Every business needs a strong online presence, which starts with content. From the web pages and blog articles on your website to white papers and downloadable guides, content remains your best option for climbing the search engines and reaching more people.
In this guide, we’ll cover the main steps involved in creating a content marketing strategy. Let’s dive in.
Why Do You Need Content Marketing?
Content marketing is a marketing approach that relies on the creation of original content shared online, such as blog articles or social media posts. With the right strategy, content marketing can help in a variety of ways.
Benefits include:
- Increased brand awareness
- Audience engagement
- Lead generation
- Authority and credibility
- Long-term value
Publishing content on websites and social media platforms can increase your online presence. It gives search engines more web pages to rank and display to search users.
Content marketing allows you to create and share valuable content that attracts and engages with your target audience. This can help generate more leads, boost your authority and credibility, and provide greater long-term value compared to other advertising methods.
Steps for Creating a Content Marketing Strategy
A content marketing strategy acts as a blueprint for all your marketing tasks and objectives. It outlines what you hope to achieve, who the content is for, and other details that guide your content creation process.
Here are the basic steps:
1. Set Your Marketing Goals and KPIs
The first step is to define your goals. Choose specific goals that you can track using available data, such as website metrics. Common key performance indicators (KPIs) for evaluating the success of content marketing strategies include:
- Website traffic
- Conversion rates
- Lead generation
- Engagement metrics
- Bounce rates
You can track these measurable metrics using Google Analytics or your preferred analytics software. You also need to set benchmarks. Record the metrics for your KPIs as they currently stand before implementing your content marketing campaigns. This gives you a better understanding of your progress and whether you’ve achieved your goals.
2. Research Your Audience and Competitors
Content marketing requires an understanding of your audience and a closer look at your competition. Start by evaluating your audience to learn more about their wants and needs. This allows you to tailor content that resonates with your target audience and addresses their specific challenges.
Utilize tools such as surveys, social media analytics, and customer feedback to gather data on your audience. Use this information to create detailed user personas. These personas offer a snapshot of your typical website visitors, making it easier to create content that speaks directly to them.
Along with your audience, you need to identify and evaluate your competitors. Taking a closer look at your competitors may help you attract the right audience and find a way to differentiate your business.
Create a list of your top competitors and visit their websites. Analyze their content, looking at keywords and the overall tone and style.
3. Choose Content Types
Selecting the right type of content is essential for reaching your marketing goals, as certain forms of content are better suited for specific purposes. For example, a home contractor looking to attract clients is likely to benefit more from quality website copy and blog articles compared to an in-depth white paper.
Some of the main types of content for online marketing include:
- Blog posts
- Infographics
- Video
- Email newsletters
- Webinars
- White papers
- Downloadable guides
- Case studies
- FAQs
- Interactive tools
- Social media posts
Each type of content has a specific place in a content marketing strategy. However, if you’re just getting your website off the ground, you should first focus on website copy and blog posts. Website copy is the meat of your site. It contains all important information about your business or brand, including contact information, product pages, and service pages. Blog posts help add substance to your site. They give search engines more content to rank and give visitors more information to digest.
As your site grows and starts ranking for specific keywords, start experimenting with different types of content to reach your marketing goals.
4. Set up a Content Calendar
Set up a content calendar to increase your chances of sticking to a consistent schedule. At the most basic level, a content calendar includes the dates that you plan on publishing new pieces of content.
However, you should include a few more details, including:
- The goal of the content
- The topic
- Target keyword
- Marketing channels
- Deadlines
- Publication dates
Use these details to stay organized, especially when working with a large team or outsourcing using an article writing service. A calendar makes it easier to coordinate with multiple people, such as writers, editors, and social media managers.
5. Hire a Content Writing Agency
Instead of creating content in-house, explore the benefits of outsourcing to a content writing agency. With a professional article writing service, such as Textun, you get cost-effective, scalable solutions for generating content so that you can focus more on your overall strategy. Content writing agencies have a team of writers with expertise in different industries and a wide range of different skills and interests.
Creating a detailed content brief can increase your chance of getting the type of content you want. Give writers a complete overview of what you expect, such as:
- Subject
- Word count
- Keywords
- Formatting
- Reference
Along with these details, you may provide a complete outline of the content with headers and short instructions for each section. Giving writers a highly structured brief is a great option when dealing with technical content and long-form content where you want to make sure that specific points are covered.
6. Track Your Progress
Tracking your progress lets you know whether your content marketing strategy is working, which you can use to tweak and improve your marketing effort. Using tools such as Google Analytics allows you to monitor important metrics, including total page views, bounce rate, and conversion rates.
You can use this to see which content performs best and try to recreate the same success with future pieces of content. Continually look for areas for improvement and keep optimizing your content for search engines and users.
Monitoring your progress can also help keep content relevant. Look for content that may need to be updated with information that has come out since the initial date of publication. Updating content provides the added benefit of helping to revive traffic for older blog posts.
So, if you want to launch and manage a successful content marketing strategy, it also comes down to trial and error. You need to create content and track its performance to figure out what works best for reaching your marketing goals.
