Building a content marketing strategy has never been so important given brands and businesses are getting more niche and specialised in their marketing to suit their products. Useful content should be at the core of everything you do, whether it’s social media marketing, emailers, PR or web content.

WHAT IS CONTENT MARKETING?

Put simply, a content marketing strategy allows you to take a strategic approach which focuses on creating and sharing valuable, relevant and useful content on a consistent basis to attract and retain a targeted audience. Ultimately, content marketing will drive customer action resulting in sales and hopefully, profits.

Content marketing is being mindful of your customers and followers at all stages of their journey through your marketing funnel and serving them relevant content in a timely manner to help progress them along.

Instead of using your channels to broadcast a sales message, promoting your products or your services, you’re answering a question, providing value and ultimately helping consumers solve their issues.

CONTENT IS THE PRESENT OF MARKETING

Don’t call us cheesy, but content marketing is the present both in the sense that it’s a gift as well as being the only way to drive meaningful interaction with your brand or business these days.

Content marketing needs to cut through the noise of the thousands of marketing messages we see every day. So, how exactly do you do that? We’re glad you asked.

Developing a content marketing strategy is a sure-fire way to align your marketing messages and get control of your content. Instead of bombarding your followers with useless and uninformative content, defining a strategy will help you align your brand needs to your marketing needs and turn your marketing from random bits of media, to a well-defined, meaningful structure of outreach.

WHAT IS A STRATEGY FOR CONTENT MARKETING?

It’s simple! A content strategy document can help you get control over your content and ensure it’s aligned to set campaigns. They could be product or service-focused, or you could create a campaign based on a trending day or event.

Don’t get us wrong, managing content marketing is no mean feat. This strategy will help you map, plan and coordinate any media that you create. This will continuously demonstrate who you are and what you do as a company. Plus, by attributing content to set campaigns, it means you can more thoroughly track the results of your efforts, and, if one campaign works particularly well, you can continue to expand and evolve it.

It’s not just a content marketing strategy you need. You need a strategy for each of your channels. Here’s why you need a social media strategy.

What you need to consider when creating a content marketing strategy:

• Who the content is aimed at
• Which channels you’ll use to publish and promote
• What format of content is most effective for your target market
• How you’re going to create all the content

So let’s get into it, how do you create a content marketing strategy?

HOW TO CREATE YOUR CONTENT MARKETING STRATEGY

1. Define your goal

   What’s your aim? What’s the point of doing content marketing? Know your goals first and you’ll find it easier to pick out what best fits.
   

2. Create your buyer persona

   Delve deep into your analytics to find out more about your target audience. Who are you actually selling to? Is it predominantly women? Are they over 50?
   By understanding your target audience through a buyer persona, you can better tailor your content to suit their needs and create media that they’re more likely to respond to.

3. Define your content types

   What exactly do you want to start creating and what purpose will they serve? You could write more blog posts, you could create case studies, or write eBooks or white papers. Perhaps you want to create videos or podcasts?

4. Create a content calendar

   Now you’ve decided what you’re creating and who for, you can start building your content ideas. But, you’ll want to track and organise your content so it’s well-balanced and diverse.
   

   A lot of your content will be evergreen, but some might be a bit timelier. Plot relevant dates into a content calendar so you can map what you need to publish and when.

5. Understand your buyer’s journey

   There’s no point creating irrelevant content. The point of content marketing is that you’re solving issues for potential or current consumers. You’re answering their questions through SEO-optimised landing pages and blogs, then you’re targeting those people through an emailer campaign with more information on the product or service featured.

   At each step of the buying cycle, identify what your customer is asking. For example, if you’re a cleaning product company, your customer at the first stage of buying is probably looking for content like; “how to remove wine stains from white clothes”.

And there you have it, a simple framework from which to build a deeper content marketing strategy. Sound like a lot of work? It can be! Setting up is difficult but our content marketing experts can help you make it easy.

Contact our team today via the form below to find out more about how they can build relevant content for you and your audience, to grow and develop leads and customers. In the meantime, read more about our content marketing services and how we can support you. 

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