Content is such a big part of digital marketing activities. In fact, through the right content, you can increase the traffic to your website and have a higher chance to converse that traffics. Content is really powerful as an inbound marketing strategy and if you haven’t tried it, you definitely should start now (as soon as possible). As a marketer, you probably ask yourself this question too much, “how to create a successful content marketing strategy?”
Well, you are in luck! Because today I am going to share with you 12 pieces of advice for a successful content marketing strategy for your business!
1. Have a clear goal
Any successful content marketing campaign should start with one clear question: ‘What do we want to achieve with our content?’ This should influence every blog, eBook, or social post you create. Having a clear overarching goal for your entire digital marketing strategy is vital. It can be easy to assume that this goal would be to generate leads, which is, after all, the goal of every business. But it’s also worth taking some time to consider the ‘how’ as well as the ‘why’ you’re creating content. This means creating informative content that would engage readers, so they feel empowered to take the next step in the buyer’s journey.
2. Understand your audience better
Before you write a single word or post a single tweet, you need to understand more about the people who’ll be reading it. For that, you’ll need analytics. Luckily, almost anybody with a website domain can analyze who comes and goes on their website with the help of Google Analytics. The data can help you understand who your readers are, what they’re looking for, and how they’re doing it.
With this information, you can understand the demographics of your readership, including age, job title, seniority, and any related interests they might have. This is important information. The material you create for the CEO will naturally be different from that created for an IT expert or HR manager.
Once you understand this information, the next step is to create marketing buyer personas based on the information. A buyer persona is a semi-fictional account of your ideal customer based on this research. From there, it’s much easier to target your future content towards this person.
3. Identify your content types
Once you’ve worked out who you’ll target, the next step is to work out what you’ll create. Different organizations will have different needs from their content strategies. So there’s no one size fits all approach. There’s an almost infinite range of different content types, from the more conventional blogs, eBooks, and case studies, to more interactive examples like quizzes, polls, infographics, and much more.
The trick is to identify what question your buyer is asking and then tailor the content type back to that specific need. Research is central that, understanding who your customers are, the search terms they’re using, and the specific problems they aim to address.
If you’re a smaller company with limited in-house resources, chances are you won’t be able to produce a large range of different types of content straight off the bat. For that reason, it’s important to effectively identify what types of content will have the maximum impact on your readership.
For B2B audiences, we find blogs, eBooks, and whitepapers, as well as social media content on LinkedIn to be the most effective. But this won’t necessarily be the same for you, so make sure to go back to your persona and consider your audience data when planning your content marketing strategy.
4. Understand the content marketing funnel
The idea of the content marketing funnel is similar to the sales funnel. The sales funnel is essentially a broad-based term that describes the buyer’s decision-making journey, with the three key phases being awareness, evaluation, and purchase. Anyone involved in sales and marketing needs to pay close attention to this process in order to gain a better understanding of what makes buyers move through the funnel.
To some extent, content marketing is considered outreach, which means it’s something that sits at the top of the sales funnel (TOFU). To an outsider, it may seem as though this aspect of digital marketing is “far away” from the actual money-making (sales) part of the funnel.
With content marketing, there is a fourth stage of the sales funnel that comes after the conversion “delight,” which essentially translates to establishing brand loyalty. Thus, content strategists should always be thinking about four critical stages of the funnel:
- Outreach: attracting new customers
- Conversion: convincing customers to buy
- Closing: making the sale
- Retention: establishing brand loyalty and returning customers
The top of the funnel (TOFU) is where brand awareness and lead generation happens. It’s where you have the opportunity to cast a net over the broadest possible customer base and not only build your audience but also engage with them to understand more about your entire strategy. But a great content strategist or manager will understand how to engage customers through every part of the funnel and ideally keep them cycling through the funnel.
5. Understanding SEO
In an ideal world, we wouldn’t have to worry about SEO. We’d publish insightful, thought-provoking blog posts about our chosen topics, and find enormous online audiences eager to learn from our experience and buy whatever we’re selling. Obviously, we don’t live in that world, and we do have to think about SEO.
Some content experts advocate for a “keyword-less” approach to content; publishing content that serves reader interests first and foremost, and doesn’t concern itself with anything as “distasteful” as keyword targeting. Again, this is great in an ideal world, but it’s a jungle out there and if you’re not thinking about keyword targeting, you can bet your competitors are. That’s why it pays to target specific keywords with your content before you produce it.
A topic as broad and complex as keyword targeting for SEO is far beyond the scope of this post, so I won’t try to condense it here. Suffice to say that you should be thinking of keywords you want to rank for before you sit down to write a blog post or produce any other type of content.
6. Answer Complex Questions
We have discussed the value of targeting specific keywords with your content. If you’re already doing this, the chances are pretty good that you’re targeting (and hopefully ranking for) a solid number of simple keyword terms that are relevant to your business. While this is still a worthwhile strategy to pursue, going after rankings for complex search queries can have an even bigger payoff, namely ranking in the Google Featured Snippet or position zero on Google.
