How are some marketers very casually marketing all the time on various channels or platforms, and audiences seem to be wooed by whatever they do? Their one post is capable of triggering massive engagements, which further encourages more and more people to join them or share their message willingly, in fact, happily. But what’s the secret behind such exceptional marketing marvels? The answer is an ingenious content marketing strategy. Anyone can pull it off with the right content marketing strategy!
So, get ready and take some notes on how to create a content marketing strategy with us!
Let’s get started!
What Is a Content Marketing Strategy?
Content marketing is all about mapping out plans for creating and sharing useful, relevant content in the form of newsletters, blogs, social media posts, emails, videos, and more. The primary purpose of crafting a content marketing strategy is to consistently post the content and enhance its effectiveness.
The key steps to forming a content marketing strategy are as shown below:
Why is a Content Marketing Strategy Important?
A content marketing strategy is important as it allows businesses to:
Improve Brand Awareness
Creating and consistently delivering quality content can increase traffic to your site and expose your brand to a wider audience.
Boost SEO efforts
Businesses that showcase their experience and expertise on many platforms are more likely to get noticed by search engines.
Generate Qualified Leads
With the right content marketing strategy, you can enhance your reach to a qualified audience, which can greatly help you nurture leads.
Build Trust Factor Among the Audience
When your audience sees you posting useful content on different channels that they often use to access information, they naturally start to perceive you as a trustworthy source.
Key Elements of a Content Strategy Plan
Here are some fundamental elements of a content marketing strategy:
- Your Goals
Based on whether you are just starting off with content marketing or already doing it for a long time, your goals may vary. There are other aspects that may form the basis of your goals, but here are some common objectives that drive businesses to go with content curation, these are:
- Brand Awareness
- Generate leads
- Improve customer engagement
Defining your goals helps you craft content that aligns well with them and nurtures results.
- Buyer’s Persona
An audience persona is a semi-fictional representation of a target audience. Its purpose is to help a business focus its marketing efforts on ideal customers.
Here are a few things that make up a buyer’s persona:
Demographics: Audience’s age, gender, income, location, and education.
Pain points: What issues your ideal customers are facing with the product/service you also offer
Customer Behaviour: Audience’s challenges, goals, values, habits, and what other media they consume.
To create a buyer persona, you’ll need to gather information about your target audience through various methods, such as:
- Online forms: You can include fields for age, gender, marital status, race, income, education, job title, and location in online forms.
- Market research: You can also analyze current buying statistics to determine gender distribution.
- Surveys: You can ask about interests, hobbies, skills, product and service usage, content consumption, communication preferences, and goals.
- Leverage groups and forums: You can encourage open discussions in forums and groups. This can help you gain deeper insights into the values, attitudes, and perspectives of your ideal customers.
- Analyze business trends: Research the market’s ongoing trends and check whether your products and services are up to or above par.
- Examine existing research: Utilize past UX research, brand health studies, and pricing interviews conducted by your company.
- Consider customer pain points: Identify challenges and barriers your target audience faces.
After you’ve collected all this information, organize your data to identify patterns and correlations within different portions of the population. Give each persona a name that reflects what they prefer. Compare your persona with your actual audience to check the effectiveness of your work.
- Content Types and Channels
You need to plan which platforms your ideal audience uses the most and then prepare content for those platforms, such as infographics, blog posts or vidoes etc.
Keep experimenting with platforms and content types from time to time to figure out what works best for you.
- Measurement and Analytics
Now that you have figured out which audience to cater to, which platforms to work on and what type of content you should produce, it’s really important to track your performance.
Establish some key performance indicators to evaluate how well are your marketing efforts performing. These key performance indicators will vary based on different platforms.
You can leverage Google Analytics and native analytics tools to keep a check on your performance and adapt your strategies as needed.
What will you need while making your content marketing strategy?
1. Brand Guidelines
Make sure to understand the brand guidelines, as they help you stay uniform with the overall look and essence. Using a colour palette, typography, messaging, and brand voice that aligns with the brand establishes you as a highly professional business.
To make things simple, you can build your content governance model based on your brand guidelines. This will ensure that all your teams, whether designers or writers, are focussed on creating content that perfectly aligns with your brand identity.
Moreover, brand guidelines make it easy for you to choose tone of voice, colours, font and graphics easily.
2. Editorial Calendar
An editorial calendar provides a broader overview of how to plan your content themes. People might confuse it with a content calendar which actually helps you in organising individual posts within a specific timeframe.
Let’s understand this with the help of an example,
An editorial calendar could state the team members to work on the Christmas theme during December month, while a content calendar can help you with details like organising a series of individual posts (each post covering a topic related to the chosen theme).
You must leverage both editorial and content calendars side by side to plan a comprehensive content marketing strategy to ensure you cohesively cover all the topics. It can also help you refine your content ideation processes and maintain a consistent workflow.
3. Content Clusters
Content clusters are a series of interconnected posts targeting all aspects of a particular topic in detail. Content clusters are very useful in establishing brand authority and targeting consumers in the various stages of the marketing funnels.
For example, suppose you are covering a topic “Digital marketing,” now you can create a central post that offers a basic overview of the subject. This general overview is also known as pillar content. You can then create some separate pieces that will further target the sub topics related to the main topic, like SEO, PPC, and so on.
Here content audits can greatly help you spot the topics that already do well. You can expand these topics by offering specialized knowledge. This can create a comprehensive, fully branched content cluster.
4. Marketing Funnels
Marketing funnels can act as the basis to how you craft your content strategy. Marketing funnel can help you define the critical stages of a user journey. By understanding the customer’s journey from the initial point to the buyer stage, you can effectively create the content to attract the consumers’ attention and lead them towards buying your product/services.
