Last year, the most successful marketers spent 40% of their budget on content marketing. To ensure your plans are innovative and up-to-date, it’s a good idea to revisit your content strategy plan regardless of whether you are an established business or recently launched entity. Establishing and executing a solid, smart content marketing plan is an excellent way to stay ahead of your competition and to continuously engage your target audience.
In case you are wondering, content strategy refers to the management of any written, visual, downloadable, etc. media that you create and own. It is the piece of your marketing plan that communicates out to the world who your brand is and the expertise you offer. There are a number of things to consider as you develop a content strategy.
CONSIDERATIONS FOR YOUR CONTENT STRATEGY
For Whom is the Content Created?
Your content strategy can serve multiple segments within your overall audience. The key is to first, determine how many different audiences for which you need content. Secondly, understand the target audience for any particular piece of content. Your content can speak to more than one type of reader so long as you utilize a variety of content types and delivery channels. Make sure you engage with each segment of your audience where they are and with the type of content that encourages them to interact.
What Problem Does the Content Talk About Solving?
The best products and services address and/or solve a problem for the target audience. In a similar fashion, the content should educate your audience about the approach to the problem and coach them through the process of addressing it. Ideally, your content strategy will support not only people who know your product will help them overcome their challenges but also the people who are still figuring out what are those problems. The content you share should reinforce the solution offered by your products or services.
How is Your Brand Unique?
Odds are good that your competitors have products or services similar to yours. The key is to communicate what makes your brand’s offerings better. You can use your content to outline why consumers should listen to your marketing and why they should, ultimately, purchase a product or service from you instead of your competition.
What Formats and Channels Will You Use?
List the types of formats on which your content team will focus. Indicate which content will be communicated via video, in a blog article, through an infographic, and so on. The form in which your content is presented should take into consideration the channel on which the content will be published. Your brand’s website and blog page will present different content than your Twitter or Facebook feeds and those may feature different content than your Instagram posts.
WHY YOU NEED A CONTENT MARKETING STRATEGY
Pushing out content without a rhyme or reason behind what you’re doing is never the best approach. A solid content marketing strategy will help any business prepare and plan for reliable and cost-effective sources of website traffic and new leads. The reliable source of traffic and leads from your evergreen content will give your brand the flexibility to experiment with other revenue generating marketing tactics like sponsored content, social media advertising, and distributed content. Ideally, your content will not only help attract leads, it will also help educate your target audience and generate awareness for your brand.
HOW TO CREATE A CONTENT MARKETING PLAN
Define Your Goals
Establish why you want to produce content and your purpose for developing a content marketing plan. It will be easier to determine your strategy when you hold a full understanding of your goals ahead of time.
Establish Buyer’s Personas
Clearly define the target audience for your content to ensure you are creating the most relevant and valuable content possible. Establishing your target audience parameters by conducting market research each year is crucial to growing your audience.
Determine the Types of Content to be Created
Infographics
Infographics can organize and communicate data in a more powerful way than text, graphs, or charts. If you are trying to share a lot of data in a way that is clear and easy to understand, an infographic is the best vehicle with which to do so.
Video
Video is an engaging medium that can easily be shared across websites and social media platforms. While videos require a larger investment of time and resources than written content, they are more likely to be shared on social media than any other type of content. Video content is an excellent way to capture consumers’ attention and, according to HubSpot Research, video is the most preferred form of content.
Social Media
Regularly posting content on social media is essential to growing your brand's reach and delivering your content to customers where they spend their time. Your creative team might create original content specifically for social networks like LinkedIn, Pinterest, Facebook, etc. or they may repurpose content from your website or blog page into new formats that are appropriate for each social platform.
The content goal on the different social channels will differ depending on the audience you are aiming for. Platforms like Instagram and Snapchat tend to support more casual communications and interactions with established customers while your goals for platforms like LinkedIn and Facebook may be more about expanding your audience, engaging in industry centered conversations, or driving traffic to your website. Understand which platforms your audience is on and what types of content they engage with most and then develop your content around that information.
Blog Articles
Your website should have a page dedicated to blog posts and articles should be published on a regular basis to educate and edify your readers and also attract new visitors by building your SEO. Blogs should offer value-added content to your audience and inspire them to share the posts on social media. A good rule of thumb is 1,200 to 2,000 words but you should experiment to see what length articles resonate best with your audience.
Customer Testimonials
Testimonials let your existing customers tell prospective customers how your products or services helped them succeed in solving a problem. Testimonials can be presented in a number of different forms – infographic, text quote, short video, blog post, and so on. The goal of a testimonial is to show people that others believe your brand provides high-quality products or services and is the best choice to help them address their challenges.
WRAP UP
A successful content marketing strategy takes time, organization and creativity to come to fruition. From building the foundation of your content marketing plan to setting up your strategy each year, you’ll find that success when you invest the time and resources necessary.
The experts at Strategy Driven Marketing can help you make sure that your brand has a top-notch content marketing strategy that addresses all segments of your target audience in an engaging manner. We’d love to deep dive into your business to better understand how SDM can help you offer content your customers will love. We’ll listen, ask a lot of questions, and create a marketing plan uniquely tailored to your brand. Contact us today to get started!
Cover photo by Daria Shevtsova from Pexels