The internet is teeming with ideas, from the next grand business idea to creative ways to advertise to the perfect marketing strategy.
Among them comes the content marketing strategy to help you connect with your audience and build customer loyalty.
With 50% of companies planning to grow their content teams, let us help you understand what content marketing entails and how you can build your perfect content marketing strategy.
What Is A Content Marketing Strategy?
A content market strategy involves creating and spreading relevant and consistent content to your current and potential customers.
You can do this in the form of blog posts, whitepapers, newsletters, emails, videos, podcasts, and social media posts.
You get more online visibility, become an authority figure in your niche, generate leads, and increase customer engagement.
The main objective is to use storytelling or informative materials to encourage your audience to visit your website, sign up for newsletters, drive traffic, and increase brand awareness.
Consider looking at Remark to understand the different content and creative services offered that will make your business stand out!
How Different Marketing Strategies Use Content Marketing
Every other marketing strategy makes use of quality content; here are a few examples.
1. Social Media Marketing And Inbound Marketing
You need engaging content to build credibility with your audience, build a strong brand presence, and keep them engaged through captions, reels, memes, hashtags, and picking topics that resonate with your audience while furthering your business goals.
For inbound marketing strategies, you must create relevant content that motivates your target audience to buy your product or service, meet their needs, and build trust with your audience.
You can do this by telling a compelling story or case study identifying with their pain and how your product or service helped alleviate it.
2. PPC and PR
Pay-per-click (PPC) and quality content complement each other because your content drives traffic, directs people to your brand, and creates a lead-generating landing page through clickable headlines and compelling ads.
Public relations (PR) uses content to educate your audience and establish your brand as an expert.
Using data-focused or emotional content can increase media coverage and reach a wider audience.
Together, they help you become a thought leader by publishing insightful content pieces like expert commentaries.
3. SEO (Search engine optimization)
Buyers thoroughly research before opting for a product. In fact, according to the 2022 Content Preferences Survey Report, 55% of buyers reported they relied more, compared to a year ago, on content for research before making purchasing decisions.
You need people to read your content to increase leads and organic traffic, such as by using keywords and articles your audience searches for that help you climb the search rankings.
Developing Your Perfect Content Marketing Strategy
Now that you know how other marketing strategies use high-quality content and its importance, let’s build the most appropriate strategy for you.
1. Content Marketing Mission Statement
Your mission statement will help you stay on track by outlining your target audience, the content you will use, and how it will benefit them.
Your content marketing strategy should help you achieve your business goals. It may include increasing sales, revenue, social media engagement, and reducing marketing costs.
It is crucial to know your buyer persona to produce the content your customers will want.
You can collect demographic data on your audience through email subscribers, surveys, or social media followers.
Use web analytics to analyze the data and find their gender, age, and income. Get regular customer feedback to understand their priorities and if your content is effective.
2. KPIs
You need to establish KPIs or key performance indicators to measure the success of your strategy.
You can measure this by setting targets for revenue increase, signups, improvement in search rankings, or how many new email subscribers you’re getting.
You can measure your content writing ROI (Return on investment) by calculating the cost to produce your content (creator’s salary, outsourced work), cost to distribute (software used, paid promotions), and add them.
Then, calculate the sales you made from your content and use the formula: Content marketing ROI = Sales minus cost, divided by cost, expressed as a percentage.
3. Where Do You Stand
Conduct a content audit on the content you have on your blogs, social media, websites, and more to assess their usefulness (such as by checking for inbound links to the content or what keywords are doing the best), identify the existing gaps (your audience’s queries that you’re not answering), your competitor’s position (their top-performing content), and what makes you unique from them.
Check where you have a successful online presence, for example, where you get the most clicks, and expand from there.
Think about the format you will use; for example, if your audience prefers long video content, go for youtube.
4. Brainstorm Ideas and Allocate Resources
Your strategy should focus on posting core content on your site, which you can share on other sites like blogs or repurpose, such as by turning articles into infographics.
Including content that increases engagement, such as videos, graphics, memes, or illustrations, is crucial.
With 40% of Americans tuning into podcasts, it is another creative option.
Do a quick Google search and analyze how your work will add value for your audience. You may even opt for original research.
Here, you use feedback or data collected from surveys or interviews to create content. This helps increase your brand’s authority, although it can be very costly and time-consuming.
Knowing who will manage your content, the content marketing manager, in-house creators, outsourced specialists, and the resources and budget they need to build and maintain the content is essential.
5. Create Your Content, Distribute, and Measure
Now it’s time to create your content by considering SEO strategies, such as optimized content, keywords, and more.
Use your content to give teasers, post tutorials, customer reviews, testimonials, or case studies of how your product or service helped your clients.
Then, distribute and market your content. Use a content calendar to know when and how much content to put out. It will help you stay organized.
Companies that post 16-plus blog posts per month receive 3.5 times more traffic than those that publish only one to four monthly posts.
You can even distribute your content through emails, paid ads, or influencers. Finally, use your KPIs to monitor the success of your strategy and make relevant changes.
Endnote
Marketing and business go hand in hand. You cannot have any success if you’re not marketing your product and service right; they give you visibility.
This is where content marketing strategy sets you apart, gives you a different tone and look from your competitors, builds trust with your audience, and leads to short-term and long-term growth.
It’s an effective way to keep people interested and engaged with what you do, so keep creating!
