In the world of digital marketing, relevant, engaging and quality content plays an indispensable role in building trust, generating leads, and improving conversions. However, content marketing efforts do not reap immediate results, it is more like a future investment that essentially focuses on building long-lasting relationships with customers. The success of your content is highly dependent on its foundation, which stems from an effective content marketing strategy. So if you are wondering how to create a winning content marketing strategy for your business, you have come to the right place.
In order to create a successful content marketing strategy, you need to tie together all types of content, so they deliver a better conversion rate. Hence, in this guide, we provide you with essential steps to keep in mind along with important tools and resources while framing your strategy.
Why Do You Need a Documented Content Marketing Strategy?
Developing a content marketing strategy will enable you to set goals for a piece of content, and thereby drive consistent results from it. However, while framing a content marketing strategy it is essential to get it documented rather than just building in your head. A recent study indicates that 60% of businesses who have documented their content marketing strategy have achieved effective and good results.
Documentation of the strategy will help you shift from chaotically creating content to building an organized system with set goals, success metrics, and streamlined processes for continuous improvement.
Essential Steps in Creating a Winning Content Marketing Strategy
Planning with a foresight of the future allows you to anticipate challenges and allocate resources effectively. Hence we have mentioned some of the most important steps in framing an effective content marketing strategy that aligns with your marketing efforts and business goals.
Step 1 – Determine the target audience
The starting point of building your content marketing strategy has to be determining and understanding your target audience. The buying behavior of your customers surely will form the base of your content strategy, but your target audience is not just made up of your buyers. Your target audience comprises people who begin interacting with your brand long before they intend to make a purchase. Hence it is essential to deliver quality and valuable content that will attract your potential customers before they enter the sales funnel.
Step 2 – Analyze the performance of historical content and establish content marketing goals
If you already have created some content in the past, you can analyze its performance using your analytics dashboard to check how your content is performing against your set goals. Moreover, content marketing efforts are long-term, so it is important to define the goals and objectives you want your marketing campaigns to achieve.
Step 3 – Existing content audit
A content audit is the process of organizing, analyzing, and improving your existing content while potentially saving resources. Auditing the existing content can also help you to better understand what content truly resonates with your audience. A recent study indicates that 65% of companies with successful content marketing plans ran at least 2 content audits a year.
Step 4 – Develop an editorial plan and content calendar
Drafting a content marketing plan allows you to allocate your resources appropriately, determine which content workflow is taking longer, and adjust your expectations accordingly. Hence it is important to develop an editorial plan that involves the following steps –
- Prioritize your actions by identifying the most critical tasks
- Find a relevant and engaging topic for developing a good content
- Create content buckets or topic clusters.
- Do thorough competitive research.
- Design your content funnel
Step 5 – Develop your content
Quality content that is relevant, engaging, and helps you to rank faster, must be the desired result of every content marketing effort. You can use the following to create effective content that resonates with your audience –
- Focus on the originality of your content
- Diversify your content ideas with keyword research
- Repurpose your content
- Make use of user-generated content
Step 6 – Develop a content distribution plan
Merely creating relevant and high quality content is not enough to derive results, it is also essential to reach the right audience at the right time. Hence, here is when the content distribution strategy comes into play. To begin with, try to visualize distributing your content on various media platforms, being earned, owned, and paid media. Thereafter, see how they can work together, and track their performance to narrow down the best ones.
Key Takeaways
Content creation and marketing is a long-term process, and its results take time to reap. But if you want your content marketing efforts to bear fruits, it is important to sow an effective and documented seed of content marketing strategy. We hope that this article has been insightful and helpful in your content marketing efforts.
However, if you seek professional guidance in framing your content marketing plan, or for SEO efforts, we at KLoc Technologies are here to serve you. With an experience of 15 years in the digital marketing and eCommerce industry, our experienced team can fuel your content marketing effort to arrive at desirable results. Connect with us today to help us understand your needs better!
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