Before you read this, you may want to read this first: What is Content Marketing Strategy and How It Builds Your Brand?
Let’s get it straight. Creating the best content marketing for your business is not just about creating any contents. Many marketers has this belief of “if you build it, they will simply come”. It was, but it does not work that way anymore.
Look at the competition, especially the crowded voices online. You cannot simply expect people to stumble upon your site and read your content. Again, it does not work that way.
Never build content for the sake of content. Build content that is valuable for your audiences. Otherwise, you will just wasting your precious time writing and publishing content that won’t be viewed and read.
In this post, I will break down the steps to guide you through creating a successful content marketing strategy. Let’s begin.
Outline Your Business Goals
Yes goals, otherwise, why should you do what you’re going to do? You need to outline what you wish to achieve by deploying content marketing. Common answers to this question could be one of the following.
- Brand awareness
- Drive more traffic to website
- Generate sales lead
- Improving customer loyalty
- Driving upsell or cross-sell
- Increase engagement
Or you might have other specific reasons. Be sure about your goals and write them down.
Know Your Audiences
The best way to understand your audiences are by conducting a survey. It can be done through online by evaluating web analytics and social media statistics. Or through offline survey with on-site questionnaire and direct conversations.
By understanding your audiences, you are able to answer these questions:
- Which channels they use?
- What topic they normally talk about?
- Which sort of content is most appealing to them?
The idea is about creating contents that your target audiences would be excited to view, read and share them.
Research Trends
Trends include market behaviour, search engine keyword, social media and technology. These trends have big impact in your content marketing. Google algorithms are tend to be changed from time to time. Facebook and Twitter too. You need to be aware of it and have capabilities to adjust your strategy based on this changes.
Map Your Content Distributing Channels
Based on the target audiences and research trends you should be able to draw a map to distribute your content. The challenge in this steps is getting the right content to deliver to the right channels at the right time.
For example, you can post the content on your business blog at a specific time, but you probably need to share it on social media at another time.
Mapping your content correctly ensure you get the right audiences at the right time.
Plan Your Strategy
Gather all the above information to plan your strategy and content publishing schedule with a spreadsheet. The simplest one could contain these columns: date, time of day, channels, content and additional note if required.
Creating and Publishing Valuable Content
On this stage, you are working based on the above determined goals, research and plan. Make sure your contents are unique and valuable. The internet is full of crowded contents, if you cannot deliver advantages to the audiences, you are not going anywhere.
Generating Report & Evaluate Your Content
Generate your report every week or month. Your report with its analytics tells the results of your strategy. You will be able to know which content engages most audiences, which content works best on which specific time, which is the most effective channels.
Based on this information, you are able to re-map, re-produce better content and re-schedule the best time.
Conclusion
Developing the right content marketing strategy are challenging. It is normal to fail at the beginning. But learning from failures, passionately fix them and use them to your advantages will let you achieve best results in future.
Hope these guide will assist you to gain the best out of content marketing. If you have any questions or feedbacks, let me know in the comment box below.
Wahidin Wong is a digital marketer at Adkomu.com and an editor at Tobeeko.com. He is also a jazz and bossa lover.
People reacted to this story.
Show comments Hide commentsGreat post, Wahidin.
I think that if you really want your readers to share your content, the content should make them look good or intelligent within their community.
Your post made me think of this one, i read earlier today: https://sleeknote.com/content-marketing-ecommerce/
There may be some additional points to your awesome post.
You are right Samuel. Essentially, the content needs to be valuable to the reader. I’ll take note of the additional points. Thank you.