Content marketing has opened up the door for deeper interaction with potential and existing clients. Marketers are now using different content marketing strategies to ensure that their products are adding value to their targeted customers and are attending to their specific needs.
Have a Clear Vision
As a business owner, you have to have a clear vision of the goals of your business and what they represent if you want to develop a sound content marketing strategy. Start by identifying your audience and then think about your distinctive advantage that you can use to create a viable solution for one of their existing problems.
1 Have a Clear Vision2 Name Your Goals3 Set Your Performance Measures4 Identify Your Target Customer5 Reevaluate your Content 6 Follow your Target Customers’ Content Channel of Choice7 Decide on Content Types8 Assign Roles9 Publish your Content
As you answer these basic questions, you will then need to progress in defining your actionable items. This includes figuring out which content marketing mediums and channels you will use so that you can determine your budget needs. Finally, you can develop your content marketing calendar to efficiently manage your marketing activities and follow up on your progress. Now that we have laid the groundwork to introduce your content marketing strategy, it’s time to get into more details about how you can create it.
Name Your Goals
This is the first and most important step in creating your content marketing strategy. You have to have a clear set of realistic goals that you need your content marketing strategy to help you achieve. Your goals don’t need to be overly complicated, something as simple as generating more sales would suffice. However, they do need to cover the value that you are going to be offering to your target customers. This win-win thinking approach will help you stay focused as you go on building your content marketing strategy.
Set Your Performance Measures
Once you have identified and named your goals, now is the time to set your KPIs or Key Performance Indicators. These are the quantifiable measures that you can use to assess your performance. At this stage, you put your marketing tools to the test and evaluate their efficacy. If you have been experimenting with new software, you will want to compare digital asset management software and decide what is working vs. what isn’t. If you find that you are wasting too much time switching between platforms, think about upgrading your DAM (Digital Asset Management) into a more universal one that allows for seamless integration. Setting your KPIs early on will help you get back on track whenever your marketing strategy deviates from your preset goals.
Identify Your Target Customer
Like traditional marketing, you have to carry out extensive market research to identify your target customer. It is imperative that you are as specific as possible when identifying your target customer. The more information you collect about your target customer’s likes, dislikes, behaviors, and purchasing habits, the more likely your content marketing strategy is going to succeed. As your business grows, you will need to upgrade your content marketing strategy to account for your expanding customer base if you hope to cover an even larger segment of the market.
Reevaluate your Content
Take a look at your existing content, and try to find out how you can make the necessary enhancements. Just because something has been working well, it does not mean that you leave it as is until it becomes completely stagnant. Instead, be proactive and take some calculated risks, don’t be afraid to venture out and experience with new content channels. By now you probably know how fast new content trends come up on a daily basis, so if you want to remain in the race, you have to get comfortable with experimenting. Look at your market’s top leaders and learn from them, this is how you can improve your content to help you reach your goals.
Follow your Target Customers’ Content Channel of Choice
Think of your target customers as your compass needle, you need to follow them wherever they prefer. If your brand is young and cool, you will probably need to dedicate your time and effort to solidify your social media presence. From Instagram to Tik Tok and Twitter, these are the platforms that you will have to focus on to showcase your unique content.
Decide on Content Types
In this step, you decide on the type of content that you want to use on your different channels. Research has shown that blog posts are one of the most effective content types and in most cases has the highest number of shares. However, you will need to refer back to your target customers’ preferences and see which type of content they value more. In reality, you will need to use a mix of content types like blog posts, videos, podcasts, and of course social media. It all comes down to deciding on when to use which content type.
Assign Roles
Now that you know what exactly needs to be done, it is time to think about who will be doing it. Assigning roles is not only about hiring personnel, it also includes creating the workflow that you will be following to create and publish your content.
Publish your Content
Finally, you have now reached the execution phase, it is time to put your content marketing strategy into action. If you want to increase your strategy’s chances of success, always stick to your editorial calendar and be consistent with your content. Creating your content marketing strategy takes a lot of work. As you have seen, there are tons of research involved and many details that you have to keep in mind. However, you have to understand that there isn’t a finish line. You will always need to evaluate and improve as you go because the strategy that is working today will not necessarily continue working tomorrow. The most important thing is to be flexible enough to shift gears whenever you need to continue growing.
