How to Build a Content Marketing Strategy

Introduction

In today’s digital era, having a strong content marketing strategy has become crucial for businesses aiming to stand out from the competition. Effective content marketing helps brands establish their online presence, engage with their target audience, and drive conversions. However, developing a successful content marketing strategy requires careful planning and execution.

In this article, we will explore the essential steps to building an effective content marketing strategy that can elevate your brand’s online visibility and engagement.

Define Your Goals

Before venturing into any marketing strategy, it is vital to define your goals. Consider what you want to achieve through content marketing. Are you looking to generate brand awareness, increase website traffic, deepen customer loyalty, or enhance lead generation? Understanding your goals helps in creating a tailored approach that aligns with your objectives.

Understand Your Target Audience

To create impactful content that resonates with your audience, you need a deep understanding of who they are. Conduct thorough research on your target market demographics, interests, challenges, and preferences. This will help you shape your content around their needs and interests effectively.

Keyword Research for SEO

Optimizing your content for search engines should be an integral part of your content marketing strategy. Perform keyword research to identify the words and phrases commonly used by people searching for products or services similar to yours. Integrate these targeted keywords naturally into your content so that search engines can recognize its relevance and improve its visibility on search engine result pages (SERPs).

Creating High-Quality Content

Producing high-quality and valuable content plays a pivotal role in attracting and retaining audiences. Develop a wide range of engaging formats such as blog posts, videos, infographics, podcasts that suit different audience preferences. Ensure that each piece of content provides unique insights or information that educates or entertains users while aligning with your brand values.

Content Distribution Channels

Identifying the right distribution channels helps your content reach a wider audience. Some popular channels include social media platforms, email newsletters, guest posts on influential blogs, and collaborations with industry influencers. Determine which channels resonate most with your target audience and launch campaigns that deliver your content to their preferred platforms.

Establishing a Consistent Publishing Calendar

To maintain brand awareness and engagement, consistency is key. Craft a publishing calendar outlining when and where you will publish new content. This helps you stay organized in delivering timely and relevant articles, videos, or podcasts regularly.

Analytics and Performance Tracking

Monitoring and tracking the performance of your content marketing efforts are crucial. Utilize various analytics tools to measure key performance indicators (KPIs) such as website traffic, engagement rate, click-through rate (CTR), conversion rate, or social media metrics. Analyzing these metrics allows you to identify what works well and make data-driven decisions for future improvements.

Evolve Your Strategy Based on Data Insights

Content marketing should continually evolve based on insights gained from analytics reports. Monitor how changes impact key metrics over time to identify trends or adjustments that optimize your strategy further. Adaptation is rich in building long-term success in content marketing.

Brand promotion is created for increasing company awareness. Without a brand, it’s not possible to make it popular and bring income.

No big surprise, that most of the companies are ready to spend a lot in order to attract the attention of the customers. And today there are a lot of effective instruments to do this.

The task is to evoke from the target audience stable associations that motivate them to make a purchase. AdvertaLine is ready to create an effective content marketing strategy for its clients.

Statistics

According to the Content Marketing Institute (CMI) for 2018, about 65% of B2B marketers found content marketing more effective than a year ago.

In the same issue, more than 80% of experts agreed that the main goal is to form a company audience. If you are not using content marketing yet, then it’s time to find out all the details and nuances in our step-by-step guide.

What is content marketing and who needs it:

Content marketing is the creation and distribution of content that is useful to the audience. It helps to increase its loyalty, gain trust and turn it into a client.

You share valuable information with your audience, solve any problems, entertain and begin to build relationships. There is an entrepreneur who organizes urban tours of the world: active rest, participation in the carnival, the study of a super-deep cave.

Content creation is preceded by the development of a content marketing strategy. This is a document that describes the goals, objectives, performance criteria, target audience, content formats and channels of its distribution, identified the participants of the process and responsible persons.

With the use of strategy, it’s possible to visualize content marketing.

Within the framework of an integrated approach, quite a lot of people work on a content marketing strategy.

A marketer, project manager or editor-in-chief is engaged in the development and supervision of a project (depending on the specifics and size of the project).

The manager draws up plans, conducts administrative work, analyzes the results, corrects the goals. The editors are responsible for the quality of the material, select the authors, set tasks for them, and control their work.

Designers create visual materials (illustrations, graphics, infographics), select images for publications.

Goals

All content marketing strategy must clearly correspond to the goal. And specialists of our company will help to create these goals individually for every client. An effective plan would be created as soon as it’s possible.

Target audience

In content marketing strategy is taken into account the target audience. So, you must clearly understand who your consumer is, what his pain is and how you can be useful.

If the content helps solve the user’s problem, then you are on the right track.

The target audience is best described in the strategy with the help of portraits. In the article “How to make a portrait of a buyer,” we talked about this in detail. The more detailed the descriptions, the better.

If you still do not know your target audience, we recommend reading on how to define it and that would be a really useful solution.

Analysis of competitors

Today there are almost no areas where there is no competition, so all the competitors must be analyzed beforehand.

Types

After you set goals, get to know your audience and competitors, it’s time to choose the types and formats of content. We give several suitable formats depending on the goals.

