Content marketing fits in a broader integrated marketing strategy and it requires a strategy of its own: a guide to shape your content marketing strategy.
Content marketing is much more than creating, distributing and sharing content in order to engage audiences, generate leads, improve branding, and other marketing goals you can serve with content marketing.
Content marketing is powerful, but it's also hugely competitive. Your business won't succeed by doing the same thing as everyone else.
A content marketing strategy (not to be confused with a content strategy) analyzes the different ways content marketing can be used across the buyer’s journey, the customer life cycle and/or the different customer experience touchpoints but it goes beyond that. Essentially a content marketing strategy looks how content marketing (not content) can be used in a strategic way as such and for and with other marketing, customer and sales strategies.
How to Create a Content Marketing Strategy
1. Define your goal.
What's your aim for developing a content marketing plan? Why do you want to produce content and create a content marketing plan? Know your goals before you begin planning, and you'll have an easier time determining what's best for your strategy.
2. Run a content audit.
Most people start out with blog posts, but if you want to venture out and try producing other content pieces, consider which ones you want to make.
For instance, if you've been doing weekly blog posts for the past year, creating an ebook that distills all your blog posts into one ultimate guide would be one way to offer information in a different format. We'll go over several different types of content you can use further down on the list.
If you've been in business for a while, review your content marketing efforts and the results from it in the last year by running a content audit. Figure out what you can do differently in the upcoming year and set new goals to reach. Now is a great time to align your team's goals with the rest of your organization's goals.
3. Choose a content management system.
Have a system in place where you can create
4. Determine which types of content you want to create.
There are a variety of options out there for content you can create. In the following section, we'll discuss some of the most popular content formats marketers are creating, including some tools and templates to get you started.
5. Publish and manage your content.
Your marketing plan should go beyond the types of content you'll create — it should also cover you'll organize your content. With the help of an editorial calendar, you'll be on the right track for publishing a well-balanced and diverse content library on your website. Then, create a social media content calendar so you can promote and manage your content on other sites.
1) Who's the target audience for your content?
For how many audiences are you creating content? Just as your business might have more than one type of customer, your content strategy can cater to more than one type of reader or viewer.
Using a variety of content types and channels will help you deliver different content to each type of audience you have in mind and engage everyone your company does business with.
2. What problem will you be solving for your audience(s)?
Ideally, your product or service solves a problem you know your audience has. By the same token, your content coaches and educates your audience through this problem as they begin to identify and address it.
A sound content strategy supports people on both sides of your product: those who are still figuring out what their main challenges are, and those who are already using your product to overcome these challenges. Your content reinforces the solution(s) you're offering and makes your customers more qualified users of your product.
3. What makes you unique?
Your competitors likely have a similar product as yours, which means your potential customers need to know what makes yours better — or, at least, different. This is where content comes in.
In order to prove why you're worth buying from, you need to prove why you're worth listening to.
4. What content formats will you focus on?
What forms will your content take? Infographics? Videos? Blog posts? Having identified the topics you want to take a position on, you'll need to determine which formats to budget for so you can best express that position.
5. What channels will you publish on?
Just as you can create content in different formats, you'll also have different channels you can publish to. Channels can include owned properties, such as your website and blog; and social media properties, such as Facebook and Twitter. We'll talk more about social media content strategy in the step-by-step guide later in this article.
6. How will you manage content creation and publication?
Figuring out how you'll create and publish all your content can be a daunting task. It's important for a content strategy to know who's creating what, where it's being published, and when it's going live.
Developing a Content Marketing Strategy
A content marketing strategy is a plan for building an audience by publishing, maintaining, and spreading frequent and consistent content that educates, entertains, or inspires to turn strangers into fans and fans into customers.
A few group like to make a qualification between the terms content system and content promoting methodology. The qualification, they recommend, is best clarified with a Russian doll: a more modest technique is inside a bigger one.
This brings us to the next important question.
In case you are a private venture with a couple of workers or a one-man or one-lady shop, you might be believing that your substance promoting is easy to such an extent that you needn't bother with an arrangement.
Will not a rundown of things that need to happen composed on the rear of an envelope take care of business?
Yes, that’s one way to begin, especially if you are typically a perfectionist and just need to start your content marketing rather than waiting until you have the perfect plan.
But at some point you will need to develop a more comprehensive plan — and then document it.
Content marketers with a documented strategy feel more confident in their work.
Content marketing challenges don’t seem as overwhelming when you have a strategy in place.
A documented strategy makes it easier to get buy-in from stakeholders.
It’s easier to chart your success when you have a documented strategy.
The jury is in, folks: We all need a documented content marketing strategy. And the cool thing is it doesn’t need to be complicated.
Crafting a simple content marketing strategy
Let's face it: Unless you are a substance advertiser for a major organization, you needn't bother with a lot. Simply an arrangement to assist with centering your time, cash, and energy.
Truth be told, you can archive your substance promoting methodology in the time it takes you to address the accompanying 13 inquiries:
Who are your clients?
Who are your rivals?
What do you bring to the table?
What do you hear?
What content do you as of now have?
What is the reason for your content?
How frequently would it be a good idea for you to distribute content?
How might you disseminate your substance?
Who is accountable for your substance?
Who will create your substance?
Who will keep up with the substance?
Who is answerable for the outcomes?
What's your objective (center procedure)?
Need to get familiar with these inquiries and the interaction behind this basic substance showcasing technique?
Understanding your content
When you completely comprehend who your client is, assess the content you as of now have.
This activity won't just assist you with detecting the holes in your content that you need to fill, yet it will likewise assist you with seeing that old content can become obsolete and cost you top situations in web indexes, cause client experience disappointment, and that's only the tip of the iceberg.
In this way, here are four assets to assist you with looking into your present substance:
A Brief Guide to Fixing Your Old, Neglected, and Broken Content
Step by step instructions to Conduct a Content Audit for Quality and Audience Experience
Step by step instructions to Plug the Holes in Your Content Funnel that Are Costing You Money
The Single Best Way to Create Hit Content in Record Time
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