Digital media is one of the most important marketing avenues for potential customers. This is especially true when it comes to content creation, where your platform is entirely digital. With the increased competition in the digital marketing arena in the last few years, it’s more important than ever to craft a winning marketing strategy as a business model in 2023. When crafting your digital marketing strategy, valuable content derives from a successful content strategy. This should be the biggest portion of your plan going forward in 2023 and beyond. According to research, 78% of businesses started seeing positive returns with content marketing strategies. Whether you’re just setting out with a content marketing strategy for the first time, or you’ve been doing it for a while, this article can help you to come up with a winning strategy for your business goals.
Table of Contents
What is a Content Marketing Strategy?
Your marketing strategy is your plan for creating awareness with your audience and building a solid client base for your content business goals. With this strategy, you get steps ready to engage your target market in a meaningful way, generating website traffic.
Your marketing strategy and thus business objectives should include a number of aspects. Here are a few examples:
- Target audience
- Market research
- Achievable and measurable goals
- Core message
- Distribution channels
- Content ideas
- Publication schedule/content calendar
When conducting research on your content marketing strategy, you should keep in mind that your content should always be relevant to your specific audience, and you should time the publication of content well.
Why Is Your Content Marketing Strategy Important?
As a content creator, you already understand the value of quality content. To get your audience to engage with your brand and to increase organic traffic, your content should not only be authentic, but it should also be on the proper channels and distributed at the right time.
This is why you should have a detailed content strategy with marketing goals. You have to know who your audience is, along with their preferred channels, so they can easily find your content. You also need to plan what you will distribute and have a schedule for this distribution.
Creating content for content’s sake is a poor way to build your business. An in-depth plan can help you create written content that can encapsulate the customer journey. Once you’ve got your marketing plan, you can create relevant content for your audience.
Questions You Should Ask Before Starting
Before you start developing your content strategy, there are a number of questions you should be able to answer.
The first question to ask is why you are creating the content. If you can answer the why, it will help you to define your goals. Next, you need to know who the content is for. This is your target audience. You should be able to describe the person you want to engage with your content.
The next important question is how your content is different from that of your competitors. Content marketing is a very competitive arena, and your content should stand out from your competitors. You should have something unique to say that will add value to your audience.
Now It’s Time to Craft Your Strategy
Once you’ve found answers to the above questions, you have to consider how your content will reach your audience. You have to efficiently plan the avenues and platforms you’re going to use to get your message to the right people at the most appropriate time. Put your content marketing plan into words. Here’s how to create a sound content strategy.
Market Research
Market research is one of the most important aspects of building your content strategy. Without proper research, you won’t understand your target audience, and you won’t know where to distribute your content. More importantly, conducting research helps you to properly form a content governance system where you’ll know what to post to engage with your audience authentically.
Without proper research, your content marketing efforts will miss the mark and be fruitless. You can conduct your own research on social media platforms and via emails, or you can hire an agency to do it on your behalf. While hiring an agency may not be as cost-effective and not always possible for small business owners, you’ll get better results with written reports. This will help you to interpret the data better, making the research more effective.
Create Your Buyer Persona
Your buyer persona is where you describe your ideal buyer. You already have an idea of your target market, but a buyer persona is a more detailed breakdown. You have to put into words what your perfect buyer looks like and the problems your content will help this person solve. There are plenty of tools you can use to make this process easier.
When using a template to create your buyer persona, you’ll have to fill in information like demographics, buyer motivations, top influencers in your field, and the preferred channels your buyer uses. These channels will likely be a combination of social media platforms, along with emails and websites.
You also have to figure out the pain of your buyer, or the problem they’re looking to solve. This is part of their motivation and will help you connect to your audience with true empathy. From here, you can easily create helpful and authentic content.
Establish Your Brand’s Story
For a successful content strategy, you have to properly define your brand’s voice. Your brand’s message should not only be authentic, but also consistent. To get this right over a long period, you have to establish your brand’s story first and then start creating usable content.
To properly establish your brand’s story, you must evaluate yourself against your customers and competitors. You also have to find your unique value proposition in your market. This will help you to find your authentic voice.
Once this is done, you also have to consider how you’re going to address your audience. Some brands have a fun and upbeat voice, while others are more serious. This will greatly impact the way you produce content, and it can have an impact on where your distribute content.
Define Your Brand
Define your unique value proposition and your mission statement as part of your content marketing efforts. What exactly is it that sets you apart from others in the same field? Why should your customers listen to you instead of your competitors?
Define the reasons why your customers will read your content over that of the competitor and what solutions you offer that will cause readers to finish reading or listening to your content. Make competitors want to subscribe to your mailing list and follow your brand.
Your mission statement will include your target audience, along with their goals and how your content is going to solve their problems. To write your mission statement, ask yourself what the purpose of your brand is, what goals you want to reach, and how you want to make an impact on your audience. Play around with different statements until you find one that fits right.
Set Your Goals
Goal setting is part of most marketing campaigns, and it’s no different when it comes to content strategies. Before you can create usable content, you have to know what your goals are with each blog post, video, or picture. Set up all the goals you expect your content creation to achieve. What impact do you expect your content to have on your bottom line?