Content plan

Now it’s time to take care of its promotion through channels of communication which are available nowadays.

This is the main and final stage of an effective content marketing strategy. But the content plan is not always included in the strategy since this is already a tactical level of planning.

Nevertheless, the strategy must fix at least a form of a content plan. You can develop your own template or use one of the ready ones.

What is content marketing and who needs it

Content marketing is the creation and distribution of content useful to the audience in order to increase its loyalty, gain trust and turn into a client.

What business needs a content marketing

Let’s figure out who and why content marketing is suitable for.
Companies in which the client needs some time to make a decision. Impulsive purchases, one-day products, and hot offers to buy another Power Bank with a 90% discount are not about content marketing.
Those who bring some benefit, value, knowledge, expertise. All this can be simulated with the right approach and sufficient resources, but in this case, it is more reasonable to use contextual advertising, SMM, SEO and other tools.
For brands that offer a complex and/or expensive product. To attract new customers is first to prove the benefits, demonstrate benefits, shown in real conditions. It is difficult to do without interesting, comprehensible and convincing content.
Information businessmen who want to organize effective lead generation, receive organic traffic and form a kind of community around their products. Especially relevant for relatively new niches and those who do not yet have a strong personal brand.
Everyone has a clear understanding that content marketing requires a lot of resources. Even without budgets, it takes time, people, experts, authors, etc. Without this, consistency and patience will not work. This tool is about a long game.

What types of content can I use?

We have already said that under the guise of content marketing they periodically sell something else. Moreover, they are often limited to one or two formats without reaching the target audience. To hit exactly the target, you need to return to the analysis of potential customers and pay special attention to such aspects:

• how do these people get new information;
• what resources they visit;
• Do they use social networks, which, how often;
• prefer text, video, audio, etc.

Now you can go directly to the formats. To come up with something unique is difficult, expensive and, most often, just not necessary. We offer the most relevant and effective formats for implementing a content marketing strategy:

Articles
Information materials about the product itself, its scope, unique functions, solution of specific problems. There may also be actual problems in the sphere itself. Returning to Oleg with his unusual tours, you can write on related topics: gadgets for travelers, new conditions for obtaining a visa to countries, life hacks for tourists.

Guides

This type of content gives a clear answer to a specific question: “How to do something”, “How to get”, “What to do if …”, etc. Great for explaining complex products, services, demonstrating expertise.

Reviews

Usually dedicated to a single product, service or one of the areas related to business. Oleg can do country reviews, gadgets for travelers, sports equipment, etc.

Cases

Examples of how you did something for the client. A good tone is to disclose all the nuances and facts in the case. It’s not enough to say “we are cool – we made the client happy”, you need to say what the client came with, what you did, how his life or business has changed.

Research

This format is suitable for large companies that have the resources for serious research. More often it is about B2B, where the expertise and objectivity of the data are important. Qualitative research in the subject will take time, money and nerves, but your clients, colleagues and other market players can rely on it. Often studies use the media – this is an opportunity to get a free publication.

Books

You can use both full-fledged e-books on the topic, and White Papers. The first type is suitable to cover several questions or concerns. The second – reveals in detail one, specific problem, pain, the objection from the audience. Oleg can make White Papers on the topic: “How to prepare for an active trip: clothing, equipment, gadgets, insurance.”

Infographics

Visualizing complex numbers, facts, phenomena, or even research is a great way to get good virality. People willingly share infographics on social networks, they can refer to it in their articles. The main condition is the usefulness of information, it is unlikely that anyone will be surprised by the infographics about how many countries in the world are on each continent.

Video

The latest data from the YouTube blog suggests that people around the world watch 1 billion hours of video every day. For 1 person, viewing would take 100,000 years. The conclusion is quite obvious – video content is popular and not only within YouTube. You can record the same reviews and manuals in video format.

Webinars and Live Broadcasts

A great option to build a living, trusting relationship. It is already appropriate to pause, there is no editing, as in the prepared video. People can ask questions in real-time, you can conduct small polls. Moreover, you can record a live broadcast and a webinar, then mount and turn it into a video for a YouTube channel.

Podcasts

This is not the most popular format in the CIS, but there is a need for narrow niches in such content. Many entrepreneurs, top managers prefer to listen to podcasts on relevant topics while playing sports, are on the road, etc. If no one else is doing this in your field, this is an excellent occasion to become a leader and encourage competitors.

Presentations

Speaking at events, publishing presentations in SlideShare and other services are also a type of content that you need to use skillfully. There is a need to prepare a separate guide for preparing presentations, but in B2B this is a particularly important format.

Of course, this is not all. There are at least social media posts, polls, stories, interviews, news. But this base should be more than enough to move on to implementing a content marketing strategy. True, there is a risk of encountering a number of difficulties.

Conclusion

Building an effective content marketing strategy requires careful planning and execution. By defining clear goals, understanding your target audience, conducting keyword research, creating high-quality content, choosing the right distribution channels, maintaining consistency in publication schedule, conducting performance tracking, and evolving based on data insights – every step counts towards better online visibility, engagement, and growth for your business!