Are you a business owner looking for ways to widen your reach and boost brand awareness? Do you want to generate and nurture leads, drive conversions, and increase your revenue? Or perhaps you want to retain your existing customers and build an army of loyal advocates? If you’ve answered “yes” to any of the above questions, it’s high time you start building a content marketing strategy.

Even if you’re new to the world of digital marketing, you likely already know about the benefits of content marketing. It helps you hit the right chord with your target audience and establishes your brand as an industry authority. This, in turn, helps convert your audience into loyal customers and boosts your revenue.

However, content marketing requires meticulous research, planning, and monitoring. Otherwise, your content might just get drowned amidst the clutter of mediocre online content. In this blog, we’ll briefly outline the different stages of content. But let’s first understand the importance of developing an actionable content marketing strategy.

Why You Need a Content Marketing Strategy

In today’s day and age, almost every business owner and digital marketer are trying their hands at content marketing. This, in turn, has resulted in an abundance of overly promotional and low-quality content all over the internet. Your target audience is likely already being bombarded with such content from different corners. Grabbing the attention of such an audience can be particularly challenging.

The key is to publish relevant, high-quality, and valuable content that strikes a chord with your potential customers. Moreover, you must ensure that your content reaches them through the right channels at the right time of the day. It’s also essential to monitor how your content is performing and determine whether it’s delivering the desired results. That’s why it’s crucial to embrace a systematic approach to content marketing.

In other words, you need a digital content marketing strategy to cut through the noise and hit the right ears. Here’s how you can get started:

1. Audit Your Existing Content

The first step is to perform a thorough content audit and identify your top-performing content. It’ll help you understand the type of content that resonates with your audience. This involves analyzing your website traffic and finding the blog posts that garnered the maximum traction. You can use Google Analytics and Google Search Console for this purpose.

Image via Google Search Console

Even if you haven’t started a blog, you likely already publish content on various social media platforms. Take a look at various social media analytics to identify the topics that drive engagement. Likewise, if you have a YouTube channel, check out how your content has been performing.

2. Know Your Audience

The next step is to define your target audience based on various demographics including age group, gender, profession, online activity, etc. It’s also essential to identify psychographic parameters such as dreams, aspirations, preferences, and pain points. This information will help you determine the type of content and subjects you should work with. It’ll also help you identify the most effective channels to grab the attention of your audience.

Image via Digital Market Asia

An effective way of understanding your audience is to take a look at social media analytics. You can find out the type of people who regularly engage with your content. It’s also essential to delve deeper into your audience’s psyche at each stage of the sales funnel and create individual buyer personas.

3. Define Goals & Budget

It’s crucial to have a deep understanding of what you want to accomplish with your content marketing strategy. Your goals influence the type of content you’ll publish and let you measure the success of your strategy. Typically, you can set goals such as:

• Increase website traffic
• Boost newsletter signups
• Drive audience engagement on social media
• Convert subscribers into customers

Once you’ve defined your marketing objectives, assign measurable key performance indicators (KPIs) to each goal. This helps you calculate the ROI of your digital content marketing strategy. At this stage, it’s also crucial to allocate a specific content marketing budget. This budget will be used as various stages such as research, content creation, and distribution.

4. Content Creation

Depending on your target audience and goals, you can publish various content formats like:

• Blog posts
• E-books
• Infographics
• Podcasts
• Video
• Case studies

Irrespective of the format you select, it’s crucial to judiciously select subjects that will resonate with your audience. Your content should educate them, answer their questions, or resolve their problems. You can even use the same topic to create content in various formats for different platforms. Find relevant and popular keywords in your niche and use them to optimize your content.

5. Outline a Distribution Schedule

Publishing top-notch content won’t yield significant results unless it reaches your audience at the right place and time. Identify the online channels where your audience will likely be active. Additionally, you should determine the time of the day when they are mostly online. This, in turn, will help you outline an effective schedule to distribute and promote your content.

It’s also recommended that you create a content calendar that outlines your publishing and distribution schedule. This can go a long way to help you maintain consistency.

6. Track Content Marketing ROI

Monitoring your digital content marketing strategy will help you determine whether it’s successful. You can also identify and rectify any gaps in your strategy. Monitor key parameters such as website traffic, social media followers, monthly conversions, etc. to determine whether you’ve achieved your goals. This, in turn, will help you understand if you should continue with your existing plan or revamp it.

Conclusion

Content marketing is a cost-effective technique of building a long-term relationship with your existing and potential customers. In addition to improving brand awareness and audience engagement, it helps drive conversions and increases revenue. Moreover, it positions your brand as an industry authority and helps you win the trust of your target audience.

It is, however, crucial to define a solid framework for content creation and distribution. Start your content marketing strategy by identifying your target audience and setting your objectives. Create a content calendar and monitor your content to identify any room for improvement.

If you want to create a solid content marketing strategy, give us a shout at WriteForMe.

We will provide you with a FREE Content Marketing Playbook to help you jumpstart your content marketing efforts. Get started now!