How to Create a Content Marketing Strategy in 2019

Having a content marketing strategy for your business or brand is absolutely essential to your success.

Whether you have an established company, a startup, or want to leverage a personal brand to gain new career opportunities, developing the right content strategy can help you get more customers, more clients, and position you for continued success.

Startups like Dollar Shave Club and Blue Apron, people like Tim Ferriss, Oprah, Gary Vaynerchuk, Richard Branson, The Rock, and Kylie Jenner, and even large companies like Coca-Cola are using content marketing to grow their businesses.

I used content marketing to grow Just Go Fitness, my first company, and garnered hundreds of thousands of views while also getting coaching clients and building my personal brand which I leveraged for other opportunities, like getting into the MBA program at USC.

With the Just Go Grind Podcast, I leveraged content marketing to get thousands of site visitors and podcast downloads in only the first year after launching.

Content marketing works, I’ve experienced it firsthand, and if you have a well-crafted content marketing strategy you too can make more money, build your brand, and impact more lives.

In this article I’m going to cover:

• What a Successful Content Marketing Strategy Includes
• How to Choose the Content Formats that are Best for You
• Which Channels You Should Use to Distribute Your Content
• What Content to Create and How to Create it Efficiently
• Where to Get Killer Content Ideas That Resonate With Your Audience
• The Keys to Great Content
• Content Examples from the Best Content Marketers
• How to Promote Your Content

What a Successful Content Marketing Strategy Includes

There are a variety of factors that go into a successful content marketing strategy.

While you don’t have to perfect each of them, and you won’t necessarily use all of them, these are factors you’ll want to take into account when crafting your content marketing strategy.

A Clear Target Audience and the Problems They Have

Who are the people you’re targeting with your content?

The more clear you can get on your target audience, the easier it will be for you to create the right type of content that speaks to them.

How can you figure out who your target audience is?

By doing your homework — researching other companies in your niche, reading survey data, and figuring out potential customer demographics.

Once you have a general idea of who your customer is, you can gain valuable insights by actually going out and talking to potential customers and figuring out what problems they have.

Before starting Just Go Grind I actually had conversations with around 15 people that I figured were in my target audience and from these conversations I listed different problems they had and that helped me craft my own content marketing strategy.

Why Your Company is Uniquely Suited to Solve Those Problems

Looking at you and your company, why is it that you’re able to better solve your potential customers problems vs. someone else?

We all have different talents, experiences, and strengths that can help others, and when crafting your content marketing strategy you need to figure out which ones you can leverage to stand out from your competitors.

A simple way you can figure this out? Ask.

Ask your current customers why they chose you.

Ask your friends and family what your strengths are.

Ask colleagues what you do better than others.

This will help you create the appropriate content marketing strategy that not only solves problems of your target audience, but does so leverage what you do best.

Your Goal

You’re about to invest a lot of time into creating content, so it might just benefit you to know why you’re creating content in the first places.

Ask yourself this question, “What do I want to receive from the content I create?”

Do you want to sell more products?

Do you want to get new clients?

Do you want more email subscribers?

Do you want to build your company brand and leverage it for future business opportunities?

Do you want to grow your personal brand and land a dream job?

What do you want?

Knowing what you’re trying to get from your content makes it easier to create the right content. Any content marketing strategy that doesn’t have a goal is more of a hope than a strategy.

Which Metrics You Will Monitor

What will you measure as part of your content marketing strategy that will let you know you’re making progress and that your efforts are not wasted?

Some metrics to consider are:

• Website visitors
• Video views
• Podcast downloads
• Email subscribers
• Sales
• Form submissions

Early on, you might only look at things like visitors, views, and downloads, but as your content marketing strategy continues to evolve you’ll look more towards the number of sales generated and clients landed from your content efforts.

What Type of Content is Best for Your Target Audience

A content marketing strategy wouldn’t be complete without a clear understanding of what type of content is best for your target audience and where this content should be distributed.

In an ideal world, you’d create every type of content imaginable — articles, videos, images, podcasts, infographics — and distribute that content on every platform that exists.

While this is certainly something to strive for eventually, we don’t all have the ability to pay content teams like Gary Vaynerchuk to produce content on that level.

Side note, Gary Vaynerchuk is the content KING, producing more than 100 pieces of content per day and running his $100+ Million agency VaynerMedia and he even says he’s not producing enough content.

Knowing that your time and resources are limited, it matters even more what content you decide to produce and where you decide to distribute this content.

