What is a Content Marketing Strategy?
But before we dive into it… what actually is a ‘content marketing strategy’?
A content marketing strategy is a plan for creating and sharing content that attracts and engages your target audience. But, unlike traditional marketing methods, content marketing focuses on delivering value rather than explicitly asking for a sale.
A content marketing strategy aims to produce content that helps you achieve your business goals and retain your customers.
There are four primary content marketing assets:
- Written: digital newsletters, articles, and blogs
- Audio: podcasts, audiograms, branded playlists on music streaming platforms
- Video: social media (i.e. YouTube, TikTok, Instagram Reels), and embedded advertising units (e.g. banners on websites, in-feed ads, product placements)
- Image: social media posts, infographics, or website banners
The right kind of content will help build customer loyalty across all stages of the buyer journey. It’ll also boost your brand visibility and make you stand out from your competitors.
Surrounded by so much promotion, customers are often fatigued by irrelevant ads and content. This is your chance to be different. Offer your customers valuable, relatable information which you know is worth their time. It’ll change your business for the better.
Why You Need a Content Marketing Strategy
If that wasn’t enough to sell you on content marketing strategy, fear not. We have more reasons for why you should have one, right up our sleeves.
Let’s roll ‘em up and lay all the reasons on the table.
A content marketing strategy can benefit your business in several ways:
- Enhances brand awareness: the more valuable content you put out there, the more people will see your brand as a trusted source of information, building credibility
- Establishes thought leadership: by offering insightful content that addresses your audience’s pain points, you can position your brand as a leader in your industry
- Boosts customer engagement: showing expertise and empathy in your content, for instance, while addressing your customers’ pain points, will increase customer engagement (e.g. with product-specific content like reviews, case studies, demos)
- Builds customer loyalty and trust: content that educates, informs, and engages customers helps cultivate long-term relationships and prompts regular purchases
- Differentiates you from competition: not just in your general marketing practices, but also in the content you produce. If your content is high-quality, informational, and valuable to your customers, this uniqueness will make you stand out
A content marketing strategy is a roadmap to your success. It guides your content creation — so, what to produce and when. When you have a content marketing strategy, your marketing efforts are more focused, and the results of your efforts are easier to measure, too. You’ll better understand what your audience vibes with.
All in all, a content marketing strategy drives the long-term growth of your business.
SEO in Your Content Marketing Strategy
We can’t forget to mention the critical relationship between content marketing and SEO. If you want your content to reach a bigger audience, then creating SEO-friendly content should be a top priority in your strategy.
SEO is the cornerstone of content marketing. Your content should be optimised for SEO by including relevant keywords, structuring the content for readability, and understanding user search intent, which can be done through competitor research. Optimising on-page elements, such as meta descriptions, title tags, and image alt text, is also essential.
Oh, and make sure your content is mobile-friendly. Search engines like Google favour sites that use mobile-first indexing, which boosts their rankings.
With SEO-optimised content, your site will appear higher in the SERPs. This will drive organic traffic, which means more potential customers, helping to build brand authority.
Your content will only benefit from SEO, so include it in your content marketing strategy.
The Difference Between a Content Strategy and Content Marketing
Before we continue, let’s distinguish ‘content marketing’ from ‘content strategy.’
Content strategy comes first; it’s the foundation for a content marketing strategy. It’s the thought and research that goes into establishing a solid content marketing campaign. It defines the ‘why’, ‘who’ and ‘what’ of your content efforts.
Content marketing, on the other hand, is the implementation of the strategy. It involves the actual creation, distribution and management of content to attract readers.
Content strategy and content marketing complement each other. It’s like a perfect circle: your content strategy guides your content marketing, and any takeaways from your marketing will improve your strategy.
Your Step-by-Step Content Marketing Strategy
Step 1 – Define Your Goals
For your content marketing to work, you’re going to need to establish some goals.
What’s the purpose of your content? Do you want to raise brand awareness or drive sales? It’s up to you — but really think about it. Take your time. Your goals will, of course, inform your content marketing, so it’s important you’re happy with your decision.
Set objectives for each stage of the marketing funnel, which are Awareness, Consideration, Conversion, Loyalty, and Advocacy. This will help you understand the motivation at each stage and determine what kind of content is needed to drive your potential customers to the next stage.
Set relevant Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) for each funnel stage. This will allow you to monitor the effectiveness of your content marketing.
Step 2 – Know Your Audience
To create relevant content, find out what kind of content your audience wants and needs. This guarantees that the content you produce has a purpose, tailored to your target audience’s preferences, and won’t go unnoticed.
But how do you do that?
1. Create Customer Personas
These fictional profiles of your ideal customers define their demographics, pain points, interests, preferences, and behaviours. This will make your content marketing more targeted, leading to higher engagement and conversion rates.
Some of this information is available on Google Analytics. Here, you can learn who forms your audience — their age, gender, interests, devices, and more.
2. Analyse Your Competitors
Think of yourself as a ninja, undercover, and on a mission to gather information. The information you’re looking for is:
- Who your competitors’ target audience is
- What platforms is their audience most active on
- What kind of content their audience engages with the most
While you’re on it, you may as well examine what your competitors’ communication style is like. What’s their tone like, and how do they interact with their audience?
