Ready to jumpstart your content marketing and give your brand a major lift? Content marketing is extremely effective and offers great ROI — but if you want to do it right, you need to have a plan.
What Is Content Marketing?
Content marketing is a key component of inbound marketing, in which your brand creates, distributes, and promotes various types of content to answer your audience’s needs, wants, and pain points. Content provides prospective customers with information, solutions, and meaningful opportunities to interact with your brand. It’s also a cost-effective and efficient way to market your brand.
What is a Content Marketing strategy?
Although both names are accurate, you'll frequently hear a content marketing plan referred to as a content marketing strategy. In essence, your plan is a written document that outlines the approach you'll use to meet your content marketing objectives.
Although the processes you take to develop your content marketing plan will differ from those taken by other companies or business types, such as start-ups or SaaS, you can expect a few phases in your strategy that are typical of many different brands and industries.
#1: Set KPIs and Objectives for Content Marketing
One crucial thing to keep in mind is that your content marketing goals and the metrics you use to assess them won't look the same as traditional marketing goals. Although sales, income, and conversion may be the main goals of your entire marketing plan, content marketing requires you to see beyond the numbers.
Sales can be one of the measurements and key performance indicators (KPIs) for content marketing, but the reality is that a lot of the material you create will reach your audience earlier in the funnel when they aren't quite ready to convert.
So you may need to redefine what a “conversion” actually is. It could be downloading a content asset you’ve created or signing up for your mailing list. But it all comes down to setting goals that align with what your content marketing strategy can achieve and tracking the right metrics to make sure you’re on track.
Additional content marketing KPIs include:
Email and newsletter subscribers
Traffic to the website or landing page
Social media interaction (likes, followers, shares, etc.)
A higher SERP position
Increasing brand recognition is one of the main objectives of content marketing, yet it's a difficult KPI to monitor. Recall that in order to calculate your ROI, you must also keep track of all of your expenses. Although content marketing is more affordable than other types of advertising, it can occasionally be simpler to overspend due to its harder tracking requirements. List your objectives first, followed by a list of the metrics you can use to monitor them. Don't forget to include and adhere to your budget.
#2: Identify Your Audience and Perform Research
Now that you have a firm grasp on your success indicators, you can begin to dive into the juicy stuff. To commence, you will delve deeply into your intended audience and, more precisely, your buyer persona(s). One excellent technique to find out what your clients want to hear from you is through surveys. Probing around on social media sites such as Reddit and Quora is another great way to gather information from prospective clients. It's the ideal chance to find out in a relaxed and conversational setting what actual people are saying about your company, goods, or sector.
#3: Perform Competitor Research
This phase can be incorporated into your content audit. Make a different tab in your spreadsheet specifically for tracking the actions of your rivals.
Examine the subjects and themes they are covering, and keep a watch on the stuff that is receiving the most attention on social media. Examine their search engine rating and utilize an SEO tool to ascertain the keywords they are ranking for, so that you may produce content that will outrank theirs. Keep in mind that there are other things vying for your audience's attention besides your rivals. Keep an eye on social media and news and entertainment websites where people may be discussing related subjects.
#4: Look up relevant keywords
It is imperative that you take great care and consideration when choosing the keywords you will employ to make your content search engine optimized.
While it could be tempting to target the mega-keywords with astronomically large search volumes, you'll quickly discover that there is fierce competition and that ranking highly for them is nearly difficult. Instead, focus on long-tail keywords, which are low-volume, lengthy, and extremely particular. Why? Because there is less competition and a far higher chance of conversion when keywords are longer and more precise. The reason for this is search intent, or what people plan to do with the information they find. High-intent keywords are made to convert, and long-tail keywords perform better at satisfying search intent.
#5: Identify Your Best Content Channels
It's tempting to distribute your material on every network and channel imaginable in the hopes that it will finally reach its goal. However, that typically entails a great deal of additional effort for little gain. Rather, distribute your content using methods that are most effective for it. Naturally, a number of things will influence your choice of channel, such as the buyer persona you are targeting, funnel position, and content type.