Let’s start with how to choose the content formats that are best for you.

How to Choose the Content Formats that are Best for You

When it comes to your content marketing strategy you have four main options for the format in which you can create content:

• Articles
• Images
• Videos
• Podcasts

How you choose which format to use depends on what you’ll be able to create consistently and which format resonates with your audiences.

If you’re great on video, create videos.

Video is a strategy Marie Forleo chose early on and she absolutely CRUSHES it in her business, helping people create a business and life that they love.

If you’re a better writer, write articles.

Tim Ferriss, entrepreneur, angel investor, author, and mega-podcast host, initially grew his audience through writing articles on his blog.

If you have a good voice, create podcasts.

Lewis Howes, host of The School of Greatness, grew his empire through podcasting.

Of course, you could choose to create content in all formats. If so, there are efficient ways to make the most of your efforts.

Film a video, use the audio from it for your podcast, and write articles from the topics discussed in the video.

Gary Vaynerchuk, the social media and marketing OG talks about this strategy in-depth in this slideshare.

If you don’t think you’re great at one of the content formats you can choose to learn and improve yourself or simply hire someone else to create content for you.

The Channels Where You’ll Publish Content

So you’ve decided on the content formats that are best for you, what’s next?

Now you’ll choose where you’ll distribute that content.

When it comes to articles you write you could publish them:

• On your own website
• On other people’s websites as guest posts
• Directly on social media platforms like LinkedIn
• On content publishing platforms like Medium or Quora

With a podcast you can publish episodes on platforms like:

• Apple Podcasts (iTunes)
• Soundcloud
• Stitcher
• Anchor

When it comes to videos you create you can publish them on:

• YouTube
• YouTube Live
• LinkedIn
• Instagram
• Instagram Stories
• Instagram Live
• IGTV
• Facebook
• Facebook Stories
• Facebook Live
• Snapchat

It can seem overwhelming with so many different options, so you might want to consider just choosing a few of them.

Of course, you’re always keeping in mind where your target audiences spends their time. The demographic using Facebook vs. Snapchat is much different.

Early on, you may try out a variety of platforms with a variety of content formats to see what sticks — that’s okay.

My current content strategy for Just Go Grind is a combination of:

• Weekly podcasts
• Almost daily videos (Mostly on LinkedIn and YouTube)
• Weekly articles on my website for each podcast episode
• Long form articles every couple weeks
• Republishing articles on various platforms

Where to Get Killer Content Ideas That Resonate With Your Audience

There’s no limit to the amount of content you produce, but putting out content as part of your content marketing strategy requires you to come up with ideas for content consistently. Where do these ideas come from?

Here are a few places:

The content curation tools allows you to follow companies and people in your niche to get article or video ideas.

BuzzSumo is a great tool for finding the most shared articles on various topics. You can use it to see how many shares across different platforms that top articles on a topic are receiving.

Google Keyword Planner gives you historical data on the number of searches per month for different keywords and also predicts future search numbers for keywords or terms.

Hubspot’s Blog Ideas Generator is just a nifty tool where you can enter a term and it’ll give you ideas for content to create around that term.

With a Google Search you can enter in the topic you want to create content on and see what results rank highest. Also, you’ll see related search results at the bottom, giving you more ideas.

Books, podcasts, and audiobooks are great places to get ideas for content as well.

Google Trends can help you find what topics are popular and which topics may become popular soon.

With all of these ideas it’s important to find a way to store your ideas. I use the Evernote web clipper to save ideas from websites I find and then I store all content ideas in Trello.

Type of Content Idea Formats

Yes, you have the choice of writing, creating videos, producing podcasts, or building images, but you can make it even easier on yourself creating content by having a few content types or formats for each.

For example, you could create:

• How-to’s
• Book Summaries
• Q & A
• FAQs
• Guides
• Templates
• Opinions
• Case Studies
• Resources
• Lists
• Infographics
• Photos
• Pins
• Predictions
• Timelines

The list goes on and on. Try out a few different options and see what sticks. Then do more of what’s working.

The Keys to Creating Amazing Content

Creating amazing content starts with your audience. Keep them in mind and create content that solves problems for them or helps them in some capacity.

Also, focus on being authentic whenever possible. People don’t want to buy from brands or companies they perceive as fake.

When it comes to writing articles, if your goal is to rank high in Google, longer articles perform better.

The articles that I had rank on the first page of Google for Just Go Fitness were typically 2,000–3,000 words long and filled with valuable content, images, and even videos.

