Simplified Guide to Creating a Content Marketing Strategy
Before we get to our simplified guide to creating a content marketing strategy for your business, let us ask you this.
What do the following types of content have in common?
They exist to provide your audience with value, relevancy, and consistent information. This content is used to attract customers, retain them and drive profitable customer action for your business. So What is Content Marketing? In short, Content Marketing is a strategy-based marketing action performed by a business to provide value and relevant information on a consistent basis with the goal of building a strong relationship with your customer base.
Think of content marketing as telling a story, a story about your brand. Instead of pitching your service or products to people like in a meeting, you are providing a story that the customers can connect on an emotional level. This creates a space where the people with the best stories to tell about their product can just simply start dominating.
Doesn’t it feel nice to know that the businesses actually care about you as a customer? Of course, it does. That is exactly the purpose of content marketing. Once you start to provide value to your customers in a consistent way, you end up getting their attention and building loyalty towards your brand. When it’s eventually time for them to purchase the services you offer, they are automatically drawn to you.
So we can specifically pinpoint the areas that are positively affected by your content marketing efforts – they are:-
- Increase in sales and brand awareness
- Saving on costs
- Improved customer loyalty
Why is content marketing important for your business?
If you still need convincing to give content marketing a try, we have got your back. On top of expanding the reach of your business and educating your prospective clients about the services you provide, it helps build a strong connection with your customers and business. You can create a sense of community around your brand and use that awareness to boost conversions.
The landscape around content marketing is very competitive and thus you have to produce unique and relevant content to stand out. It is a very cost-effective means of marketing thus businesses of different calibers are focusing their efforts on this. It becomes very important to create a content marketing strategy and revise it at various stages to maximize your efforts.
Do not expect short-term results. Your starting goal should never be to generate sales from this. It is important to understand that this is a very give-and-take nature of a transaction. Only when you provide the people with something of equal value can you expect something in return. Your goal at the beginning should always be to capture the attention of people and tell stories. Any sort of gains made in the early days cannot be considered as a reliable metric.
How can you start dominating the market with your content marketing strategy?
We hope we have been successful in simply making the case for you to create quality content. Now comes the real question, where do you start to create a content marketing strategy from?
A good starting point for your content strategy plan is to lay down a mission statement for your content marketing. It should outline things like who your target audience is, what content you plan to reach them with and what platforms you will use.
Set up goals for what your business will get out of these efforts. Your typical goals can include improving revenue, getting more traffic, gaining influence and authority, social media engagement, etc.
Your goals should be SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant and Time-bound). That means setting up key performance indicators (KPIs) for your content marketing strategy. The KPIs will help you check off all the goals you have achieved and learn from your findings to better optimize your efforts for the future.
Keep an eye out for how much you are spending on different campaigns and track your budget throughout.
You will need to have a clear idea about who your audience is so you can create the right content to reach them. There are three actions you need to take; collect demographic data, get feedback from customers, and describe your ideal readers and customers to target them better.
The next step is to carry out a content audit to assess the usefulness of your current content and identifying the gaps where you can do better.
As you work through this process, you will start to see where your audience is present, and where you already have a successful online presence. Taking what works and expanding on it rather than starting from scratch is the best option at most times. Use various free or paid tools available online to see the main social networks or platforms where your content is being shared.
Next, we need to start thinking about the right type of content to create. Most of the successful content marketing strategies out there rely on having a central core of content being published on your own site which is then repurposed and shared on to other sites.
Blog posts should be an essential part of your content marketing mix as they still deliver strong results. Video marketing is another essential part of the type of content, as it’s proven to engage your visitors to keep them on your website longer, improve lead generation, and reduce bounce rate.
Consider creating infographics to create customized graphics and memes for sharing on your social media. It’s also worth thinking about podcasting as a content delivery mechanism for your business, as more than 40% of Americans now listen to podcasts. We can’t help you decide on what type of content you should double down your efforts on, as it varies according to the business needs. Instead, experiment and keep optimizing your efforts from time to time.
Now that you know who you are creating the content for, what type of content you are producing it and where you are going to be publishing it, it’s time to identify and allocate the resources. This includes allocating roles in your content team for purposes of creating, marketing, etc and creating a content calendar. As part of your content strategy, it’s important to know exactly when you want to publish your content on each of the platforms you wish to see.
After the prep work is done, it’s time to actually create the content. When you’re ready to write, do a Google search to check out the top content for your topic, and see how you can improve it. This is called the skyscraper technique.
You’ll have to start thinking about how to reflect your brand’s personality. You can choose to be super-professional, very casual, or something in between while talking to your audience. And you’ll have to create a separation between showing your area of expertise without patronizing your audience.
A very important step after you have created your piece of content is to distribute it via your channels and market it. It’s important to handle this step carefully because this is what will get you the results that you desire. Set up a suitable means of marketing campaigns such as email marketing, social media marketing, guest blogging, SEO, SEM, etc.
Finally, you measure the results using the KPIs you set up. Marketing should be an everchanging strategy based on the market fluctuations and attention shifts. Check to see if you are hitting your goals and see what’s changed or if gaps still exist in your efforts.
Conclusion
With such ease of access to all these technological creations, anyone can go online and start creating content. With so much noise in the digital landscape, it’s important to have good stories to tell. That is the only way you will get people to listen to you and what you stand for. Winning and dominating in this online world is about being consistent and keep winning in the long run.
We hope you liked our simplified guide to creating a content marketing strategy for your business. Do check out our other blogs over at Top Nepal and check out the services we offer such as Digital Marketing Nepal, Web Design Nepal, Web Development Nepal, etc.