An effective content marketing strategy has the following characteristics:
- Draws in new customers
- Educates current users
- Generates revenue
- Helps to build a powerful brand for any business
This comes from years of creating content that gives results. I am not the only one who believes this. Figures released by the Content Marketing Institute shows that approximately 70% of B2B marketers surveyed said that they created more content in 2017 than they did in 2016. This trend shows no signs of slowing down in 2018.
Even though many businesses understand the importance of creating content, it is especially a scary thought for new businesses. Why? Because, it can seem overwhelming. Your competitors seem to be doing all sorts of content creation including posting in-depth blogs, long-form, video, and launching podcasts.
Today, I am hoping to get rid of some of that pressure by helping you create an effective content marketing strategy.
A content marketing strategy serves as a roadmap that not only guides you on what you are going to create but also how you will:
- Distribute
- Attract
- Retain
- Convert viewers and readers into customers
It is definitely a huge task however, there is no reason to be afraid.
How to Define Your Content Marketing Goal
Before embarking on the content creation journey, you will need to determine the reason why you are creating it in the first place.
Other important questions you will need to ask include:
- App downloads
- New subscribers
- Social shares and engagement
- Conversions
- Podcast downloads
- Sales
- Video views
To effectively answer these questions you need to look at your content marketing strategy as building a ship. You will need to know where it is going to sail before you start nailing planks of wood together.
For instance, in many cases the reason why businesses create content is so that they can have more free trial signups or email signups.
Once this goal has been achieved, it is then much easier to determine the number of listeners, readers, viewers, users etc you need to pay attention to the content you are creating in order to hit your goals.
Understand Your Audience
Once you have determined why you are creating the content in the first place, you need to consider the audience, that is, who is going to watch, hear, or see the content you create.
Effective content results in engagement in form of feedback from your audience. For this reason, the best kind of content is content that is created to answer your audience’s most pressing questions thus transforming your audience via education.
If you hope to have people share your content with others you need to ensure that it speaks directly to them, that is, makes a connection with your target audience.
Two things you need to put into consideration include:
- Demographics
- Psychographics
Demographics refers to your audience’s quantitative traits such as:
- Job title
- Location
- Gender
- Age
On the other hand psychographics refers to things that we cannot measure such as:
- Belief systems
- Interests
- Attitude
Therefore, as an example, you can target an audience that has executives in the 35 – 40 years range that has strong family values etc.
One of the reasons why you need to understand your audience is so that you can come up with audience personas.
The purpose of creating a buyer persona is so that you can internalize aspects attributed to your ideal buyer. In the end, a buyer persona will help you relate to those people as real human beings.
For each of the audience persona you are creating, you will need to write out their psychographic as well as demographic attributes.
The next step in this process is looking for a random photo of the person you have just described. Even though this might seem a bit crazy, it is designed to help build a solid connection between you and your target audience.
Setting Up Your Blog
In this step I will cover the technical aspect of your blog. If you are still yet to set up a blog, now is the time to do so.
Unlike before, when setting up a website was a job reserved for techies, setting up a website is an easy step by step process that can be achieved by the most clueless novices. You will, however, need to decide how you want to host your content; on someone else’s platform or your own?
If you choose to host your own content, sure, you will have plenty of flexibility however, you will need a lot of upfront investment while if you host the content on a third-party platform, you might not have as much flexibility, but it will be both easier and cheaper to kick things off.
Content Update
Have you already been publishing? Then maybe you need to take a look at your previous marketing strategy and decide whether it is time to shift gears. It is never too late!
Now is the best time to change the style of your published content.
It is at this stage also that you need to define your core content pillars, that is topics that will constitute the foundation of your blog.
Using your content pillars you will need to ensure that you create content that revolves around the 3 main content types, that is:
- Engagement – Content that is created for the purpose of starting a conversation
- Evergreen – Content that is based on main keywords in your niche and which can be referred to for years to come
- Events – Content created around a particular occurrence, for instance, an industry event or some huge piece of news
Build an Email List
No matter the content you are creating, you need to ensure that you direct as many eyeballs to it as possible.
Now, there are many ways that can be used to distribute your content including social media, but none is as effective as email.
With email you are able to communicate directly with your subscribers. If one of your objectives as a new business is to build a list, you will need to amplify the content that you are creating. You will need to ensure that you are creating meaningful email campaigns that go hand in hand with your content marketing strategy.
With time, your email list will grow and you will need an efficient way of sending out emails in scale. Such tools are known as email service providers and allow you to send out emails as well as building and maintaining your list of subscribers. You can also use ESPs to gain insight of how your email campaigns are performing.
Some popular Email Service Providers include:
- Mailchimp
- Aweber
- ConvertKit
- Campaign Monitor
- ActiveCampaign
In case you do not like any of these options, you can always migrate to an ESP that best suits your needs. Each of the email service providers mentioned above offer a great job of migration.
Any goals you plan on achieving in your email marketing campaigns, should determine the strategy you implement in your newsletters and email campaigns.
If you are having a hard time coming up with content for your email campaigns, no worries. You can always borrow some of the content from the blogs that you publish on your website.
When you follow the above mentioned tips, you will definitely see an uptick in the amount of traffic as well as signups on your website.