LET’S GET STARTED
A good content marketing strategy isn’t something nice to have, it’s a requirement. According to reports from the Content Marketing Institute, 80% of businesses have this strategy in place, but only few have documented it.
In reality, a fully functional content marketing strategy requires some serious time and effort investment Therefore, if you aren’t quite sure what it entails, these points will help guide in the right direction as far as having a sound content marketing strategy is concerned.
1 Objective for Creating the Content
For what reason are you creating that strategy in the first place? Do you want more leads, more awareness or loyalty and retention? You should remember one thing; that the goal is to be good at doing what you do because of your strategy, not because you’re good at content marketing.
2 The Unique Approach
What is this thing that sets you apart from the rest. There’s a lot of content already floating around, and more on the way. Are you going to be disproportionately useful? Are you going to be motivational, inspirational and so on? Identify the heart and soul of the content strategy that’s going to drive your business.
3 Metrics
The kind of objectives you set forth dictate the metrics you use. If you want to generate awareness, measure the level of awareness that your strategy is generating.
4 Define Who Your Audience Are
The kind of audience you’re targeting will influence your objective. A good way to start would be to use personas to model the kind of audience you’ll want to target with your plan. You should also remember that you are not part of your audience. Don’t market to yourself, market to them by thinking like them. This is of course possible when you make it your goal to understand them the same way you do with a friend.
5 Know What They Want
What solutions do they need from you? What are they expecting to get from you? Simple, just figure it out from your conversation with customers, on social media and in search. It will also take working with customer service to determine what their exact needs are. Once you have a list of needs they are expecting you to fulfill, you need to categorize them by personas and funnel stages. This way, you will have a map to follow when releasing content to them.
Remember, you won’t just need to do spreadsheet mining for the sake of it. You want real insights from the data, and this means having real conversations with the people you target.
6 An Execution Plan
Through customer conversation and personas, you can easily determine content modalities. You need to understand how they’ll consume that content too. Also, depending on the funnel stages, your audience will need different types of content. For this reason, you have to come up with a plan that will help you generate content on a daily, monthly, or quarterly basis.
Conclusion
Whatever content marketing strategy you end up choosing, don’t forget to amplify the content you create. This is where social media comes to play. Identify all the relevant people who can help amplify it whether this will involve influencers, employees, customers etc. That way, you’ll be all set.
