How to Create a Content Marketing Strategy for your Business
Are you planning to create a content marketing strategy for your business but don’t know how? According to research in 2020, about 63% of businesses don’t have their content marketing strategy documented. The remaining 37% with well-documented content marketing strategies are more successful.
We leave the success of our businesses to luck when we run them without good strategies. As a business owner, you risk all your efforts going down the drain when your success and failure rate is left to luck. This is why developing an effective content marketing strategy is one of the important educational needs of business owners.
If you belong to this group, we are here to help but first, let’s take a quick look at the concept of content marketing strategy.
Defining Content Marketing Strategy
A content marketing strategy is one that primarily uses content as a means to achieve business goals. Let’s imagine that your business goal is to increase revenue by boosting the visibility of your brand or business. Your content marketing strategy can involve taking more SEO in your content, increasing website ranking and visibility. Hence, driving traffic to your products or services.
You can focus on improving your content on whatever platform, whether your website or your social marketing platforms. Creating great content will help engage your audience, hence, building a community that trusts your brand. Usually, when people trust your content, they will trust your brand or business.
A good content marketing strategy does more than attracting more prospects to your brand. If used properly, it can increase overall customer satisfaction and sales enablement.
Tips to Help Create a Good Content Marketing Strategy
A content marketing strategy is not merely a “nice-to-have” as its benefits go beyond entertaining your customers.
Here are some tips to help you create a great content marketing strategy:
Define your Mission:
A great place to start when creating your content marketing strategy is defining your content marketing mission statement. This mission statement helps keeps you from being distracted. It helps you maintain focus on only the important things by helping you easily identify action that yields little or no result.
Your content marketing mission statement should revolve around:
- Your target audience
- Content that sparks their interest
- Benefits they will get from going through your content
Define your Marketing Goals:
Unlike the mission statement that focuses on your target audience and their benefit from your content, your marketing goals focus on your business. It focuses on what you think your business will benefit from investing time and effort to creating great content.
Your marketing goals should include;
- Increasing overall revenue through your content
- Getting more quality leads and increasing sales rate through your content
- Driving more traffic to your site and social media platforms
- Improving business and brand perceptions
- Minimizing marketing costs and increasing audience engagement.
Establish your Keep Performance Indicators (KPIs)
There is no better way to achieve complex goals than breaking them down and making them measurable and specific. Setting KPIs for your content marketing strategy will help you do just that.
KPIs will help you keep track of your achievements by providing check-off options for every milestone. They are more specific, hence, making your goals more achievable. They’ll include setting milestones with specific numbers and time frames, for instance, hitting a specific revenue in the next quarter.
Study Your Audience
Creating great content is crucial to the success of any content marketing strategy. Great content is any content that interests your audience. Hence, you need to know your audience to create great content.
Here are three key actions you should take to know your audience:
- Collect Demographic Data: You need to collect demographics on your followers, email subscribers, and visitors. This data will help you identify your average audience’s age group, gender, Education, and Income.
- Get Customer Feedback: Another way to understand how your audience thinks is by collecting feedback from existing customers. This way, you will know how they feel about your product or service, the urgent needs, and how you can address these issues with your content.
- Develop Buyer Personas: You can create buyer personas after collecting demographics and customer feedback. Customer avatars otherwise referred to as buyer personas, help describe your ideal customers and readers. It should include your customers’ pain points, behavioral motivators, and sources of information.
Identify the Perfect Content Channels for your Business
As you follow all the steps we’ve highlighted so far, you begin to see patterns around your audience and where they love hanging out the most. This will help you identify the social media platform that suits your business.
You shouldn’t focus on marketing your content on Facebook when the majority of your audience is on Instagram. A good marketing strategy will help you focus on what is working rather than exerting many efforts on everything at the same time.
Decide on Content Types
Usually, the type of content that will help you achieve your goals depends on what your audience love and the channels you choose to use. For instance, if most of your audience happens to be on Instagram, your content will largely be picture-based. The channel you opt for will play a vital role in determining the content type that’ll work for you.
Conclusion
A good content marketing strategy focuses on using your content to help you achieve your marketing goals. Since it is created around what your target audience love, getting them to know about your products and services becomes easy. You could talk about your new product while talking about something that addresses their pain points.
