Content marketing involves marketing your brand through the content you produce in the form of blogs, videos, images, and educational content, such as webinars and eBooks. When it comes to marketing via the content you produce, you need a strategy. If you go into it blind, your content will be all over the place in terms of value and consistency. Here is what should be included in a modern content marketing strategy.
Plan Ahead and Set Goals:
When engaging in content marketing, you should never be developing content and posting willy-nilly. You need to have a plan. Determine what your content marketing goals are. Do you want to increase your number of leads? Do you want to increase the traffic coming to your website? Whatever you decide on for content marketing goals, ensure they are SMART goals, Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Timely. In other words, decide precisely what you want (a solid number), when you want it, break it into manageable chunks, and ensure it is realistic and relevant.
Define Your Target Audience:
You need to know who your target audience is. You probably have a good idea of this if you already have a marketing plan in place. You need age range, gender, geographic location, and all relevant demographics. Not only this, you have to learn to think like them, to understand them. You need to know what they need and social media, blogs, and forums are great places to do research.
Determine the Most Appropriate Content Formats:
Once you know your goals and have a solid understanding of your target audience, you need to decide where and how you can best reach that audience. There is no point marketing on Instagram if your target audience is more likely to visit blogs and forums. If your goal is to increase website traffic, then you are better off writing guests posts for blogs than tweeting the latest industry news or research results. The key is to focus your efforts where they will count the most.
Make a Plan:
Whatever goals you set and whatever content formats you have chosen, you need to plan your content accordingly. Schedule blog or social media posts at least 2-3 weeks in advance, taking into account holidays and seasonal trends. You can determine what type of post you need to make and when you need to make them to get the most attention and engagement. You can determine a good mix of content formats that will offer variety and value.
Analyze and Adjust:
All of this planning and content creation will be for naught if you don’t know how effective it is. As with any good marketing campaign, you need to analyze the results of your campaign to see what works and what doesn’t. Many social media platforms have their own analysis tools and Google also has an analysis tool that you can use to track your website. Using these tools, you can determine what is working and what isn’t working and adjust your plan accordingly.
Content marketing strategy
Content marketing strategy