Learn how a well-thought-out strategy makes it easier to create and publish impressive content.
Achieve your goals
Creating successful content requires a strategy that all of your marketing materials will follow. This content marketing plan will guide you, help you prioritize and avoid content pitfalls. Even if strategizing seems like a tedious task to you, remember that it’s essential to creating impactful content.
Before you write your next blog post or create a social media post, check out these tips for developing an effective content marketing strategy.
Define your content marketing mission statement
When creating content, it’s important to consider your business objectives, target audience, and the purpose of the content creation. Do you want to help customers learn new skills? Engage members of your target audience in a discussion? Improve your search engine rankings or Google rankings? Attract potential customers? What types of buyers is your content targeting? If you define your content marketing goals, you’ll see how you can achieve them. Your mission should be the foundation for your content efforts going forward. Determine who your content will help and how it will benefit your target audience.
Set metrics for digital marketing
When creating content, it’s important to be able to measure and track its success using KPIs, or key performance indicators. Determine what goals you want to achieve and what metrics best reflect those goals. If you want to create an infographic that will grab your audience’s attention, look at metrics like reach and engagement. If you’re creating a success story to encourage customers to shop online, focus on conversion rates.
When determining metrics, consider industry trends, your business goals, and the buyer’s journey. These metrics will help you understand what types of content to create and what analytics tools are best to use. Review metrics regularly as your business and resources evolve.
Work on ideas for content together
Determine a general direction and collectively discuss individual topics that need to be reflected in new content. These topics should be broad enough that you can continually create new content, implement new ideas, and keep readers interested. At the same time, the topics should be specific enough to resonate with your target audience and be associated with your brand. Understanding the brand’s mission and visual aesthetics are key here.
Based on the topics you choose, decide what style of presentation or point of view you will pursue. Will your content be educational, motivational or inspirational? Think about what problems your customers have and what content will help solve them. Understanding your mission, goals, and brand identity will help you create content that reflects your brand personality.
A collage of marketing materials and notes posted on a wall for collective discussion
Determine your content distribution strategy
Whether you plan to create a search engine optimized landing page, a regularly updated blog, or a social media profile, you’ll need to determine where to post your content. When choosing a site, you need to focus on your target audience first and foremost. Study your competitors’ content to see how they run marketing campaigns and distribute their content. Don’t try to do everything at once. In content marketing, quality over quantity is always more important: it’s better to make a plan and focus on achieving business goals than to rush and create a lot of mediocre content.
Determine content formats
Think about what format is best to offer content in. This could be videos, articles, podcasts, social media marketing campaigns or infographics. Make sure the type of content you choose is familiar to your audience and suitable for the chosen platforms. For example, videos work very well on Facebook, and if your customers actively use this social network, it makes sense to invest in this format. If your audience frequently uses Twitter or LinkedIn, you can create a newsletter to publish long-form content and fresh ideas.
Prepare a content plan
A content plan helps you offer new content to your target audience on a regular basis. It is an important part of the strategy, but before you move on to preparing a content plan, you need to fulfill all the previous steps. If you don’t develop a marketing strategy and understand the purpose, where, how and for whom your content should be posted, you risk not achieving your goals. First of all, you need to establish certain requirements for the marketing materials you create and only then move on to preparing a content plan that will help you control the actions on the way to achieving your goals.
Test, study, tweak, adjust, repeat
Your content development strategy should change and evolve as you create content and analyze how users respond to it. Get feedback through surveys, respond to comments on your posts, track your website traffic and audience engagement. Experiment with different formats, topics, writing styles, and ways to distribute content. The better you understand your audience, the more effective your strategy is and the greater your brand recognition.
