Here are our top tips and advice on how to develop a content marketing strategy.
Content marketing is about consistently producing content of value to your target audience, to attract and retain customers who will buy your goods and/or services.
Producing high quality, valuable content for your audience will set you up as the go to expert for your particular area of sales or services, keeping you at the front of their mind when they need your product or services,
The content you produce also needs to encourage your audience to reach your business goals – to get that sale, to get them to contact you, to book that meeting to discuss how you can help solve their problems.
To be successful at content marketing you need a content marketing strategy – a plan or blueprint to follow to accomplish this – against which you can measure results. A plan that can be altered or revised in light of the results being achieved.
Why You Need A Content Marketing Strategy
A strategic content marketing plan will map out how your business will use content to attract, acquire and engage with new prospects and existing customers (do not forget about your existing customers they are the easiest to sell to as they already know, like and trust you!).
Most successful content marketeers have a well documented content marketing strategy in place.
It enables you to stay focused on your content priorities, and allows you to allocate resources to get the required results.
Having a documented plan makes it easier for you to review the plan as required and to make alterations to it.
A document plan allows you to examine it with results in mind and so can make tactical decisions on how to alter the plan to get better results – which type of content is the most effective, do you need more content relating to your bloopy service, as your bloopy service is where you make the most money or you have spare capacity in that area.
These decisions easier to make and plan when you have a documented content marketing strategy in place.
What Are The Components Of A Content Marketing Strategy?
Content marketing strategies vary with a number of factors icluding budget, niche etc but essentially there are 4 areas to consider:
- How are you going to produce content – will this be done inhouse, will you get in help by using an external expert such as JSP Web Design, what resources are you going to allocate to this?
- What are your goals? What would be a good result? – This is why you are producing content, what do you want your target audience to do when they have seen your content? What to you want your content to do for your business?
- Consider who are your ideal clients and where are they on their buying journey. Have a clear idea of the characteristics of your ideal client – what do they need? Where are they on their buying journey – are they just gathering information or are they ready to buy?
- What is your companies unique perspective and approach to creating content – what makes you different and why should your prospects buy from you and not somebody else.
What are your goals?
Different types of content work differently on different goals.
Often the goals revolve around:
- Sales
- Cost Reduction
- Business Growth
Deciding what goals what you want to aim for will avoid wasting resources on content that do not align with your goals.
Decide where you want to improve your business:
- Brand awareness
- Audience engagement
- Website visitors
- Lead generation or nurture
- Marketing – reduce market costs, increase sales, new revenue streams
- Customer retention / loyalty
What Content Should I Produce And When?
The type of content you should produce will vary depending upon the goals you want to achieve as shown above.
The type of content can be in various formats and published on different timescales.
- Some examples are shown below.
- A short headline or quote – could be a tweet, Facebook post – issued daily
- A web page, blog post, video, infographic – issued twice a week
- A magazine article, guest post or article or longer video – issued monthly
- A white paper, skyscraper/cornerstone content web page, webinar, ebook – issued quarterly.
Conclusion
A well documented content marketing strategy will gather together details of your businesses purpose, goals and target audience, outlining the purpose, goals, strategies and results required.
Content marketing is a huge subject, and large companies will have a whole department dealing with it – check out The Content Marketing Institute website here: https://contentmarketinginstitute.com/
For a smaller company – think about the above tips – write down your content marketing strategy on 1 A4 page – keep it as a ‘Standard Operating Procedure’ – and regularly visit it and update as required – JSP Web Design are a firm believer in having a written down plan to follow.
These tips on how to develop a content marketing strategy will help your business grow by using and measuring results of your content marketing efforts.
