If you want to see real results from your content marketing efforts, you need to go beyond simply creating blog posts and social media updates.
To be successful in content marketing, you need to create an all-encompassing and integrated plan. Doing so will help you attract and engage a specific, defined audience, which will ultimately lead to profitable customer action.
This guide will show you how to create a content marketing strategy that will help your business succeed.
What Is Content?
Content is any information that can be consumed by others. It is designed to educate, entertain, or persuade an audience.
Marketers often use different types of content to connect with their target customers, such as articles, blog posts, and more.
For example, you could improve viewership by creating video content or launching a podcast. The key is to make it accessible. If others can’t view, hear, or read your content, it can’t fulfill its purpose.
Remember that content isn’t just words on a page. It should have a valuable purpose. Your audience should be smarter, more entertained, or more inspired after consuming it.
What Is Content Marketing?
To define content marketing, let’s turn to the foremost authority on the subject, the Content Marketing Institute. According to the organization, there’s a very clear definition of content marketing:
Content marketing is a marketing strategy that focuses on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly defined audience—and ultimately drive profitable customer action.
This definition can be used to your advantage.
What Is a Content Marketing Strategy
A strategy is a plan that helps you achieve a specific goal. 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 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.
Strategic Marketing Approach
When the CMI talks about a strategic marketing approach, they mean that content marketing should have a larger purpose. In other words, you shouldn’t just write articles for the sake of it. You should only write them if they fit in with your other marketing efforts.
Incorporate content marketing into your overall marketing strategy from the start. Drive social sharing and email marketing with great content.
Create and Distribute Valuable, Relevant, and Consistent Content
According to the CMI, content must possess certain qualities in order to be effective.
- Valuable: What problem does the content help the reader solve? What pain point does it help resolve? How can the reader use your content to achieve a goal?
- Relevant: Why should your audience care about this piece of content? What’s the takeaway? How does it fit into their personal or professional lives?
- Consistent: How often do you post new content? How long is each piece? What types of topics do you cover? And are all of these facets consistent?
How Does Content Marketing Work?
The most successful content marketers have a plan and know who their target audience is. You don’t need to make content marketing difficult, but you do need a strategy. Anybody can type up an article and post it on a blog, but that usually doesn’t accomplish much. The most successful content marketers have a plan and know their target audience.
You can make content marketing work for you by creating goals for your marketing campaigns and using your content to help achieve them. Your goals could be any number of things:
- Attract X% more customers
- Generate X% more revenue
- Bring in X% more leads
- Drive traffic through social media
- Build your brand
After you establish what your goal is, generate content that works towards that aim.
If you want to generate more leads, you need to attract consumers who are not yet aware of your brand but might need your digital products.
Your content should be educational at this stage. Write articles that pack in as much value as possible, then use a CTA to send traffic to your email newsletter signup form.
This technique can be effective for any goal and strategy. The content created will help bring more customers and convince them to make a purchase.
What Are the Benefits of Content Marketing?
It’s beneficial to understand content and content marketing and how it works. But why put in the extra effort?
There are four main benefits to content marketing: raising awareness, aiding research, encouraging consideration, and driving purchases.
Awareness
At the awareness stage, the consumer doesn’t know what they want or need. They might come across your content while doing a Google search or scanning hashtags on social media.
At this point, your goal is to simply make your brand and product known. There’s no pressure to buy anything, just to be aware that it exists.
For example, “Welcome to my blog. Here I write about topics X, Y, and Z. Feel free to explore and hopefully you enjoy what you find.”
The goal is to make sure the consumer remembers your brand when considering a purchase.
Research
When consumers are further down in the sales funnel (i.e. closer to making a purchase), they will start doing research. This research may involve Googling various phrases related to what they want to buy, in order to compare their options.
At this point, you want to take their research and lead them to your article. Writing comparison-style pieces as well as articles about what to look for in an online course related to your topic can be successful.
Consumers don’t want to be sold to, they want data that will help them make a decision.
If you think a competitor’s product would be better for the reader, you should recommend it.
That’s fine. Be as objective and thorough as possible.
Consideration
The content for the consideration stage should present your digital products as the best possible solution for the consumer. They have already done their research and now you need to persuade them to buy your product.
The consumer is considering different options before making a decision. He or she knows about the available products but has yet to choose the best one.
This is a great opportunity for you to show how credible and generous you are in your field by providing as much valuable content as possible for free. By doing this, you will make people wonder what kind of amazing value you must offer in your paid products.
Buy
Once your prospect has decided to buy a product, they are likely to buy yours.
There are a lot of things that can make it harder to achieve your goal. A long, complicated checkout process can make someone change their mind about buying something. So can sales text that is not well written, a landing page that is confusing, or a call to action that is not clear.
