Content strategy is not just about articles and SEO. It covers everything from email, social media, audio/video and user experience. As a business owner, your biggest educational need is learning how to adopt content strategies for your business.
So, let’s get started!
How to Design Content Marketing Strategies for Your Business
Content strategy is about handling practically all measurable media you produce and own: visual, written or downloadable.
Know Your Target Audience
You will need to learn who your audience is, so that you can build the best content management system to reach them. You have to define your own audience before you can own it.
Interview your potential customers to learn more about their demographics, behaviors and interests. What publications do they read regularly? Which educational level are they at? What are their biggest issues? Which subjects do they take the most interest in? You’ll also want to collect high-level data on age, sector, company name, title, etc. for a general audience.
Tip: Conduct an annual survey at the end of each year to check hypothesis about audience.
Conduct an SEO Audit
Once you have a better understanding of your audience, you will be able to lock in on which topics they take interest in. And Google is here for you to find it out! Gather all of the knowledge and compile a list of primary and secondary keywords.
For example, a main keyword for is “content marketing resources”–it’s a regular search phrase that thinks for just about everyone in the community. A secondary keyword is “brand voice”—it’s significant for some of the customers, but it’s a little bit more specific, and probably not what a buyer should look for when they’re ready to purchase. In the end, the difference between good or bad brand awareness could be how you rank for keywords related to your business. This strategy is followed by leading content marketing companies.
Create A Content Calendar
You’ll need to decide exactly when you want to publish your content on each of the channels you want to use as part of your marketing strategy. Lack of preparation is a key mistake in content marketing, so using an editorial calendar is important to get all of your content planned.
There are several ways of doing that. For instance, you can use Google Calendar and place the dates for each piece of content there. This works pretty well, particularly if you don’t have a lot of content out there. That’s the easiest solution.
Measure Results
Lastly, it’s time for the content marketing campaign to evaluate its effectiveness. In do so, you will look to the KPIs you set at the beginning of the content management plan, to see what has changed and how you are meeting your targets.
Google Alerts and Mention are more tools for monitoring content marketing performance. Each of these will allow you to see if your content is being discussed and shared, which will help you reach your KPIs for recognition and commitment.
Tools such as SEMRush will help you assess your content’s KPIs for search rank. And in your email marketing program, you will be able to monitor email signups via analytics.
That’s it! Now you know how to create an effective content marketing strategy from scratch.
Types of Content Marketing
These are the eight most common content types you can build for readers and customers alike.
- Blog posts
- Case studies
- Ebooks
- Templates
- Infographics
- Videos
- Podcasts
- Social media (Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, Google+)
Wrapping It Up
An effective content marketing campaign requires time, coordination, and innovation to develop. Between building your content marketing plan’s framework to incorporating tools to help manage your content, setting up usable content strategy won’t be a challenge if you follow the above steps and explore the resources here. Or you can consult leading content marketing agencies such as Plan A Agency to save time and money.
