Building the Perfect Content Marketing Strategy

Many content creators and website owners often wonder how to go about creating a foolproof content marketing strategy. Creating a content strategy is a lot easier than you may think. This article will give you useful tips for building the perfect content marketing strategy for your business.

Building the Perfect Content Marketing Strategy

Create Specific Goals and Formulate a Mission Statement 

A great place to start is by creating clear-cut, specific, and realistic goals. Setting goals can give you a sense of direction and can help you build the framework of what sort of content you would like to create. Your goals are unique to you and your business, so make sure you’re as specific as possible. 

Make Sure They Are Measurable

Regardless of what sort of goals you create, be sure that they are measurable and that they have numbers attached to them. Key performance indicators, or KPIs, are a great asset to your content strategy. They are extremely helpful because they can help you determine if you’ve reached your goalsPerhaps you want to increase the engagement rate of your content. If this is the case, you should specifically state that you’d like to increase the rate by 10% for example. Or maybe you want to increase the number of views on your video content. Then, identify a specific number of views by which you would like it to increase. In any case, making sure your goals are measurable in some way is extremely important. content marketing strategy

Consider Your Target Audience

Another helpful thing to consider when creating content goals is to think about the members of your target audience. Your target audience is an important part of goal setting because, at the end of the day, your content is going to be viewed by them. You need content that sparks their interest in some way, has meaningful value and satisfies their needs. So, you always need to make sure to create content that is going to connect with them. After all, the better content you produce, the more likely you’ll be able to convince them to purchase from your business. So, do a little research on your target audience. Find out basic demographic data such as their age, gender, education, and income. You can easily find this information through Google Analytics. You can also conduct research by performing customer surveys. In the survey, you can ask your audience questions regarding how they feel about your product or service, what sort of content they enjoy from your social media platforms and what content they’d like less of, as well as what your company could improve on as a whole. This information can really help you figure out how to best cater to your audience through your content marketing strategy. 

Establish a Timeline

The last thing you want to remember when creating your goals is establishing a timeline for when and how you’re going to achieve them. Giving yourself deadlines will give you and others in the company more motivation and help you to stay on track. Be sure to make your deadlines reasonable. If you don’t give yourself enough time to complete certain tasks, you could find yourself in a discouraging situation. With that said, don’t be afraid to be ambitious. As long as you have a plan, you can accomplish your content goals with consistency and perseverance. 

Conduct a Content Audit 

Now that you’ve established what goals you wish to focus on, it’s time to take a look at how your content is doing in the present moment. Content audits are perfect for this. A content audit is a process that analyzes all the content you’ve created for your site and can help you determine what content does better and what content falls short. You can easily find free content auditor software that can help you perform content audits such as DYNO Mapper and Screaming Frog. These platforms can help you analyze content titles and descriptions, create sitemaps, track backlinks and social shares, find duplicate pages, and many other useful data points. As you look through the analytics, be on the lookout for how often your content gets shared, how well keywords you include in your content are ranking in search results, and if you have any broken links. Content audit platforms often have an overwhelming amount of information to offer you about your site, so if things start to get confusing, you can narrow things down by only focusing on data points that relate to the goals you created on the onset. content strategy

Perform Content Research 

After looking through the results of your content audit, you’ll be able to decide what content you want to keep making more of and what content you might want to improve. Doing some content research can help you with your content plan even more. Content researching is when you look through the content of websites that are similar to yours and see what sort of content seems to be garnering success. This research can help you come up with ideas for your own content. It can also help you pick up tips and tricks that could potentially improve any of your current content. When researching, it’s important to ask yourself what value the piece of content brings and how the site is succeeding or perhaps failing at keeping people engaged with it. You can learn a lot from other sites, especially your close competitors. So don’t be afraid to take some notes to help inform your strategy. 

Brainstorm Content Ideas

You’re now ready to draft up some content ideas of your own. Think about what makes your site unique and what sort of lasting impression you want to make on your audience. How will your content prove your brand’s worth? In what ways will it engage your audience and lead to conversions? Next, you’re going to want to decide what media channels you’ll be utilizing to create or upload your content. Video marketing is a popular way to engage your visitors since the skilled combination of images and videography can catch your site viewers’ attention. Blog posts are another ideal content type to focus on since they can answer your potential customers’ questions in-depth, attest to the fact that your brand is knowledge, and build a sense of trust between you and the customer. Additionally, blog posts can be shared on other sites and social media channels to spread the word about your business even more.build a content marketing strategy

Create a Content Calendar

After pinpointing the best content for your site, it’s time to create a content calendar. Content calendars are a way to organize the logistics behind your content marketing strategy. In order to successfully meet your content goals, you’re going to need to plan your content ahead of time. That is why content calendars are an essential part of the process. They can be as basic as simply putting up due dates for content. Or they can include more information such as what sort of content you’ll post, what day and times you will post it, and what action items need to be done before the post goes live. If you have a team working on content creation, you can assign your team members jobs and indicate when their tasks should be completed. Regularly check in with your team members to make sure tasks are completed in a timely fashion. You can create your own content calendar relatively easily through Google Docs or Microsoft Word. You can also use content management platforms for a more automated content plan.content plan

Be Smart About Your Content Creation

Now it is easy to think that to build a content marketing strategy, you simply need to constantly push out brand new pieces of content every week or even every day. However, smart content creators should know that valuable content is not necessarily created this way. Of course, how often your business creates content will be unique to your brand and niche, but you do have options when it comes to content creation. For example, you can recycle or repurpose content in conjunction with the needs or interests of your target audience. If a certain topic seems to be commonly searched by your audience, consider giving old content on that topic a brand new look. This can be done through updated information, enhancing or editing its visual content, or republishing it on one of your main pages so that is one of the first things your site viewers see when they come to your site. You can also tap into user-generated content to see what interests them. You can also go through your previous articles and revisit them. In other words, you can break topics you discussed in an article down into smaller pieces, creating standalone articles on these topics. All of these above strategies can help you be more intentional, creative, and proactive when it comes to your content marketing strategy.

FAQ:

  • What is a content marketing strategy?
  • How do I research my target audience?
  • Why should I use key performance indicators?
  • What are ways to brainstorm content ideas?
  • How do I do a content audit?

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