For a lot of their material, B2B brands will discover that LinkedIn is a wonderful medium; whereas, B2C brands might see greater success on Instagram. Some firms may do better with a company blog, while others may find greater success on YouTube.
Whichever route you decide on, you'll need to plan and conduct study to determine which ones are best for you. If you go into acquisition and see which channels are bringing in the most traffic and shares, Google Analytics can help with that. To find out what material is doing well on various channels, you may also utilize a service like Buzzsumo that was created especially for this reason.
#6: Build an Editorial Content Calendar
After all of this preparation is complete, you're ready to develop your editorial calendar, which is one of the most important components of any content marketing strategy. By using an editorial calendar, you can stay organized and ensure that your material is distributed and published on a regular basis, which is linked to the most successful content. Never be afraid if that seems overwhelming. Content's ability to endure forever is its best feature. In actuality, one of the best ways to use content marketing to achieve outcomes is to reuse, update, or repurpose old material into new formats across new media.
#7: Write Content
My new reality show may be titled So You Think You Can Write, but are you actually capable of writing? Do you know how long a blog should be in order to achieve optimal results? Which terms are most effective in promoting conversions? or the distinction made between there, there, and they're?
Writing correctly and without grammatical faults is not the same as being a content writer, even if you excelled in high school English. If you don't have someone on your team with the necessary expertise and skill, you'll probably need to outsource at least some of your writing. Content creation requires skill. Additionally, there are several tools available that assist you in creating content with artificial intelligence. These are incredibly helpful tools for helping you come up with content ideas, brainstorm subjects, and optimize for search. However, human intervention is still necessary, even with the most advanced AI.
#8: Create a Plan for Content Promotion and Distribution
You established an editorial calendar and selected the outlets that would be most effective for your content earlier. It's finally time for all of your efforts to pay off. Plan out the best way and time to release your work onto the internet. It's important to let your audience know that the information is out and provide them with guidance on how to discover it, so don't just click "publish" and wait for the praises. To make sure it reaches the correct audience, this frequently entails posting your material on social media, including it into a lead generation campaign, or even investing in sponsored advertisements.
Repurposing old content, as we mentioned before, can be a terrific method to spread the word about and advertise high-performing material without breaking the bank. All you have to do is choose which material can get by with a little update and which requires a total makeover.
#9: Identify and Allocate Budget and Resources
Content marketing is an investment, and as such, there are certain expenses involved, such as:
Content creation: Who is responsible for all this incredible writing, filming, and designing? It may be necessary to outsource if you don't have enough personnel on staff who are available or skilled enough (this is the most typical area of content marketing that is outsourced).
Content tools: What hardware—digital or physical—do you need to accomplish this? These could include podcasting microphones, cameras or other recording equipment, design and editing software, and more.
Content management: Who is responsible for overseeing this? Who is creating the content ideas, who plans it all out, who finds or hires talent, and who publishes and distributes it?
You'll need to decide if it's worthwhile to handle everything internally or if you require outside assistance and support because each of these things has a cost.
#10: Measure Results
You established your objectives and KPIs for your content marketing strategy way back in stage one. It's time to evaluate all of your hard work and effort and assess the outcomes. You can accomplish this in a variety of methods, the most of which will rely on the KPIs you have chosen. Here are a few methods for keeping an eye on your outcomes:
Google Analytics: monitor visitors, purchases, and a plethora of other metrics on your complimentary dashboard.
Tools for social analytics, such as Sprout Social, Buzzsumo, and others, to gauge success and engagement.
SEO tools, such as Ahrefs and SEMrush, can help you better understand keyword performance.
Listening tools: You can receive notifications whenever your brand is mentioned or searched for using Google Alerts and Mention.
Boost Your Prospects of Reaching Your Objectives with a Content Marketing Strategy
It's time to put all you have learned into practice by following these 10 steps. We hope you now know a lot more about content marketing and how effective it can be for your company. We are available to assist you if you think you need more help planning, producing, and disseminating outstanding content. For more information, get in touch with Digital Mode's content experts right now.
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