8 STEPS TO BUILD AN EFFECTIVE CONTENT MARKETING STRATEGY

Content marketing is a strategic marketing approach that focuses on creating and distributing valuable and relevant content to attract and retain a defined audience. Ultimately, content Marketing’s main objective is to drive profitable customer actions.

Start providing relevant and useful content to your prospects and customers, and you will see your brand grow.

Regardless of what type of marketing strategies you are using, content marketing should be part of your process.

In this entry, we will cover 8 crucial steps you should take in order to develop a successful content marketing strategy.

1. Be aware of your current situation

Analyse your business: what needs does your company have, the products or services you offer, the price, who your target audience is and the points of contact you have to communicate with your customers.

Analyse your competitors: Find out what kind of content they are doing, how they distribute it, and how often do they publish it. Observe your competitor’s volume of fans and followers and the way they communicate with them.

Analyse your business’ online reputation: understanding your online reputation is key to define how your brand or company is valued.

2. Define your objectives

Your content strategy must always have one goal (several). You and your team will need to answer a simple question: What do we want to achieve with this strategy? The answers can be varied: Increase sales, improve your brand’s reputation, generate a larger community, increase visibility, traffic, etc.

3. Know your target

• Who are they?
• Where are they
• How old are they?
• How do they find your content?
• What are their interests?
• How can you help them?
• What problems do they have and how can you solve them?

Collect all this information and once you have it, create your buyer personas.

Knowing your buyer personas will help you understand your audience better.

4. Determine what content you have, and what content you need

Based on your business’s objectives and your buyer personas, you need to determine the type of content you should provide. Do you have this content available or you need to create it?

5. Before creating any content, find out what is the useful and relevant information that your target audience needs

Once you work out the content your audience needs, you can determine what content you already have and how to make the most out of it (you might need to re utilise it giving it a new perspective).
Combine different formats: compilations, guides, success stories, reviews, interviews, tutorials, videos, contests, surveys, etc.

6. Map out your content

At this point, you know your business’ audience, the content that you have, and the one you need.

Its time to map all the contents based on what stage your users are in the purchasing cycle or customer journey. You can create content for users who visit your website for the first time, content for users who downloaded an ebook, or content for users that receive our newsletter and read us daily.

Each user is different and according to the stage in which they are, they need different content.

7. Distribute your contents effectively:

Take advantage of all the distribution channels. Publish content through your social networks, send an ebook to your subscribers, make a good call to action or send personalised newsletters to distribute your content efficiently.

Additionally, you can use payment methods to promote your content on social networks with small campaigns, banners, affiliate marketing, etc.

8. Measure your results

You need to measure everything you do and eliminate those tactics that don’t work or have no results.

Use Google Analytics or other personalised tools to analyse your user’s behavior and see what they do on your blog or on your website. How much time do they spend on your website? Do they read your content? How do they find you? Do they click the download button, etc.

CONCLUSION

A content marketing strategy involves more than creating content and publishing it, don’t forget that the goal of creating and distributing content is to attract and convert your target audience and this is impossible to achieve without a good content marketing strategy.