Content marketing strategy is one of the most important components of an overall digital marketing strategy.
How can you create a successful content marketing strategy?
Define Your Goals
Your content, in some way, should contribute towards an objective or a goal. When creating a content strategy, focus on S.M.A.R.T goals: Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound. An effective content strategy starts with realistic goals and your efforts become more streamlined.
For e.g. If your primary goal is to improve your SERP ranking. You need to analyze Search Engine Optimization (SEO) efforts. Optimize your current content – keywords, H-tags, meta description, backlinks etc. As you set your content objectives, understand your lead’s lifecycle stage to offer relevant content.
Defining content marketing strategy and aligning it with your overall business goals ensures that you stay on track when creating your content.
Target Audience
Content marketing strategy should be focused on multiple audience segments. Content creation should be focused on specific people or purposes. Audience targeting is fundamental for digital marketing strategy.
How to visualize the target audience? A great way to identify target audience is to conduct market research and use the research to create buyer personas. Buyer personas are a fictional representation of your business’s ideal customer. When creating buyer personas include – demographics (age, job title, gender, income), what they are searching for – pain points or touchpoints, behavior online and location. Your content marketing strategy should align with these buyers.
Once you know your target audience, you will find it easy to create relevant content that appeals to a specific person and needs. It is important to conduct regular buyer persona research. How can you do that? Look at your website and social media analytics such as Twitter trends, Meta Insights.
Identify Keywords
Content is worthless without choosing the right keywords. Identify keywords by establishing the problem your business solves. Remember, content is created to generate interest and spread awareness foremost.
Begin by defining your business- product or service that you sell. This will be the basis of primary keywords and phrases that you want to target. Including the right keywords will help you rank highly in SERPs. Your content should focus on what value you can offer to the customer and why they should choose you over competition.
Content Audit
Do you ever find that content you have been publishing is not yielding the results you expect? It is time to perform a content audit. What is it and how can you perform that?
It is a process wherein you analyze the content you have created and published. You will gain insight into what types of content perform best and what areas you need improvement. You can use this insight to update, rewrite or altogether delete the content that does not match your goals or objectives.
How can you do it? Use the content audit tools such as SEMrush, Google Analytics or MOZ. These tools can help you automate auditing process and help you understand user patterns, behaviors, most popular pages on the website and how you can improve the SEO.
Content audit can help you lay down the future roadmap to enhance your efforts and maximize the content marketing benefits.
Content Types
Content is king and has the power to make or break your brand positioning. Thus, it is vital to plan, create and execute content marketing strategy meticulously.
Some content pieces are staple to any business, such as Blogs. Does not matter small or big brands, blogs are important for every kind of business. Most effective and common types of content marketing in 2022:
- Blogs: informational, journal style pieces of digital content, blogs help engage with audiences, attract leads, and improve SEO.
- Videos: according to HubSpot, almost 93% of brands are getting new customers through posting new video content. Video content gives the edge with versatile options such as explainer videos, animated videos, how-to-do videos, informational videos etc. It is highly engaging and entertaining, and effective.
- Infographics: creative and easy to read, infographics is the quickest way of getting information across to your audience. Incorporating infographics in your content marketing strategy helps you reduce costs. The only drawback of infographics is that they are harder to rank for SEO.
- Podcasts: in 2021, 80% of marketers who used podcasts plan to invest same amount or more in 2022. Podcasts are an amazing way to attract, engage and inform audiences. It is a cheap and easy piece of content, if created right.
- Case studies & guides: they are super important, especially when it comes to leads learning more about your business or on topics they are researching on.
- Pillar pages: pillar pages are large pieces of content that cover an entire topic. They may include subtopics covered by blogs, infographics, video, etc. It may sound like a complicated topic, but pillar pages are just clusters of related topics interlinked to create more informative content.
There are many more forms of content, however it is suggested that you research what is best for your company, audience, and industry.
Content Calendar
What, when and where – content calendar is your guide to organize your content to be published on the right platform at the right time that engages the right audience. Content calendars act as visual workflows which help you schedule work on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis.
Content calendars are an effective way to set deadlines on your content creating efforts. They also help you to repurpose content, for e.g., a blog can be converted into an infographic or an informational video.
Measure Results
What would be any marketing effort without measuring its impact? Content marketing strategy is only effective if you analyze the content performance, what type of content is connecting with your audience the most.
Utilize free tools such as Google Analytics and social media analytics to gain deep insights. Data gained from content audit should be analyzed to learn more about what attracts the customer’s interest to help you create new and intriguing content.
Content marketing is an amazing digital marketing domain and content marketing professionals are in demand in Canada more than ever. According to Marketing News Canada, companies need to invest in content marketing strategies.
How to get started?
Our Digital Marketing Professional diploma offers in-depth knowledge of content creation, various tools for content audit and content performance. If you want to learn more about content marketing or various domains withing digital marketing, our subject matter experts can help. Book an Appointment.