Marketing Strategy Important?
At the very top of the list, a content marketing strategy is important since it’s considered one of the first points of contact when a business aims to develop a relationship and build trust with a customer.
Once a customer recognizes your brand, the next task of the content marketing strategy is to ensure that the customer is consistently fed high-quality and relevant information. This is best done through various channels, such as blog posts, newsletters, social media posts, and so on.
Aside from its establishment and retention effects, your content marketing strategy will also impact your customers. It is also important to create and maintain industry authority for your business among your peers and competitors.
How to Create a Content Marketing Strategy
To create a content marketing strategy curated to your business needs, the first and most important step is to understand your business inside and out and then find an approach that will best align with it.
1. Identify Content Gaps
Focusing your marketing campaigns on content areas that are not saturated is an almost sure way to reach your target audience and drive traffic to your blog. You need to see the entire picture and understand what topics you haven’t covered so far. Better yet, analyze your competitors and check if there are areas they haven’t covered as well, so you can drive more traffic.
2. Run Topic and Keyword Research
Conducting keyword research in your niche will help you understand what information your target customers are looking for, while allowing you to cover topics that will drive traffic to your blog. With the dedicated tools, you can automate the research process and find the right keywords.
There are some metrics to take into account when choosing keywords. The difficulty score shows you how easy it is to compete for the top results in the SERP for your target keyword. The search volume shows you how many users look for the keyword every month. You can also combine short-tail and long-tail keywords for better results.
Learn more about how to research and use keywords in your blog posts in our guide.
3. Set Up Your Goals and KPIs
Having well-stated and measurable goals is a good way to tell whether or not you’re on the right track. Depending on the stage of the content funnel, your goals can be to: educate the audience, engage the user, improve SEO, generate leads, or make sales. You can also set key performance indicators that will allow you to understand how you’re progressing. Furthermore, you can use a measurable scoresheet to see how each approach is performing.
4. Analyze Your Audience
Understanding your audience by metrics such as age, gender, occupation, interests, and more can help inform your content marketing approach, while offering an idea of how different demographics will respond to your strategy. Thus, you’ll make sure that you’re creating content that resonates with consumers and encourages them to take action.
You can find eight smart approaches and tools to know your audience in our post.
5. Choose Content Types
When choosing content types, it is important for you to consider what works best for the largest percentage of your intended audience. To do so, you can diversify your content, see what performs best, and then make that high-performing content part of your marketing plan.
You can find 19 content types and how to create them in our guide.
6. Write Your Content
Now that you have researched keywords, analyzed your audience, and identified necessary content types, you can start creating content for your blog.
If you don’t have the time or skills to write posts yourself, you can always rely on article writing services whether you need a couple of articles or a stable flow content for your blog. You can also try to look for free blog post writers, although the quality of their posts might not be the highest.
7. Schedule a Publication
Once your content is ready, it’s time to add it to your blog editor and schedule a publication. You can either publish the post manually or schedule a date and time for automatic publishing. This option is available on WordPress and most modern blogging platforms.
If you also run social media marketing, consider sharing your newest post on social media so that more people can find out about it. For those who are short on time, we’ve gathered a list of the best social media scheduling tools to automate this task.
8. Create Internal Links
To improve navigation on your website, motivate readers to stay longer, and send traffic to other posts on your blog, make sure to set internal linking on your page. For example, in this post, we’re linking to other relevant materials on our blog and using keywords as link anchors.
Here are three reasons why internal linking is important for blog promotion:
- Increase the Authority of Your Blog Posts. The more backlinks and, therefore, traffic directed to your page, the higher your blog will rank in the SERP. While getting backlinks on third-party websites can be challenging and require extra work, internal linking can help grow your ranking in the meantime.
- Improve Site Navigation. The easier it is for users to discover content on your site, the longer they’ll stay there. Internal links create connections between pages on your blog, so readers can smoothly go from one post to another.
- Grow Site Ranking. In addition to users, search engines will also crawl your blog faster with smart navigation in place, resulting in higher positions in the SERP and organic traffic growth.
9. Choose Promotional Channels
Your work doesn’t end when you publish a post. Now, it’s time to let the world know by leveraging the various promotional channels you have access to, such as posting to social media, sending out a newsletter, writing guest posts, running influencer marketing, and so on.
Find 14 proven strategies to promote a post after publishing on our blog.
10. Reach Out to Bloggers
Sharing your post with other bloggers’ audiences can be a great way to drive tons of traffic to your page. It’s important to find bloggers whose followers have similar interests to your audience and will gladly explore your content.
On our blog, you’ll find 11 best practices for successful networking. If you don’t know where to start, try out these blogger outreach tools that will help you connect with the right influencers in your niche.
11. Assess the Results and Adjust Your Strategy
With a dynamic content marketing strategy, one of the most important features is adapting to the feedback that comes from the approaches that you’ve already tried. Make sure to take time and assess how well your strategy is performing and how you can further improve upon it.
Check out our guide on how to analyze website traffic, where you’ll learn about important metrics that reveal your blog’s performance and tools that can automate the process.
How to Create a Content Marketing Strategy
As with most other things in life, having a strategy in place is a crucial step towards achieving your goals. For a large percentage of businesses, it’s quite unfortunate that they operate while lacking a well-thought-out and documented content marketing plan. With such a vital piece of the puzzle missing, their content marketing efforts and, therefore, successes are nothing but a matter of luck. However, a well-thought-out content marketing strategy will help ensure that you’re moving in the right direction while maintaining full control over your progress.