And, in turn, how does their audience interact with them? Read reviews and customer discussions. These can be very illuminating, as they might share their needs, wants, pain points — all of which you can cover in your content.
These are all bits of information that can inform your content marketing strategy.
To return to SEO, look at what search terms they rank for to gain a better understanding of the topics your shared audience is searching for.
Step 3 – Conduct a Content Audit
A good content marketing strategy doesn’t just involve creating content. It also involves revisiting existing content, analysing its performance against your goals, and sometimes updating or deleting it.
This is called conducting a ‘content audit.’
To perform a content audit:
- Define a timeframe – so, what content, from which period, will you analyse?
- Collect data on KPIs, like website traffic and conversion rates
- Use these insights to improve your content strategy
It creates a good overview of the type of content you already have, and what worked and what didn’t. Note these topics down in your content plan to help you remember.
Overall, content audits are a nice refresher, but they also offer other benefits:
- It helps you identify content gaps — what can you focus on more in the future?
- You can improve SEO and user experience
- If it’s text, you can make small changes to ensure consistent messaging
- It inspires you to make smart decisions about future content
Step 4 – Choose Content Types and Channels
It’s time to decide what types of content you’ll create and which marketing channels you’ll distribute it through, based on all the info you’ve found up until now. Keep your target audience in mind, of course.
What would your customers prefer: long-form blog posts, short videos, or infographics? Where do they spend most of their time: email, social media, or your website?
Work off of this, but don’t be afraid to experiment. Switch up content formats and channels to measure their effectiveness. You never know, a different content type might work wonders for your conversions — and you wouldn’t have known if you hadn’t tried!
Step 5 – Create a Content Calendar
To keep track of the content you produce, create a content calendar.
A content calendar is a strategic tool. It helps you plan and schedule your content in advance, guaranteeing consistent publication and fresh topics. Knowing what you’re publishing and when will prevent any overlaps or repeats.
Think of the content calendar like the ‘headquarters’ for your content strategy. It combines your social media calendar, blog schedule, email marketing schedule, and other content plans. It provides an overview of everything content-related, ensuring a smoother workflow across all the different channels.
Step 6 – Produce High-Quality Content
You already know what content your audience appreciates. Now all that’s left is to create it, and ensure it’s high-quality — though we’ve no doubt it will be!
What makes content ‘high-quality,’ you ask?
It depends on what topics your audience finds valuable and engaging, and what information they’re seeking. Whatever it is, if you create content that either answers their questions, educates them or provides original information (or better yet, all three!), you’re on the right track.
The user experience also plays an important role. You, of course, want to provide a good one. To do that, integrate storytelling into your content, make it visually appealing, and if it’s textual, structure it for better readability and use clear—but compelling—language.
Here are a few more tips for creating high-quality content:
- For text, use short paragraphs, subheadings, bullet points and bold text to make your content easy to read
- Include high-quality images and other visual elements to make your content more visually-appealing to your users
- Ensure your webpages are optimised for mobile users
If you’d like more tips or a personal consultation on what makes your content high-quality, contact us today.
Step 7 – Promote Your Content
Hey, if you’re going to create such excellent content, you may as well get more people to see it, right?
Promote your content across all channels and platforms to reach a wider audience. Share it on your social media, email, and forums, but also boost it in the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) so more people can find you.
Sharing it far and wide will also help you gather more accurate metrics, allowing you to see if the content resonates with a wider audience or not.
Step 8 – Measure and Optimise
As your content marketing strategy comes to life, remember: measure your content’s performance, and refine your strategy as needed.
Track your chosen KPIs, like social media reach, website traffic, or number of subscribers. This will help you evaluate your content’s effectiveness — is it really engaging people? If not, what’s something you could change to boost people’s engagement?
‘Review and refine’ is the right approach to any strategy. You stand up and try again.
Use analytics to gain insight into how each piece of content is performing. Then identify:
- Content that’s performing well
- Channels with the best results
- What needs improvement (i.e. content- and promotion-wise)
- What goals you’ve achieved, or what you can do better to achieve them
Sometimes, there’s also an opportunity to repurpose existing content. If it served you well a few months ago, it can do so again. Repost or update it, but make sure it’s still relevant. Otherwise, your aim of extending its reach and value might backfire.
Step 9 – Staying Agile With Your Strategy
The thing about having a content marketing strategy is that you need to be flexible with it.
Topics, keywords, trends — these are all ever-changing. Your content marketing strategy needs to be ‘in with the times,’ to not risk producing old and irrelevant content.
For example, the keywords that users search for change depending on trends, current events and their evolving needs. Your target keywords need to be up-to-date with what people are searching for. Your content’s performance data will help inform which topics don’t resonate anymore, allowing you to fill in the gaps with other pieces of content.
Algorithms also change, and quite frequently, too. Track how these changes impact your visibility and rankings and, based on your findings, make sure you’re still coming out on top.
Don’t forget to listen to your audience. Follow user discussions on your social media platforms and forums. Take notes of their pain points and see what opportunities there are for your content creation.
For your content marketing strategy to be fresh, up-to-date, and relevant, you have to be agile and adaptable. If your content marketing strategy hits these three points, you’ll be well on your way to connecting meaningfully with your audience.