As part of your content strategy, your goals should include an increase in brand awareness, helping generate leads and sales, and increasing brand loyalty. Ensure that the goals you set are measurable.
Make sure you study the metrics on your social media platforms: see how much of an impact your content is making on the metrics. You can work out your key performance indicators, key results, and objectives.
Setting goals is an excellent way to see how efficient your content marketing strategy is and how well your content is doing. From here, you can make the necessary adjustments to your strategy as you get feedback.
Make an Inventory of Your Content
Making an inventory of your existing content will help you with improvement and optimization and help give you fresh content ideas. If you have a big platform, it may be difficult and time-consuming, so you can use a free content auditing tool to simplify the process.
It’s a good idea to do a content audit at least twice a year, considering that there’s a natural content lifecycle. The content audit tool will help you find content that needs to be optimized, rewritten, or eliminated. This will ensure better content that will help you reach your key performance indicators.
You should also use post-tracking tools to help you keep your content on track to improve user metrics and engagement, as well as identify how external content impacts your customers.
Optimize Before Publishing
Optimizing your content for a search engine is the best way to rank high organically when people search specific terms. SEO can be tricky, so you should get the help of experts to make it easier. Captain Words can help you to write blog posts, articles, and even scripts for podcasts are videos that will make your SEO journey a breeze. This agency will ensure high search engine results for specific search terms and do all keyword research on your behalf. Research on keywords will impact your Google analytics positively.
Some experts may state that keywords are no longer important, but even in 2023, it still has a huge impact on search engine results. Your content should have the proper keywords and be easy to read. It should stay true to your brand voice while being engaging and solving the problems your target audience has.
Choose Your Channels
Now that you have your content strategy ready, you need to choose which distribution channels will be the most effective for your target audience. Initial research of your target audience should indicate which social media channels your audience prefers most; these are the ones you should focus on.
When choosing media channels, you should mix free and paid distribution to ensure maximum exposure. Keep in mind that some people will prefer direct emails, while others enjoy video posts or podcasts.
Types of Content
We’ve already touched on the different types of content production you can consider for your content strategy. There is, however, a wide variety of content you can look into. Before deciding which combinations you’ll use, you have to ensure that the type of content will fit your content marketing plan and add to the buyer’s journey.
Here are different types of content to consider:
- Blog Posts
- Articles
- Long-format written content
- Videos
- Webinars
- eBooks
- Podcasts
- General social media posts
- Infographics
- White papers
Whenever you start with content production, consider the social media channels and how your brand voice will suit the content.
Where Do You Get Content Ideas?
Once you’ve set up your content strategy, you need good ideas for content. This is where a content writing agency like Captain Words can help. Along with optimizing your content for search engines, an agency can also help to create engaging blog posts, scripts, articles and various other pieces to help generate organic traffic to your website.
User-generated content is also an avenue you can explore. Allowing your target audience to create content for your brand is an excellent form of engagement with your brand and can turn into a sales funnel. When people start engaging at this level, it means that there’s brand trust, which is one of your ultimate goals.
When thinking of content to distribute, you should consider a combination of written content, pictures, and video. Make it interesting for your followers, which will in turn boost engagement and generate leads.
Along with a combination of different content types, you should also consider combining different avenues. When using social media to distribute your content, cross-post your content on different platforms. Combine this with email marketing and you’ll see organic traffic referring to your website.
Bigger businesses can create content teams to distribute content on a specified content calendar. A team like this can focus solely on creating high-quality content and can work with a sales team to funnel sales. A dedicated content team can also help create support content for different marketing campaigns that include core elements of an effective content strategy.
Using a Content Management System
A content management system is software that will help you to manage your content creation and distribution. It can help modify, manage, and personalize your web pages to optimize the content you create for your audience.
There are plenty of tools available, some are free, while others you’ll have to pay licensing fees for. Find a tool that will suit your business and schedule the best.
Final Thoughts
A content strategy is a crucial business tool to ensure that you create content that is relevant and engaging to your audience. There are multiple aspects to consider when working on a successful content marketing strategy. Some of these aspects include your initial research, your buyer persona, and your distribution channels.
You must ensure that your content strategy defines your brand and encapsulates your brand’s voice. You have to set measurable and attainable goals for your content and choose appropriate distribution channels, like social media pages.
A mix of content types keeps your content engaging. You can use a content team, who can work closely with the sales team to ensure a sales funnel or use a content agency to create content on your behalf. The benefits of using an agency include the keyword research that’s done for you, your brand’s voice will be consistent, and the content you publish being of the highest quality. An agency has experts working on content to ensure that your content will boost your web traffic.
There are plenty of documented strategy systems you can consider to help you manage your content easily. These systems can help with an editorial calendar and ensure your web pages are optimized to reach your business objective.
A good content strategy is the first step to creating marketing content so your audience engages with your brand, creates leads, and ultimately, boosts sales. Make sure you start working on your winning content strategy today!
