Best Practices for Creating an Engaging Content Marketing Strategy

When it comes to B2B marketing, the trend of content marketing isn’t slowing down. In fact, according to the Content Marketing Institute, successful companies use about 40% of their marketing budget for content marketing.

While trial and error can bring in great results and help you A/B test what really works for your company, it’s still important to have a plan. Here’s how to create an all star content marketing strategy:

Key Considerations

Building a content marketing plan can be a unique journey for every business because each is different. We recommend answering these questions before getting started:

• Who? — Who is your target audience? How many different audiences do you have?
• What? — Will your target audience react best to blogs, videos, podcasts, or another form of content?
• Why? — What problem are you hoping to solve for your audience? Can you create content that reinforces the USP of your product?
• Where? — Will you focus mainly on Facebook and Twitter? Or will it be more effective to reach out to prospective customers on YouTube, Reddit, Instagram, LinkedIn, and various other platforms?
• How? — How will you ensure regular content is produced? How will you keep your audience intrigued and interested with the content? Will you need to outsource certain tasks or will you have a dedicated team member for content management?

As you can see, there are a whole host of questions to consider. However, once you start finding the answers, the likelihood of building a great content marketing plan increases.

See Related: Where AI Marketing Meets Content Marketing

Creating Your Content Marketing Strategy

With a carefully-considered strategy, the whole business can move together as one and you’ll also find it easier to grow and adapt. Here are 5 steps to building this plan:

1. Set a Goal — Just like everything else in business, you need to have an end goal. What do you want your content marketing to achieve? Do you want to increase awareness, increase the number of followers you have, or even increase the percentage content contributes to leads/sales? How often do you want to release new content, and on what platforms?
2. Recognize Your Target Market — The best way to produce relevant content to your target market is to draw up a buyer persona that outlines the average consumer of your product or service? Whether this is the same market as normal, or perhaps a new market, it’s important to define your consumer. This helps you can create content that resonates with them.
3. Content Audit — Review your current marketing efforts, what’s going well, and what can be improved. By using social network platforms and blog publications, like Medium, you can view built in statistics about your content. This will help you understand which of your current content is catching the attention of readers and then guide your new content production.
4. Consider Content Ideas — Get together multiple team members and discuss exciting plans for 2019. By gathering people — even those outside of those who oversee content — you’ll be able to generate fresh ideas from multiple perspectives. You should also always use what already exists to your advantage, taking some time to research the most effective ideas for your target market. While some audiences will prefer infographics and videos, others will resonate with text-based content. In between, you’ll find eBooks, case studies, podcasts, social media, and more.
5. Assess and Manage — Just because you’re now producing content, this doesn’t mean your job is done. Now, it’s time to keep tabs on all content performance and continuously adjust your strategy so the ultimate goal can be achieved.

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