The goal of this job is to convince the consumer to purchase your online course instead of someone else’s. You will need to use your copywriting skills to make your product stand out as the ideal solution for the consumer.
Why You Need a Content Marketing Strategy
About 40% of businesses have not created a written content marketing strategy. However, it can be beneficial to document your content marketing ideas and plans. Having a written strategy can help you better organize and execute your content marketing, and can also make it easier to measure your results and track your progress.
Replacing “chaotically creating content” with “building an organized system” will help you improve your success rate by setting specific goals, measuring success, and improving processes.
Seventy-eight percent of those surveyed who felt their content marketing strategy was effective had documented their strategy.
Attract and Retain a Clearly Defined Audience
To get people to view your content, utilize SEO methods, share it on social media, and email it to potential viewers. Keep them engaged by always following through on your promises and offering content with value.
One of the most important things to do is to know your audience. You want the people who are most likely to be interested in your content to see it.
Drive Profitable Consumer Action
You’re not in business just to keep yourself entertained, right? It’s not a charitable cause.
You want to make money.
Your content marketing should influence your target audience to purchase your products.
Your products are more likely to be successful if you market them as a solution to a problem, a way to reach a goal, or a way to reduce pain.
The 5 Elements of a Powerful Content Marketing Strategy
To have a successful content marketing strategy, there are five core elements that must be included: audience personas, brand positioning, owned media value proposition, business case, and an action plan. By understanding why these elements are essential and how to implement them, you will be on your way to success.
Audience Personas
You won’t be able to effectively communicate your brand’s story if you don’t know your audience. There are multiple ways to do this:
- Survey your existing customers
- Research industry trends
- Know who you aren’t trying to target
- Keep close tabs on whom your competitors are targeting
After you have considered your audience, you can use our free Personas tool to create a written representation of them.
It’s important to be able to explain who your target audience is to anyone who is involved in creating brand messaging.
Positioning Your Brand and Story
If you want your content marketing campaign to be successful, you need to make sure that your brand and products are positioned correctly. This will help you create a consistent experience for your audience and build the right image across all of your content marketing channels.
These questions will help you brainstorm your positioning in the market:
- Who are my existing and potential customers, and what are their goals?
- Who are my top competitors, and how do they market their brands?
- What is my brand’s unique value?
- What problems does my product help to solve?
- What makes it a better choice than my competitors?
This information can help you create the main ideas for your brand story.
A brand story is a summary of your company’s history, mission, purpose, and values. You can use it to help you choose the right direction in your content marketing strategy by identifying the right messages and topics to translate into your content.
Focus on the following elements:
- The hero of your story (your customer) and their goals and challenges
- Your brand’s personality
- The purpose of your brand and key brand values
- The way your product and your content can help reinforce all the above and empower your hero
This free brand storytelling template will help you document your brand’s unique story. This can be especially beneficial for small businesses and startups that can leverage their background and identity to stand out.
Mission Statement and Owned Media Value Proposition
Your brand’s value proposition is its reason for being, the thing that sets it apart from the competition. A strong value proposition is essential to building a successful brand. It’s what attracts customers and keeps them coming back. To establish your brand as a credible content publisher, you need to define your owned media value proposition. This is the reason why your brand exists and what sets it apart from the competition. A strong value proposition is necessary in order to build a successful brand. It’s what attracts customers and keeps them coming back. To do so, answer the following questions:
- What unique value do you provide to your audience with your content?
- How do you stand out from other content creators?
- Why should readers choose to follow your content channels?
Be sure to include a content marketing mission statement in your strategy. It should provide a summary of why you are creating content and who can benefit from it.
Make sure your content marketing mission statement includes the following elements:
- The audience you are creating your content for
- Their goals and how your content will help achieve those
For example, digital marketing managers can find multimedia information about SEO and content marketing on our website to help their companies grow via organic channels.
Business Case and Content Marketing Goals
If you’re only focused on providing value to your audience, you’re missing out on a key aspect of a successful content strategy. Your content should also be driving your business forward.
What are your company’s business goals and how will content marketing help achieve them? How much should you invest in your content strategy and what kind of results do you hope to achieve?
A business case will help you understand the benefits, costs, and risks of implementing a content marketing strategy, and convince decision-makers of its value.
Action Plan
Next, you will list out your main content marketing campaigns and projects and add them to your content plan. Make sure these campaigns and projects will help you achieve the content marketing goals you’ve set for your business.
Doing this will allow you to think through each content strategy step. Make sure to include the following information:
- Content formats you want to focus on
- High-level content topics and campaigns
- Channels for content distribution and promotion
It is important to look at your historical content performance and further analyze your audience in order to decide on your optimal content formats and channels.