Your Complete Guide to Content Marketing Strategy

Getting started with Content Marketing might leave you feeling overwhelmed with the long to-do list that doesn’t seem to end anytime soon.

Analyzing your audience, publishing fresh content, tracking your results, and repeating it all over again.

However, if you have not made a content strategy yet, your team will be clueless on what to do. Assumptions will drive your work, and you will have no idea about what to do with the massive pile of poor quality content.

With a content marketing strategy, you can double or even triple your results! And if you are here for guidance on that, we have got it all covered for you.

In this blog, we will be discussing everything you need to know about content marketing strategy.

Why Is Content Marketing Strategy Important?

When we talk about content marketing strategy, we refer to the process of planning, creating, optimizing, and publishing effective content that we ultimately take you one step closer to achieving your business goals.

As observed, marketers who write down their content marketing strategy have a 500% chance of success.

Having a content marketing strategy is a necessity to make your content marketing successful altogether because this way, your team can measure their successes as well as failures. Your strategy goals will help them make improvements and stick to the plan.

Moreover, you and your team won’t be just hitting the “publish” button, hoping for some miraculous results, instead you all will know the ultimate reason and goals behind your content marketing.

In conclusion, a content marketing strategy gives you a direction in which you and your team must proceed.

How To Plan Your Content Marketing Strategy?

So, now that you know the importance of having a content marketing strategy let’s dive into the details of planning it. With these 8 steps, you will be able to prepare a robust content marketing strategy for your business.

1. Determine the goals you want to achieve with it

This is the most basic yet crucial step. You should not just start any marketing strategy without knowing what you want to achieve through it. Just like you cannot run a Facebook campaign without setting an objective.

Implementing the same on your content marketing strategy, first of all, you need to figure out what you are aiming for with it. Some common business goals include:

• Driving more traffic to your site
• Increasing customer retention rates
• Boosting profit
• Generating more leads/sales

For instance, let’s consider the first point. Aiming to drive more traffic to your website seems logical with the help of content marketing. When you provide informative, valuable, and interesting content to your audience frequently, it will keep them engaged. Some of them might even share them on their networks. Your SEO rankings will drive more traffic. Your social media promotions will increase brand awareness. All of this will overall contribute to achieving this goal – attracting more new audiences.

2. Identifying your target audience

It is a pointless idea to publish content without even knowing who you are trying to reach. Because even when you are reaching the audience but the content is not interacting with them since it is a generic one, what is the point?

Your content is only good until it engages with the right audience. Even if you are reaching 2000 people and only 10 of them are the eight ones who might show interest in your products or services, it is a total waste of time, effort, and money.

When you identify your target audience, you will get the idea of keywords, topics, and concepts that you need to cover to attract them. To determine your audience, here are a few points you can consider:

• Demographics – age, race, income, employment, education, etc.
• Sociographics – gender, nationality, language, socioeconomic status, brand loyalty, etc.
• Psychographics – hobbies, interests, beliefs, habits, etc.
• What challenges are these people facing that might make them search for your product/service?
• What problems can your product/service solve?
• Where is your audience searching for the information?
• What is your audience’s favorite content format?
• Is your content giving them adequate information to appeal to them?

3. Develop the core of your content

Now, once you are clear on who your target audience is going to be, you can proceed further by determining your content core i.e., the most relevant topics to your product/service.

For example, if your brand makes beauty products, you can consider these topics for your core content:

• Beauty hacks to make your hair look shinier
• Tips to keep your skin healthy
• News on the cosmetic industry
• How to get a party-ready look overnight?

Take the help of your content strategists and determine the sub-topics. Jot down all these topics as your core content. You can also assess your core content by finding out the basic questions your target audience has and how your product can be helpful in that concern.

4. Decide your content format and channels.

You need to gather some information on what type of channels and formats you should include in your strategy. And on the second step where you worked on audience personas, the question “What is your audience’s favorite content format?” will prove to be helpful.

Now, these content formats might include anything starting from blog posts, newsletters, social media posts, eBooks to magazines, case studies, research reports, and videos.

For instance, if your target audience is people between 18-30 years who are more into social media, visual content, or short videos can be your best bet.

Remember that choosing the right content format is as important as selecting the channels you will use for its promotion. Both of them equally impact each other. Plus, what is the point of creating insanely awesome content if it fails to reach your audience? Therefore, perfect execution is vital to run a successful strategy.

5. Set up a basic content publishing schedule

You need to prepare a publishing schedule for each content type that your team creates. If your team makes blog posts, videos, and email newsletters, you need to fix a basic plan about when and how frequently they should be published.

Do not depend upon posting the content whenever you get the time. Your schedule will help you in developing consistency. For example, if you decide to post a video tutorial weekly, your audience will come back weekly to see it.

You can make your schedule something like this:

• 3 weekly blog posts
• 2 weekly videos
• 1 monthly eBook

It is always better to start with easy, and once your team gets used to it, you can always bring enhancements.

6. Establish your performance standards

Every piece of content that you are going to publish must meet some basic performance standards.

Otherwise, you might just end up posting lousy content and, thus, tampering with your brand’s reputation of creating excellent quality content. Sometimes, you will end up publishing unsuited content that doesn’t align with your brand. No one will read it, but they will quickly realize that you published it.

However, establishing your performance standards will save you from this trouble. This is how it might look like:

• Keyword – assign a relevant and robust keyword to each of your content.
• Thorough content – make sure every content covers all the information that your audience might want to know about that particular topic.
• Format and grammar – your content should follow a specific format (like not capitalizing the subtitles) and grammar.
• The tone of voice – your content should have a consistent voice tone. Do not keep it too formal as it will bore your audience soon.

Review your content; if it does not match all your set guidelines, then either get it fixed or dumped. Avoid posting anything junky.

7. Assign roles to every team member

Keeping too many editors can complicate the process and make it ten times more time-consuming.

Determine who is going to be in your team and assign them roles. Each of them should have their own unique but vital roles.

8. Develop the workflow

Now that you have everything penned down, it’s time to take the final step – developing your workflow.

You will need a workflow that will help you follow the work pattern and repeat the same every time. This will help you in assigning the roles to the rest of your team and ensuring that everything is done in order.

For example, for writing a blog post, your workflow can be:

• Planning – create a plan, pick a topic, and get the topic approved.
• Creating – prepare the blog and get it approved.
• Editing – send it to the editorial team for edits and final approval.
• Publish – upload it on your website
• Promotion – share the blog post across various social media channels.

By the end of this, you will be all set to create your own strong content marketing strategy. So what are you waiting for? Bring it in action and get ready to shine!

Let us know how this strategy works out for you by leaving them in the comments below.