The best way to ensure you have a successful business is to have a strategy in place, right?
If you don’t have a strategy or set any goals or measure anything, success and failure are left to luck, which is a huge waste of your time and resources.
Creating a content marketing strategy for your business is a great way to attract traffic to your site, build your audience, create brand awareness, and make money.
Follow these simple steps to develop a content marketing plan that will grow your business in the most efficient way possible.
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Step 1: Your Content Marketing Mission Statement and Goals
The best place to start on this journey is to develop a content marketing mission statement. This will help you focus on what’s important in creating your content so your strategy stays on track.
Your content marketing mission statement should outline:
- Who the target audience is
- What types of content you’re going to use
- The value your audience will get from the content
The mission statement outlines what your audience is going to get from your content, but you also want to think about what your business is going to get from it.
This is where some quality goal setting is going to be really handy.
Different content is going to help you to achieve different goals. That’s why it’s important to consider what exactly it is you want to get out of your content strategy.
Your goals will depend on your particular business but here are a few thoughts to get you started.
- Increase revenue
- Attract more high-quality leads
- Drive more traffic to your website
- Brand awareness
- Thought leadership
- Building an email list
- Social media engagement
Remember, the best way to achieve your goals is by making them specific and measurable. That brings us to our next step.
Step 2: Establish KPIs
KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) are the best way to measure whether you’ve achieved your goals.
KPIs lay out what exactly you plan to achieve so you can tell if you’re hitting the mark or need to reassess and change course.
Typically KPIs are very specific, for example:
- Increasing subscribers to your email list
- Revenue targets
- Increased organic traffic
- Improved search rankings on Google
- Increased followers on social media
Certain campaigns can be used for different goals with separate KPIs. So, for example, if you have a goal to increase your organic traffic, you could try improving your SEO which will also improve your search rankings.
Step 3: Know Your Target Audience
The basis for any successful digital marketing strategy is knowing your target audience.
If you know who you’re targeting, you can create just the perfect content to draw them in.
You can utilize the following information to hone in on your target market.
- Demographics – age, salary, family size, etc.
- How does your product benefit the customer?
- Understand their priorities
- Find out where they spend time online
Once you have some basic information about your audience, you can create buyer personas, also known as customer avatars.
Good avatars will help you to write content and create campaigns that address your customers’ pain points, challenges, information sources, and motivations.
Step 4: Figure Out the Best Content Channels for Your Audience
As you work through getting to know your target audience, you’ll begin to get a really good sense of where your audience spends time online.
Once you know that, you will know what types of content are going to best reach them.
Step 5: Determine Content Types
Successful strategies have core content, usually published on your own site, which you can then repurpose for social media or the like.
Blog posts are an easy way to get started, as they are central to most businesses’ content marketing strategies.
They deliver strong results and are so versatile. Video marketing is also a strong content type as it is very engaging and the visitor has to put in little effort.
Step 6: Create a Content Calendar
Lack of planning when it comes to creating content will derail your efforts faster than anything.
Especially since one of the key components to making your content strategy work is consistency. If you wait until the last minute and then can’t think of anything to write, the quality of your content is going to go way down.
Sit down with your calendar and map out your content.
Be sure to check for any holidays you want to mention or special dates, like anniversaries, when you might want to publish something special.
From there, map out your content with due dates. Keep in mind that you will have to research, type, and edit all of your content.
Step 7: Create Your Content
Now that all of the prep work is done, you can get down to business and actually create a piece of content.
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The first step is to do some research to find out what content is already out there – likely with your competition – and how your content can add more value to your audience.
Be sure to do some keyword research as well so that you have better SEO and ranking on search engines.
That’s it! Now you can distribute and market your content and measure your results to see if you’re hitting your KPIs.
If you need help creating your content, check out this useful resource!