The article you see below had 1,968 words and makes it VERY clear how to get faster results in the gym.

Another article I had that ranked high in Google called How to Look Like Bradley Cooper in American Sniper is seen below.

It’s the 4th result on Google, depending on the day, and it has 4,730 words, images, and a video in it.

Which brings me to the next aspect of creating great content — including visually appealing media in your content, particularly with any articles you create.

While this is certainly helpful for creating better content, there always exceptions to the rule, with Seth Godin being a prime example.

Seth writes a short daily blog and has been doing so for years — Find what works for you and be consistent.

With podcasts, especially with a show where you bring on guests, you can create better episodes by first having great audio quality, then asking follow up questions to things your guests say during the interview, and finally, doing your homework so you can come up with insightful questions.

Videos can be an incredibly powerful part of your content marketing strategy as well and while any things can work when it comes to video, a couple components of great videos include:

• Having a kickass intro that grabs the audiences attention
• Telling a story (Something Quentin Allums did to become a LinkedIn Influencer)
• Creating exciting and inspiring videos (See Casey Neistat for examples)
• Including music
• Adding your company URL or logo
• Educating your audience on something ( Like Sean Cannell does so well)
• Ending with a call to action
• Asking questions
• Having great audio quality
• Using plenty of light
• Incorporating humor (Will Smith is blowing up with this on Instagram and YouTube)

How and When You’ll Create Content

Getting into a flow of content creation can be tricky, especially if you haven’t done it before. I’ve found it helpful to block out time and set minimums.

Currently, I’m writing 60 minutes per day, spending time daily on podcast production, and have goals of releasing a new podcast episode every week and a new in-depth blog post every two weeks.

These goals change, but it’s helpful to have targets to shoot for.

I find it best to dedicate time every morning to content creation to ensure I’ll do it, especially with my current demands of being a full-time student in the USC Marshall MBA program.

How I create content, specifically articles, involves the following steps:

1. Keyword research
2. Creating an outline
3. Writing the rough draft
4. Editing the basic content
5. Adding images, videos, links, and examples

Many content marketing strategies will also include an editorial calendar, listing exactly what you’ll publish, when, and where.

With a larger, more established company I see the value in this, but I’ve tried, and failed, repeatedly to stick to an editorial calendar. Instead, I find it easier to establish the habit of creating daily and just keep putting out create work.

However, a editorial calendar can provide you a road map which you can use to create relevant content at various times during the year where some may be more relevant.

Promoting Content

What helps you get the most from the content you create? Content promotion.

You can promote your content on all your social media platforms and, when you’ve created amazing content that also links to others in your industry, you’ll get more attention.

I used this strategy with an article I wrote called 6 Lessons Learned from 6 Months of Podcasting and this is also the strategy Austin Belcak, the guest on episode #21 of the Just Go Grind Podcast, used to get 60,000 views on his article in 60 days.

When you create content on platforms like Medium, you inherently have the chance to get featured in their newsletter and on their homepage which could catapult your traffic.

Sure, it’s not easy, but it is possible.

Check out this article for how to improve you chances of being featured on Medium from someone who consistently does it.

I’ve found that answering questions on Quora and linking to your content is another useful method for driving traffic to your website and getting more views of your content.

I accumulated over 40,000 answer views on Quora with only 52 answers, many of them linking to different content of mine.

With Quora I’ll specifically target questions on topics I have experience in and that I’ve already written about or interviewed a guest about and provide the link to the other piece of content I created.

Analyzing Your Results and Making Adjustments

Remember how I said that initially you’ll create a bunch of content and see what resonates with your audience?

Well, every few weeks, every month, whatever interval you choose, you’ll perform a content audit as part of your content marketing strategy.

Evaluate the content you’ve created based on your goals and the metrics you’ve established for how you’re going to measure success.

While I check my stats briefly every day, I prefer a more in-depth audit of the content I’m creating every few months.

Key Takeaways

An effective content marketing strategy includes these main components:

1. A Clear Target Audience and the Problems They Have
2. Why Your Company is Uniquely Suited to Solve Those Problems
3. Your Goal
4. What Metrics You Will Monitor
5. What Type of Content is Best for Your Target Audience

It takes time but you’re investing in your brand and business and every piece of content you put out there is a deposit in your future.

Need help developing your own content marketing strategy? Learn more about working with an experienced content marketer — me.

Originally published at www.justgogrind.com on January 7, 2019.