What Are The Steps To Developing A Content Marketing Strategy?
Content marketing is defined as a strategic type of marketing that involves the creation, publication, and distribution of engaging and relevant content in order to target and attract a specific audience and demographic.
60% of marketers create at least one piece of content each day. Content marketing is an extremely important aspect of generating prospective leads, cultivating brand loyalty, and building client and consumer trust.
In fact, studies show that businesses that use content marketing have conversion rates that are 6 times higher than their counterparts that don’t utilize content marketing. Furthermore, as users continue to spend more time online, mobile content marketing is becoming an increasingly valuable marketing strategy.
Steps To Create An Efficient Content Marketing Strategy
1) Establish Goals, Objectives, and KPIs
In order to understand what types of content would best suit your business, you must first establish a clearly defined mission statement that encompasses your organization’s current and future goals and objectives as well as previously set key performance indicators (KPIs).
Organizational marketing goals usually include generating higher revenue, maximizing sales revenue volume, increasing website traffic, and reduced marketing costs. KPIs will then help you determine whether or not these organizational goals and objectives have been met or not.
2) Understand Your Target Audience
Before creating content, you must understand your current and prospective audience so that you can better target their needs and preferences. This can be done by collecting demographic data such as age and gender, collecting customer feedback, and creating buyer personas. These three criteria can help your business better understand consumer priorities and which types of content they would best respond to and engage with.
Consumer feedback can also help determine how effective your business’s current content marketing strategies are and how they can be refined and developed.
3) Decide Content Types and Content Channels
Once you have clearly established which demographic you would like to target, you must then decide which content channels that demographic is most present on. Once you have decided which content channels to connect with consumers on, your business must establish an online presence.
This can be done by creating relevant and useful content on those platforms. Most effective content marketing strategies involve creating a central core of relevant content that can then further be repurposed on other content channels and platforms.
4) Planning Content Calendar
Your strategic content marketing plan must include when you want to publish each piece of content and on which particular content channel. Content marketing automation software can help your business create a content calendar so that content can automatically be published autonomously.
Your business should also establish an employee content workflow, which details who is in charge of creating content, who organizes physical and human resources in order to do so, and who establishes the content calendar. 32% of marketers think that their content creation workflow is poor.
5) Create, Distribute, and Market Content
Now that you have an established content calendar, your business can select a topic and create relevant content. It is extremely important that content is well researched and accurate.
Your business should also conduct keyword research in order to determine which key terms work best for ranking higher on organic search engine results. 70% of marketers are actively investing in content marketing. Therefore, your business’s content should be relevant to the products and services that you offer. Your content should also reflect your brand’s personality and tone.
Once content has been created, you can publish it on the previously chosen content channels. You can further promote your content using social media and email marketing.
6) Measure Results
Once content has been published and distributed, you must measure the success of your content marketing strategies, content types, and channels. Your business can do so by assessing results on the basis of the previously established key performance indicators. Your business can then use results to refine and further develop content marketing strategies.
Revolutionize Your Sales Processes With Content Marketing
63% of businesses don’t have a well-documented content strategy. A holistic and comprehensive content marketing strategy can completely revitalize and rejuvenate your business’s promotional efforts. Highly engaging and relevant content can help your business gain a significant competitive advantage over other businesses that don’t realize the power of content marketing.
