Whether you’re just getting started with digital marketing, content marketing or revisiting your current content strategies, there is always room for improvement in content marketing strategy. The main aspect that separates content marketing from other marketing techniques is the way you connect with and engage your audience by providing them with valuable content.
Your loyal audience won’t have to surf the web elsewhere looking for answers to their questions and solutions to their problems anymore, as your content will educate them and build their trust in you and your brand. Developing a content marketing strategy is not difficult at all, so we have compiled a quick how-to guide on how to develop and nurture your own content marketing strategy.
Develop A Content Marketing Strategy
This way you can have all of your titles, content ideas, and other helpful notes to help you along the way in our content creation process. You can find many examples of content calendar templates online, editorial calendars or you can check out our complete guide to content clusters where we describe content production and content calendars from start to finish. The main purpose of having a content calendar is to track your existing content and provide guidelines for creating new content.
Know Your Audience
When you know exactly who your readers are, you’ll know exactly what type of content they want. Researching your social media audience and identifying their pain points is a good practice in ensuring you provide as much value as possible when distributing your content. You’ll also benefit from knowing which social media platforms resonate more with your particular audience, as types of content will vary among them, from videos, images, blog posts, to in depth-articles or industry news.
You may have multiple demographics in your target audience, no matter the case, using Google Analytics is free and easy to learn. Tools like this are vital for defining your target audience.
Decide On Which Type Of Content Best Suits Your Audience
There are so many ways to produce and distribute content today, it’s amazing. When implementing your content marketing campaign, you have tons of options available to give to your readers. Blog posts, Vlogging, podcasts, e-books, short stories, visual content, infographics, and educational articles are just a handful of content types you can choose from. However, it’s best to have your audience choose for you, which you can do by using Google Analytics. Instead of blindly developing your content in hopes you reach more people, use the metrics gained from Google Analytics to target more accurately.
Begin Content Creation
Neil Patel says it best;
“Great content is created for a specific purpose, and this purpose needs to be defined.”
Ask yourself if you are creating content to boost brand awareness, generate leads, convert users, attract past customers, improve search ranking results, or something else altogether.
Up to this point in implementing your content marketing strategy, you have only done preparation. Now it’s time to create quality content for your audience. In your content calendar, you should have your title, subheaders, and other helpful talking points.
If you are having trouble putting together an outline, you can do some online research.b The best way to do this is to look at the top trending articles that cover your topic. We recommend you go through the top 10 Google articles that come up when you search for your topic. Read through them and get some inspiration. Combining the information covered in those top-ranking articles with your knowledge and expertise in the field will secure you higher rankings.
Think about keywords as well. While keywords are not the only metric for good rankings, they are an important one. Adding them to texts after they have been written can prove to be challenging. If you want to avoid multiple rewrites and frustration, you can make things even easier, you can add a list of keywords to your outline. This will help you write content that sounds natural and contains the right keywords.
With all the instructions above, you have everything you need to create the perfect piece of content for your readers that adds true value. But we’re only halfway there.
Optimize Your Content
Having excellent content ready for your readers is a great success, but there is still work to do to gain every benefit possible through content marketing. Content optimization is the most important step to take before publishing your content. When you optimize your content you will be much more visible on Google and other search engines, as well as drive a higher quality of traffic to your website. Optimizing your content for SEO is necessary towards being known as an industry expert as well as ranking on search engines such as Google. SEO optimized content can help improve conversion rates, although this is not it’s primary function.
Luckily, in the age we live in today, AI can do most of the work for us. These tools can be tailored to your marketing goal. They can help with everything from content production to measuring content performance. All you have to do is define your goals and adjust your content to the data. So when you start optimizing your content it’s a great practice to become associated with AI and SEO tools like SEMRush or MarketMuse through a tutorial. With tools like these, you can quickly outrank any competitors you see on page 1 in Google searches. SEMRush will plan all of your keywords, do research on your competitors, and tell you exactly how your audience needs to be spoken to. Taking the time to optimize content will surely increase web traffic and conversion rates.
Launch Your Content Marketing Campaign And Track Success
Using your freshly optimized content, it’s time to start marketing. In your content calendar start keeping a schedule and track all of your pieces of content. You can use tools like Google Analytics, Ubersuggest, and Google Search Console to get a better idea of content performance. These tools can help you find out which content is hitting your target audience and which is not doing so well. This opens the way for A-B tests that can help you move forward and create content that will enhance customers’ experiences on your website. In addition to this, they also help in performing content audits and maintenance.
Part of launching your content marketing campaign is trial and error. Ask any industry influencer out there, not every great idea makes the cut and you will have to adapt your plan sometimes. That’s why it’s important to use these important tools that help you keep up with marketing trends and algorithm updates.
Always Be Testing
In conclusion, each content marketer will have an individual and personalized content marketing plan. But by following this guideline on making your content marketing strategy, you will have better odds at attaining success with your marketing efforts. The ultimate goal here is that you are providing a win-win for your audience. You are providing them with content they find valuable and even unique to your brand, while at the same time you are increasing your organic traffic, quality of audience, industry authority, and ultimately driving your sales and showcasing your services.
For more in depth research visit The Complete Guide To Content Marketing Strategies – 2021