Digital marketing is the most popular marketing strategy that both B2B and B2C businesses utilize to promote their brand. It covers a wide range of tactics, but the result is to gain traffic, increase engagement, and boost sales.
There are plenty of online marketing strategies that marketing professionals can use to benefit a business. But the core of them all is content marketing. Without a content marketing strategy, other digital marketing strategies remain useless.
But what is a content marketing strategy? How can it help businesses grow?
What is Content Marketing?
Content marketing comprises multiple steps to achieve goals set for a business. It includes phases, such as thorough research, content creation, publishing, and content promotion using social media or other platforms.
An effective content marketing strategy’s most crucial ingredient is quality. It doesn’t matter how long or how many posts you have online. What matters is if it adds value to your audience.
Quality content does better online and earns the trust of readers. When people trust you, your content and website can be recommended by search engines.
Aside from being pushed on top of the search engine result page, content marketing strategy brings in more leads, which is an opportunity for businesses to make more sales.
So, there are three main points to remember when it comes to content marketing:
- Content marketing is a strategy. It is an approach you take to accomplish your goals, not simply posting on social media. It requires careful research of the steps you need to take.
- It should add value to your audience. Make sure that the content you produce after studying every data you have will help your target audience.
- It must be relevant to your niche, valuable to your audience, and consistent with your brand. Create content that is in line with your website. You can make sure that the niche-related content you produce addresses what your audience needs. Staying focus on your expertise can help build trust. Furthermore, remain consistent with your content marketing strategy, from the tone to the writing style. With consistency, your audience can build awareness of your brand.
Good content marketing strategy drives audiences to take action. If your content is valuable to them, they want to do business with your company. People will trust your business, recommend it to others, and even share them on social media. All of these actions will drive more traffic and sales to your company.
When building a strategy for your marketing plans, you need to do some research. You can’t dive into the game without knowing what you want to gain out of it. So, here are content marketing strategies you need to follow to help your business grow.
Content Marketing Strategies for Your Business
Set Goals
How will you know what to do if you don’t have a goal in mind?
Goal setting is the first crucial step in content marketing. It serves as a guideline on the strategies you are about to take to accomplish it. Most marketing strategies’ goal is to generate sales, which is obvious. However, there are other goals you can achieve with content marketing strategies.
But before plotting out your goals, here are some questions you need to answer.
- Who is your target audience?
- How can your content help your audience?
- What are your objectives and goals?
- How will you manage the creation of the content?
- Where are you going to distribute your content?
Answering these questions can help guide you in your goals. Your goals will help set out the content you need without focusing your attention on unnecessary content strategies.
Some goals you can set for your marketing strategy:
- Increase website traffic
- Improve revenue
- Get high-quality leads for more sales
- Gain authority and influence
- Reduce marketing cost
- Help in social media engagement
After setting your goals, it is time to move to the next step.
Set Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)
When setting goals, you have to be specific. So, you can measure them later on. It means you’ll need to set KPIs for your strategies.
What is KPI?
KPI helps teams reach their goals by breaking down tasks and creating milestones that teams can check off. It will include specific tasks to achieve bigger goals like revenue, sales SEO, and marketing strategies.
Also, it includes specific numbers such as,
- Target revenue
- Gain a certain number of email subscribers
- The target number of traffic each month
- Improve ranking on search engine
- Get a specific number of likes, comments, and follows
- Allocate a certain amount of money for different campaigns
Choose the Content You Need
When it comes to creating content, you’ll have endless options. You can write a blog, e-book, make infographics, and record podcasts and videos.
You have to choose content that is appropriate for your niche or goal. Here are some content ideas with a brief description.
- Blog: Blog is the most frequently used content marketing strategy. It is completely free or sometimes requires a small budget. But it can deliver valuable traffic if optimized and handled carefully.
- Video Content: It requires more time and effort when creating a video, but with the increase in demand for video content, marketing professionals rush to create videos that can gain them more traffic.
- Social Media: Although it can be a marketing strategy of its own, social media marketing also includes content that promotes or advertises a product, service, and business. Social media marketing has different rules and requires engagement.
- Podcasts: It’s similar to video content, only using audio. Podcasts improve brand awareness and build relationships with the audience. It should contain valuable content or topic and not anything like a sales pitch!
These are a few content types you can use for your social media accounts and website.
Research Keywords
After determining which content will work for your goals and niche, it’s time to research keywords.
