A definitive guide to content marketing

According research, 97% of businesses include content marketing in their overall marketing strategy. 91% of all marketers we surveyed also had at least some success with content marketing last year. Content Marketing offers you a tremendous opportunity to boost brand awareness and generate conversions.

However, to succeed in content, you need to build a comprehensive and holistic strategy. Ultimately, it will allow you to attract and engage a clearly defined audience and, in the end, generate profitable customer action.

By following the in-depth guide below, you will map out the primary steps needed to develop a robust content marketing strategy for your business.

What Is a Content Marketing Strategy

A strategy is a plan for getting where you want to go. So, what specifically is a content marketing strategy? Let’s distinguish it from a few similar industry terms:

Content marketing strategy: This high-level strategy deals with mapping out the implementation and distribution of your brand’s content marketing materials

Content strategy: A content strategy involves the creation of content for your brand. It often focuses on understanding and adopting tactics around keyword research, user intent profiles, and personas

Content plan: You will sometimes hear this referred to as a “content calendar.” A content plan helps you organize your material implementation in a neat and orderly fashion.

Why Do You Need a Content Marketing Strategy

Research shows that 42% of brands are still taking their first steps in content marketing, and over 40% of them don’t have a documented strategy yet. So, why is it important to map out and document your content marketing strategy?

It helps you move from chaotically creating content to building an organized system with specific goals, success metrics, and processes for continuous improvement.

Way to go : content calendars

Who hates doing chores? Cleaning is boring, ironing, ditto. Well, for many professionals, scheduling content is just as much of a chore as anything else. However, when it comes to content, preparation is key. Without solid planning, content production and management will soon become too much for your marketing team to handle.

If your team wants a regular and impactful content output, you’ll need to have a firm idea of what you want to publish and when. Creating content is a whole lot more than just waiting for inspiration — it takes proper organization, without which your content can all too easily flop.

Step 1: Do your research

Before you start to assemble your content calendar template, you need to thoroughly research your audience and potential customers. This includes knowing what makes them tick, as well as where they like to get their content.

There are several ways to understand what kind of content and platforms your audiences prefer. For example, you can use Google Analytics to analyze the traffic sources on your website and run a content audit to check which content of yours is being shared the most, and which pages generate the most traffic and backlinks.

Make sure to talk with potential and existing clients, run customer research, and collaborate with your customer-facing teams (e.g., Customer Success), to help you plan your content and decide what you want to publish, and when.

You should also run a competitive content analysis, which could become an excellent source of information (and inspiration) for your content calendar.

Prioritize Your Actions

One of the essential elements of efficient planning is prioritization. If you plan your actions, you can identify the most critical tasks or things that you can easily test. By doing this, you protect your strategy from major failures and find opportunities for experiments that can potentially boost your results.

You can choose to prioritize in multiple ways, including:

• Potential gains
• The flow of the campaign you are creating
• What resources you’ll need to create your campaigns
• Product or service launches

Based on that, you can decide which campaigns, topics, and formats should go first in your plan.

Find Relevant Topics

Start by looking at the big picture. What big themes do you want to cover this year? Maybe you want to tackle large, integrated campaigns.

For instance, a company offering a time management app might want to focus on such high-level topics as productivity and work-life balance. This information should come from your audience research insights, as well as competitive research.

Try generating a list of themes that are likely to stay effective and relevant long-term. When making a decision on whether a topic is worth pursuing, assess it across the two main dimensions:

• Its usefulness for your target audience
• Its ability to impact the bottom line

There are several tools you can use to automate and enhance this process. One of them is the Topic Research tool that gives you ideas for subjects to cover, as well as related questions, possible subtopics, and headers.

You might focus on creating evergreen content, building topic clusters, or leveraging newsjacking — the tool will suggest ideas for either of those strategies.

Your task:

Review your existing content marketing budget and your goals.

Determine where your content will be sourced from and which resources will be needed. For example, who are your copywriters, and who will help with design?

Estimate the time and resources needed for each content type/piece.

With your team, decide on how many content pieces you need to produce per month to meet your goals. You should also consider the posting frequency that will be optimal for both your production cycles and your customers.

Master Your Content Marketing Strategy

While the methods used to deliver content to prospects are continually changing, the core principles remain the same — developing a top-notch content marketing strategy based on customer empathy and trustworthy data.

Even if you are just getting started, don’t get intimidated by the process. Keep moving at the optimal pace.

As you progress in your content marketing efforts, you will find that automating different pieces of your content workflow and enriching them with data allows you to outsmart the competition. Ps. Work smarter, not harder!!