Creating a Content Marketing Strategy

Do you want to know how to create a content marketing strategy? If you want a successful business, creating a content marketing strategy backed by research is crucial. In this article, you will learn how to create a content marketing strategy from content development to implementing a content marketing plan.

Content Development

Learning how to create a content marketing strategy includes learning how to develop content. Content development, or content marketing, refers to the actual process of creating material and promoting it. This includes blog articles, images, videos, infographics, and anything else you choose to post on your website. 

content development

Choose a Medium

Once you understand the audience and goal-setting portion of how to create a content marketing strategy, you will start planning the actual content marketing plan. You will now need to decide what type of media you want to create. The best content marketing plans will use a combination of different mediums to best reach their target audiences and achieve their goals.

Blogs

Blog posts are an excellent way to establish credibility and a relationship with your target audience. Blog posts are usually posted to a business’s main website and should be helpful and actionable. This medium is the most popular because it has the potential to deliver strong results for your business.

Video

The unique aspect video holds over other mediums is that they are an audio and visual experience. You can sway a potential customer’s feelings with just your music choice and editing techniques. Video is the perfect medium for how-to content and other topics that would be aided by strong visuals. Video content will keep your audience on your page longer and keep them more engaged than other types of content. 

Infographic

Infographics will give your audience information in a quick and digestible way. You put the most important facts right in front of their faces so they do not have to search for the information themselves and get confused by the surrounding material.

Infographics are easy to make using websites like Canva and PiktoChart. Both of these sites have free options that make it easy to create visually appealing infographics even if you have no graphic design experience.

Content Development Ideas

A big part of learning how to create a content marketing strategy is learning how to generate a large amount of content at once. Most people do not find that many genius ideas pop into their heads without doing something first. Here are some ways to get started when you find you have no content ideas left.

content marketing ideas

Research Trends

Creating content related to your industry’s trending topics is a great way to create content that your audience will enjoy. Stay up to date by reading as much as you can about what is happening in your industry, get to know the people in your industry, and stay in contact with your customers. This will help you recognize trends and create a lot of quality content.

Repurpose Old Content

When you are out of ideas, make something new out of something old. Expand a subsection into a whole article or explore an existing topic from a different angle. Although this is a great content development technique to use when you need large amounts of content as you do for an effective content marketing strategy, it is imperative that every piece of content you create serves its own purpose separate from the one you took inspiration from. 

Just Create

Sometimes the hardest part is just getting started on a piece of content. When that’s the case, the best thing for you to do is sit down and create something. This forces you to try something. It might not work, but at least now you have an idea to improve upon. You will never learn how to create a content marketing strategy if you wait for a genius idea that will take too long to come. 

Quantity and Quality

Should you focus more on the quality or the quantity of the content you produce for your website? Both are important. It is easy to take the side of producing quality content, but what even constitutes quality content? In its most basic form, quality content is helpful and devoid of errors. If you are passionate about what you are creating, as you likely are considering it is your career, and have someone else edit your work, producing quality content will not be as difficult as it sounds.

As you explore different techniques relating to how to create a content marketing strategy, you will discover the importance of consistently posting content. It is no secret that you need to consistently post content for your content marketing strategy to be effective. It might take some time for your efforts to yield results, but if you know how to create an effective content marketing strategy, you will reach more people and bring in more customers.  

You should not relent on either the quantity or quality of work. Creating a content marketing strategy involves learning how to balance creating as much work as you can while also keeping the quality consistent.  

content marketing plan

Keyword Cannibalization

Another issue you could run into when learning how to create a content marketing strategy is keyword cannibalization. As mentioned earlier, you need to create as much quality content as you can. You are also likely aware that it is difficult if not impossible to come up with an infinite number of unique ideas, but if more than one piece of content serves the same purpose or uses the same focus keywords you will hurt your search engine rankings. This can lead to low conversion rates and a slew of other issues. 

To combat this issue, you can rewrite, combine, or delete repeated content. To avoid keyword cannibalization before it happens during content development, you should search through your old content and research unique keywords that will fit your purposes better than the ones you have used before. 

Content Marketing Plan

This lesson on how to create a content marketing strategy would not be complete without learning how to create a marketing plan. The technical pieces are just as important as the actual development of content. These steps will help you create a content marketing strategy that actually works instead of throwing ideas at the wall and hoping something sticks.

Understand Your Audience

Before you start creating any content, you need to know who will be consuming it. For example, content marketing strategies for small businesses are different than large businesses. Who is your audience? How do they behave? What geographic area do they live in; is it a city, suburb, or rural area? How do they think and what do they think about? Your business might cater to more than one type of person. As such, you might need to develop multiple different types of content for different audiences. The more information you collect on your target audience, the better you can craft your content to fit their specific needs. 

Know What Your Audience Needs

Identify the issues your audience is facing. By solving their problems, you are not only giving them the information they are looking for but also building trust between your business and potential customers. Taking the time to build trust and establish yourself as an authority in your field will transform potential customers into life-long customers.

Set Goals

As someone learning how to create a content marketing strategy, you might not understand the importance of having goals during this process. All content you create should serve to help you achieve your goals, not the other way around. Set goals that are challenging, but that you can reasonably reach within the time you have.

content marketing strategy

Budget

Everything costs money. Deciding when and where to spend it is a part of learning how to create a content marketing strategy that can not be skipped over. When you do this work before implementing your content marketing plan, you can optimize your spending to get the most out of your plan for the least amount of money. 

Find out what you have and what you need. Do you need to hire someone to produce content for you? What do you need to pay your content creators? Do you need to invest in software to help organize your content posting schedule? Do you want to pay social media platforms to boost your posts? Are you willing to pay to unlock all the features on your website? As you create your budget, these are some questions you could ask yourself. 

Create a Posting Schedule

Creating a consistent upload schedule will help you stay on track when dealing with a lot of content. You can use programs like Google calendar to keep track of due dates. It is free and easy to use. For more complex work schedules, CoSchedule or Asana might be better options. 

Measure Results

You can not improve if you do not know where you went wrong. Measuring the results of each piece of your content marketing plan will help you know what type of content resonates with your target audience. You will then know where your funds will be most effectively spent and what kinds of content you should put more effort into creating. Google Analytics is a popular way for businesses to measure how people interact with their content.

Your Content Marketing Strategy

Now that you know the basics of how to create a content marketing strategy, you can create your own custom-made to fit the needs and goals of your business. As every business is different, every content marketing strategy will be different. There will likely be some trial and error informed by the information you can find in the beginning, but once you start seeing the data, you will have a clearer idea of what you need to do to succeed.

FAQ:

  • What are examples of content marketing?
  • How do you create digital marketing content?
  • What are the best methods of content marketing?
  • What are the steps of the content development process?
  • How do you measure content marketing results?

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