There are many CRM tools available in the market that can help you with user journey details and set up a personalized campaigning.
5. Competitive Research
Look at your competition to get insights into details like what themes are trending, what type of content do people find engaging, what content format you can follow and whether you are outperforming them or not.
Doing competitive research can also help you in spotting what they are not offering so you can. If your competitors are also targeting the same audience as you, it’s very important to stay ahead by being active on various platforms.
How to Create Your Content Marketing Strategy?
1. Focus on achieving your goals
Focussing on your goals is the initial step to creating a content strategy plan. It is like a brief statement that makes it easy for you to focus on what really matters to you and stick with it.
A content marketing mission statement generally outlines:
- Your target audience
- The content you need to reach them
- The benefits you need to highlight in your content
Your goals define the type of content you are going to produce. For example, if you want to enhance your brand awareness your focus would be on being present on various platforms and making efforts to boost your visibility. On the other hand, if your goal is to increase engagement, your focus will shift toward generating content that can trigger a lot of comments or DMs.
2. Know Your Audience
To ensure the effectiveness of your marketing effectiveness it’s important to first understand who you are creating the content for. Find out your target audience and their interests. Know their pain points and figure out on which platform they spend most of their time.
You can make this step simple by creating a Buyer’s persona as defined above. It can prove to be a great help in targeting the right audience.
3. Identify Your Current Performance
A content audit is a detailed analysis of existing content. It helps you to identify strengths, weaknesses, and opportunities in your content strategy.
With the help of audit, you can discover the topics, formats and channels that may be missing from your content repertoire.
Moreover, it can also help you evaluate your existing content, find duplicacy or other issues and refine its structure and tone.
To conduct a content audit you need to gather all your existing content from various channels. This includes blogs, posts and newsletters etc.
After collecting it, group it by type, topic, format and channel.
Assess key performance metrics of each content piece. Based on the assessment, identify areas of improvement.
Make sure you are prioritizing updates. Record your audit result which may even include future recommendations for future content.
Here are tools you will need for content Audit:
- Spreadsheets
- Content analytics tools
- Project management tools
4. Develop a content mission statement
A content mission statement is a brief statement that outlines the tone, style and purpose of your content. It can act as a directional guide for all your content creation assignments by assuring consistency and alignment with your brand’s overall goals.
To develop a content mission, start by identifying your brand’s overall purpose and goals. Then, find your target audience.
After these steps, determine your unique value proposition. For this, you will need to clarify what sets your brand apart from the others.
Now, it’s time to create the content. Decide on the tone and style that will resonate with your audience.
At the end, combine the above elements into a summarised statement and you are done with creating one.
Benefits of having a content mission statement:
- Provide a clear direction to the teams working on content creation, hence streamlining the whole process.
- Ensures a harmonious message and tone across all channels.
- It can considerably improve engagement.
5. Choose content channels
Content channels are where you will post your content. It could be any social media channel, website, etc.
Understand which channels your audience uses the most.
Alongside, evaluate each channel’s ability to allow you to reach your goals, such as reach and engagement.
Consider the unique characteristics each channel offers and leverage them fully. For example, Instagram features polls, which you can use to get insights on what the audience thinks about your products, etc.
6. Make a content calendar
A content calendar is a planned schedule of content to be published across various channels over a specific time.
It helps you organise and optimize your content creation process by ensuring consistency.
Using a content calendar, you can easily organize your content ideas, deadlines, and responsibilities.
It helps you maintain regular posting and avoid last-time scrambles.
It also supports teamwork and cooperation, which is vital for content creation.
Here is how to create a content calendar:
- Select a format.
- Plan themes for a specific period.
- Designate tasks such as designing, storytelling, copywriting, etc.
- Set specific publishing times and dates.
7. Develop content formats
Content formats refer to different types of content you create to achieve your marketing goals. These could be blogposts, videos, infographics, or more.
Popular Content Formats_
- Blog posts
- Videos (explainers, tutorials, interviews, etc.)
- Infographics
- Podcasts
- E-books and whitepapers
- Webinars
- Social media posts(images, stories, reels, etc.)
- Case studies
- Testimonials
- Interactive content t(quizzes, polls, surveys, etc.)
8. Stay up to date with trends
Stay current with the ongoing trends to ensure competitiveness. For this, you will need to follow the industry leaders and blogs, read industry reports and research studies and experiment new technologies.
9. Measure your performance
Use analytics to monitor the effectiveness of your efforts. Make sure your decisions are data-driven and well-optimized. Set clear metrics and track your key performance indicators. Regularly reviewing these can help you adjust your strategy based on insights and stay relevant.
Transform Your Content Marketing Strategy with Kinex Media
Is your business facing bottlenecks in lead generation, or conversion? All you need is a dedicated content marketing service. Kinex Media can help you craft an appealing brand story, top notch SEO strategy and data driven content strategy. Unlock your brand’s potential and witness conversions at all time high.
FAQs
- Do I need to create a content marketing strategy?
To perform well and meet your goals, you need a proper plan that can help you develop and manage the content that generates leads.
- What’s the first step of creating a content strategy?
The first step to creating a content strategy is to define your goals so you stick with them throughout the process.
- How to create a content marketing strategy for a B2B brand?
B2B content marketing involves various stages, each serving a specific purpose, such as driving brand awareness or lead generation. That’s why you need professionals by your side. Kinex Media offers end-to-end content marketing services for B2B businesses. From concept creation to curation, our comprehensive services can help you with brand promotion and lead conversion.