Keywords are a group of words/phrases that people type on the search engine. Using the best keyword for your niche and topic is critical in this process.
There are tools available online that can provide the free keywords you need. Furthermore, don’t forget to search for long-tail keywords, competitive and non-competitive keywords too.
You can also use tools to determine what keywords your competitors are using so you can target them.
Choosing the right keyword and narrowing it down will help you target qualified and specific leads.
It’s better to have high-quality traffic than plenty of visitors on your site that don’t convert.
Know Your Audience
As mentioned in the beginning, you need to know your audience. Determining your target audience helps narrow down the cost and create valuable content for those who find your brand vital to them. Your audience is your foundation on every decision you are to make for your campaign.
You can use data you have gathered on your website, social media accounts, or asking people to answer surveys or write feedback.
Every detail gathered from your data can be used to build a customer persona. You can use the following data when getting to know about your potential customers:
- Demographics
- Psychographics
- Site behavior
- Average customer value
- Lifetime customer value
Building a customers’ persona serves as a guide on how you can set the tone and your goals. It ties with being relevant to your audience.
Create a Content Calendar
Like planning and determining your target audience, creating a calendar for content posting and designation of tasks helps in the process. It will give you and your team an overview of what project is scheduled to be created, edited, or posted for that day or week.
Most content calendars are created months in advance with the content that you plan to make. It keeps you track and organizes everything.
You can create a content calendar on Google or use scheduling tools or management tools for multiple contents and managing a team.
Decide What Channel to Share or Promote Content
Choosing the right network or platform for posting your content is a must. There are plenty of places online where you can post your content, from social media platforms to email and websites.
But that doesn’t mean you have to optimize your content for all platforms available online. Instead, go back to your website or business analytics and study it.
You can see which social media or where your content is being shared. You can either use tools such as Google Analytics, SemRush, and Buzzsumo. But there are other tools you can find to help you analyze your website’s data.
Determining which platform helps eliminate spending time sharing on the wrong network. Instead, you can focus on platforms that would increase engagement on your content, from sharing to clicks on the link.
Time to Create Content
Creating content is just one part of your content marketing strategy. But it requires time to research resources for the content you are to make, no matter what form. Whether a video, infographics, blog post, or podcast, you need to explore resources and content similar to your topic.
Also, keep in mind that when you create content, think of your audience. Of course, you would want to rank on Google or other search engines, but you have to think of people first. When writing, don’t worry about optimizing your content first. Instead, think of how you can convey the knowledge in a way people will understand.
Your audience will determine if they would like to engage in your content and share them or not. So, write for the people. But don’t lose your identity by patronizing your audience. Make sure you focus on the writing tone, readability, flow of your content, and your brand’s personality. Furthermore, create content that your audience will find helpful for them, like how-to posts.
Don’t forget your keywords when creating your content.
Share Content
After posting your well-researched content, it’s time to share them. Earlier, you have decided which network you are to post your content on. Now, it’s time you need to share your content on different platforms.
Let’s say you have created a short video for your YouTube channel. For it to gain more views, you need to share them. You can take screenshots, create short clips and convert to a podcast and share them on respective social media platforms.
You need to market your content in different ways possible to meet the goal you have set.
Track or Monitor Your Content
Posting and sharing your content is not the end of your content marketing strategy. In fact, every marketing tactic doesn’t end with promoting or sharing content. It is a continuous process. You have to check on its performance, how it is doing, and if it’s meeting your goals.
You can check your content’s performance via the following tools or platforms:
- Google Analytics
Google Analytics is a free tool where you can track everything about your website and social media platforms. You can determine if there are conversions, page views, bounce rate, time spent on a page, and so on. It can also track email data.
Here you can determine which channel drives traffic to your website or blog post.
- Social Media
You can also check on your social media analytics and see what platforms get the highest engagement. In such a way, you can determine where you can market and share your future content.
Also, social media analytics can show you the number of likes, clicks, comments, and so on you receive on your post. Here you can determine if your content is converting or meeting your set goals.
You can also check the analytics of your email. It shows how many people open and read it, engage in it, and so on.
Gather all the data you need and analyze them to see how your content marketing strategy is performing.
Conclusion
Content marketing strategy takes time and effort. It requires thorough research and planning to achieve the goals you need. As you focus on creating a better plan, it helps your business grow and increase conversion. Also, expand more than content marketing, explore other ways to promote your business, whether it’s digital or traditional marketing.