The Google Featured Snippet or position zero is some of the most coveted real estate on the search engine results page. If your content answers a complex question by appearing in the Featured Snippet, not only could you drive a ton of referral traffic to your site, but you could also give your brand a major lift in terms of subject matter expertise. User trust in the content promoted in the Featured Snippet is high, meaning that if Google chooses your content to answer a complex question, your brand WINS BIG!
So, before you create any content, you should do your research first about what are the questions that your audience probably asking on Google regarding the solution or the keyword you are targeting. You can try Asking Franklin to check what are the questions frequently asked by people and start creating content from there. If there’s no result, it will be best to move on to another topic to cover. This could make your chance to be placed on position zero is higher than ever!!
7. Be Bold and Speak Your Mind
One of the biggest challenges facing content marketers is competing with and overcoming the sheer volume of content being produced. With literally millions of blog posts being published every single day, making your voice heard over the tsunami of (poorly written, useless) content can be an almost insurmountable task, unless you take a stand that nobody else is willing to take.
So much of the content being produced (especially in tight-knit industries such as digital marketing) merely parrots and regurgitates the opinions and viewpoints of a select few. This is why readers are rapidly becoming desensitized to content. If there are hundreds of blogs all saying the same things, why should readers waste their time consuming that content? This is what makes producing contrarian content so powerful.
Taking an unpopular stance, speaking your mind when others won’t, and flirting with controversy can be a powerfully effective strategy in your content. Of course, you should take care not to offend or be contrarian for its own sake, but dare to be bold and speak your mind. If nothing else, your readers will likely appreciate your candor. In addition, you’ll probably sound and appear much more authentic than you would by merely repeating what others have said.
8. Create an Editorial Calendar
Creating an editorial calendar is one of the most important pillars of a successful content marketing strategy. It’s easy to think ‘I’ll just write a blog when I’ve got something to write about, or when inspiration hits. In reality, unless you create clear goals and deadlines, it’ll almost certainly fall to the bottom of the to-do list. For that reason, it’s good to start by defining exactly how much content you’ll produce each month, and what types. Then, it’s time to start generating ideas.
You can start planning by deciding how many blog posts you want to create in a month, what are the best topics to cover. You can use project management software to create tasks and make your editorial calendar or you can make your own editorial calendar template.
For many companies, however, as little 4-8 blogs a month, 1-2 eBooks and some accompanying social media activity can lay a strong basis for an effective digital marketing campaign.
9. Repurpose Your Content
The best content takes time, effort, and skill to produce. Even if you’re giving away your best content for free (which you should be), that doesn’t mean you can’t get a greater return on investment from your content. This is why so many businesses repurpose content from one format into several.
Think of the last blog post you published that performed strongly. Did it resonate with readers because it served as a valuable, evergreen resource? Did it offer your audience something they couldn’t find anywhere else? Then it would probably do well as a downloadable guide. Similarly, some blog posts might be well-suited to an email blast, or a live webinar. However, you choose to repurpose your content, be sure you’re getting your money’s worth from your content production investment.
10. Promote and share your content!
You can write the best content in the world, but if nobody knows about it, it’s not worth the HTML code it’s written on. It’s essential to find ways to push your content out and find new audiences. And if you want to build a successful, sustainable, and following, the best tools are social media and email marketing. For a B2B audience, Twitter and LinkedIn generally provide the most valuable audiences. And currently, TikTok is on the rising, so you should consider creating a TikTok account.
11. Track, Measure, Evaluate, and Refine
Building a long-term content strategy from the ground up is certainly the hard part, but that doesn’t mean it is plain sailing from there. The B2B technology market is a competitive place and organizations looking to stay on top need to make constant improvements to their digital strategies. To do this, you should constantly aim to discover more about your readership and how they interact with your content.
Research is incredibly valuable, and it is vital to understand how successful the content you produce is or could be. That requires an understanding of how many people are viewing the content, as well as how they access it. If you discover that all your readers are finding you through paid media and SEO, it’s a good sign you need to improve your organic social efforts. As well as this, however, tracking bounce rates and engagement times will help improve your strategy, since it will allow you to identify which pieces of content readers are really interested in.
12. Consistency is key
A content strategy must, above all, have a long-term goal. There’s no point posting a few blogs and some social media tweets and expecting the leads to roll in. It simply doesn’t work like that.
If you’re looking for short-term wins, paid media will help get some immediate traffic, but it’s important to work on an organic presence at the same time. Over a long period of time, you’ll start to see content and social engagement rise, providing you with far richer and more lucrative audiences than Google Ads ever could.
But as well as consistency in the amount of content, you should also aim for consistency in style. Every piece of content you produce is essentially a lesson in branding and should contribute to your company’s wider image. Whether that’s the topics you choose to discuss or the opinions you share, you should work to create a clear and tangible brand voice through everything you do.
Conclusion
So, these are 12 pieces of advice to build a good content marketing strategy. Creating goals, do some research for keywords, and make content that could actually answer your audience’s questions is highly recommended. But not only that, you need to have a solid plan about how to do your content, your type of content, and how to promote them to your reader is also a must! Above all, consistency is the key to success. So, are you ready to create your content now?
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