Are you looking to create a content marketing strategy for your business, but wondering that the steps are to getting started? To create a content marketing strategy you will need to focus on what your audience’s priorities are, what they want to know and where they will see your content. You are much more likely to be successful if you plan it out, write it down, stick to it, revise it and keep it up!
6 Steps to Create a Content Marketing Strategy
1. Identify objectives that impact your business’ bottom line.
There is no better place to start than your checkbook to decide on what objectives are important for you to devise a content strategy around.
Most likely lead generation is going to have the greatest impact on your revenue, but the other objectives could help contribute to gaining new leads. For example, many times website traffic and Facebook likes can generate new email subscribers. The email subscribers with who you can directly communicate can be your new leads. These new leads may convert into orders and actual cash flow.
The most common objectives of a content marketing strategy are:
- Improve Customer Engagement
- Increase Lead Generation
- Expand Brand Awareness
- Increase Sales Revenue
- Improve Lead Nurturing
- Increase Website Traffic
- Increase Customer Retention
- Improve Search Engine Rankings
2. Determine a price tag for obtaining your objective
Now that you know you need to turn your Facebook fans into email subscribers in order to make them a lead and potentially a sale, you need to determine how much each new email subscriber is worth to you. This way you can find out what your conversions are. This will help you determine what your return on investment (ROI) is.
3. Who do you want to reach
Knowing your audience is half the battle. You need to know your audience’s priorities or your writing will fall on deaf ears. Consider:
- Who is the ideal audience for your content, the people most likely to buy or become customers?
- What does this ideal client want to know?
- Where are these ideal clients on the web? What social media platforms do they use?
- Any available marketing influencers to reach this audience?
- Is there a tone that works best with these clients? Are they sarcastic, serious, political, like sports, gardening, etc.?
- Are there other companies or publications with reach that you could cross promote content with?
Example: A real estate salesperson would not be able to only sale to one type of person. They would be selling to singles females, singles males, partners, married couples and married couples with children. Each one of these groups would have their own set of demographics, beliefs and needs for buying their future home. A family with children would care about the school district, neighborhood safety and distance to work. Whereas a single adult male may be more interested in having a bar, big living room and a walkable neighborhood.
The buyers journey
Awareness > Consideration > Decision
4. Create content for your customers specific personas
Now that you know the actions [objectives] for prospects to take, who they are and where they are, it is time to create the content.
Ask yourself, what service do you offer that you really want to be selling more of because it is what you are best at, it has the highest possible income, it costs the least to provide, it has the least amount of competitors or the most ROI? This is the type of content you will be creating.
Ideally you will initially start with brainstorming. Come up with at least 50 content creation ideas that would be helpful or useful to your audience. Now cut out the hardest to create, the least useful and the lamest ideas. Commit to creating the rest of this list and make sure to use each piece of content more than once.
How to reuse content
- Become email content
- Be rewritten into an e-book.
- Break it into many different tweets or social media posts
- Turn it into an infographic
- Repost on an industry website
- Citation in a Press Releases
- Used in Thank You cards or follow up promotions for customers
- Be used to create additional interior or exterior links
5. Promote your content to your customers
Why create and plan out a content strategy that doesn’t spend just as much time on promoting that content? Different types of promotion can include social media posts or ads, email marketing, reaching out to influencers or optimizing your page content for SEO.
6. Close out your content marketing strategy by evaluating how you did.
Check out your website analytics and your social media analytics to determine if you achieved your objectives, if your conversions were effective, was the content what your customers were interested in and was their any engagement with your content?
Make any changes necessary based on your findings and continue with your content marketing strategy. Unless you got everything completely wrong, this is an ongoing strategy that will need to constantly be revised over time.
Never forget that developing a content strategy has a few key things to consider such as who it’s for, the problem it will solve, how it will be uniquely yours, what you will want to focus on, where it will be published, managing promotion and publication and finally how well did it work and what can be changed.
If you follow this plan for creating a content marketing strategy, you may not get it right the first time, but you are on your way to analyzing, tweaking and getting it right the next time.
