An all encompassing article about the Things You Need to Know About Content Strategy.
In this blog find out first handed why you should never neglect content and why is it one of the most important parts of marketing strategy.
When we talk about the creation of sales content, we are talking about an item that has become one of the most important factors in marketing, as well as one of the most important factors when it comes to ranking on Google. Content can do wonders for your business and you need to be aware of that.
Every marketing campaign must have a detailed content marketing strategy plan as a ground base. If the campaign develops without a strategy, its success is extremely uncertain. You must never rely on luck in promoting your business, and that would be the case if you don’t define and implement a content marketing strategy in your overall marketing plan. Not having a content strategy increases the risk that all the resources invested in the campaign will fail. That’s why a content marketing strategy must be the starting point of every content marketing campaign.
In this article, we’ll walk you through the most important steps in creating a successful content marketing strategy.
1. Defining the main goals of the content marketing campaign
Defining clear goals is the starting point of any further planning. If you don’t have a clear picture of what you want to achieve, you won’t have a way to measure the results of your campaign and you will lose focus. Believe us, the last thing you want is to “wander around” in your marketing campaign. And, on the other hand, when you don’t have clear results of invested efforts and the way you presented yourself, you can not know how successful the campaign was, or if is there something that needs to be changed in the future, and what.
We will itemize the most common goals:
-Income increase
– Collecting quality leads
-Attracting more traffic to your site
-Engagement improvement
– Improving your brand awareness
-More advanced SEO
-Reducing marketing costs
2. Determination of key performance indicators (KPI) of the content marketing strategy
Key Performance Indicators (KPI for short)are very important in the proper creation of a content marketing strategy. KPIs are quantitative metrics that are used to monitor and measure the performance of a digital campaign in relation to set goals. Each of the indicators is usually linked to specific numerical values that will later serve as a reference for evaluating the success of the campaign.
Key performance indicators – KPI 3 If your goal is to improve SEO, as a key performance indicator for this goal you can set, for example, the position and ranking of certain key pages from your website. If you concentrate on increasing income or sales, you will define a specific desired income or number of sales for the next month, quarter, or year. You can also set a KPI for the total number of website visits per month, or the number of new subscribers to a newsletter. Your KPI can also be the number of downloaded mobile applications in a certain period if you own such a product.
In addition to monitoring key performance indicators, it is important to measure the costs of the campaign, so that you can have a realistic picture of whether the achieved results are really profitable. In other words, is it gonna pay off, and when.
3. Getting to know the audience is your priority
To be able to decide on a certain type of content, you need to know who your target audience is. Their interests will determine the topic as well as the communication channels. In this regard, you should do three things.
– Collection of demographic data
The first step is to collect data on website visitors, email subscribers, and social media followers.
Google Analytics can provide you with information about the age, gender, and interests of your website visitors.
Social networks can provide you with similar data. Through Facebook Business Suite, you can find out the gender and age of your followers.
– Collecting feedback from clients
Your existing clients can provide you with the most complete picture of what they, as well as potential clients, would like to see. You can ask them for information about how satisfied they are with your current content, what their most pressing needs are, and how you can help them with your content. You can do this in several ways. A simpler way would be to ask them on social networks, e.g. via the questions option on IG stories. Simply ask them. You’ll be surprised how this kind of information can help you. You could also create a survey, e.g. using Google Forms. Email your customers or users and ask them to fill out your survey. In addition to the information you will receive, your users will get the impression that you really care about them and their needs, so they will become even more attached to the brand. If you do not get enough completed forms, you can also offer them a certain discount for the completed survey so that they have a larger number of completed surveys.
– Creating an ideal customer
When you have all the data about your audience, you can summarize it in the persona of the ideal customer (buyer persona, customer avatar). An ideal customer persona is an imaginary person that is created by sketching the characteristics, needs, and habits of the entire target audience. It should include the needs, wants, interests, challenges, and sources of information of your ideal customer.
Once you have created such an avatar, your content marketing strategy can be directed towards that specific persona. This will make the campaign creation process more effective and the results better.
4. Content creation and distribution
After the prep work is done well, creating content should be a lot easier. You know your goals, you know who are you talking to, and you know your products/services. Now, it’s up to you to create content that will resonate with your audience and which will fit in your marketing plan and brand identity.
When creating content, keep in mind that every part of it should reflect your brand identity. You may want to be very professional, very relaxed, or something in between. It is only important that the tone of communication is in line with the products/services your brand offers, and that it remains consistent.
After the content is created, it should be published according to the publication calendar. As we said before, it is best to schedule content in advance. You can schedule content for Facebook and Instagram using the Facebook creator studio tool. This is a free tool that does not include the option to schedule Instagram and Facebook stories. There are also numerous other web solutions you can use to schedule posts.
It is of crucial importance that the published content reaches the desired audience. Because if you just post it, it will only be seen by a small number of the audience that already follows you in terms of social networks. Let’s be honest, organic reach is getting harder and harder. By publishing content alone, you can’t reach a large enough number of people, so the entire process you went through to create the content itself could be in vain. So you have to create paid campaigns as well. When creating a campaign, you should precisely target the audience, so that the invested budget is used to the maximum. Always target the audience interested in your brand on digital channels – the one you already interacted with. But also a new audience, which you will target based on well-chosen parameters.
We hope that we managed to bring closer to you what content marketing is and why a content marketing strategy is so important for your business to grow and your brand to develop.
If you are not skilled in creating sales content (copywriting) and you need expert help to create a content marketing strategy, consider hiring a professional team of experts, such as Monuments SEO & Design, which, in addition to content marketing strategy, provides the entire range of services in the field of digital marketing, such as SEO, PPC, web development, social media marketing, branding, and other. Call Today at +17864423622 and get a FREE personalized assessment!
