What is Content Marketing Strategy and How to develop it
What is a content marketing strategy?
Strategy, in general, is a plan to achieve your goals. In the context of the content, people tend to use the terms Content marketing strategy and content plan interchangeably. Let’s first understand what these are:
Content marketing strategy
A content marketing strategy is your “why”, i.e., Why you are creating content, whom you are reaching out to, and how it will help them. Businesses use content marketing to build an audience and nurture it to achieve any of the following: brand positioning, increased revenue, or acquiring more customers.
Content plan
On the other hand, a content plan is a calendarized view of the type of content you are going to create, how often it is to be created, and where will it get distributed. It’s an organized way of creating and managing content.
Why should you have a Content Strategy?
The answer to this question is that you’ll be directionless otherwise. A documented content marketing strategy helps you move from randomly creating content to an organized approach that has clear goals, outcome metrics, and processes for continuous improvement.3
Elements of a Content Strategy
Precise goals
Before you decide to formulate content, you need to understand what its purpose is. Setting clear goals will bring more transparency and streamline your content production.
Understanding your brand’s identity is crucial; this will help you know what problem you are solving through your content. The kind of problem you solve will build an image on social media platforms. For different social media platforms, the content must be customized. It must have a value and purpose to it. For example, videos can have relatable content and be insightful. Conversely, infographics can wrap be visually pleasing and have easy-to-consume minimal texts.
It is not enough to keep churning content without going after the performance metrics. These established content goals must be measured for key performance indicators (KPIs) to know your content marketing efforts are hitting the right point. And KPIs are measured at each step of your strategic goals.
Know your audience
After setting the goals, you must know your audience. Anyone can’t be your audience; defining them is a win-win situation. You reach your target audience, and your audience finds you and avails your product or service to address their concern. And to reach your target audience, you must define your niche market.
Research your customer base
Drill further into your existing customer base and find out who is your audience and what is their demographics. Learning more about audience demographics such as:
- Gender
- Age group
- Occupation
- Income group
- Education
- Location
This will further help you to gauge your customers better. Understanding why they are making the purchase will give more insightful information about your existing and potential customers as well. Knowing the why-to-buy, interests, and online behavioral patterns, keyword research will further reveal information on the psychographic interests of the target audience.
Brand’s tone
Brand positioning and building an image online will add value to your content marketing goals. This means your brand’s clear message and positioning on social media will send out a clear message to the audience. The brand’s logo, tagline, and coherency in messages will be the unique selling point of your content strategy.
Another vital aspect of brand voice is storytelling. Storytelling will be your strong backup in this overcrowded digital world. Create stories on reels, posts, and videos if your audience is based on Instagram. Your small business can gradually move from your social media page to a full-fledged website. Setting up a feedback form or streaming live can increase your customer reach. The cue here is to listen, be more customer appealing, and loop in the necessary feedback to the content strategy.
Distribution medium
Crafting content for different social media channels is the last element in the content strategy process. The objective here is to create mindful content that can be used as an effective tool to leverage your online presence.
Content can be presented to the audience by spreading awareness about the brand and brand equity. If you are a company fighting off established enterprises, using content types from the top of the funnel is just for you. You can run social media ads and events and do sponsorships advertising your sole product.
The content channel type can be videos, testimonials, customer stories, and interviews for service-based companies that are into food, wellness, supplements, beauty, and skincare. Here the content should be built on trust, commitment, and loyalty. If your small business is about beauty and skincare, you can make a series of do-it-yourself (DIY) videos. This will act as a personal touch to your customers, and they will prefer your products over others. For example, McDonald’s and Domino’s create content using transparency as a tool to have loyal customers.
The steps to creating your Content Strategy
Know your audience
Your digital business can flourish when you know whom you are targeting. And this can be determined by knowing the buyer’s persona. Instead of becoming all salesy, warm up your audience. Educate, advocate, and create brand awareness by providing insightful information.
Define content goals
Content goals set a realistic approach and help you bring closer to your strategy. There are different frameworks to achieve your content goals. Earlier it used to be SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-Bound) goals. But the CLEAR framework gives you a fresh and agile method to chase your dreams. Content marketing metrics help you know which content is getting more traction and will help you create more of it.
Evaluate existing content
Performing a content audit is a process of analyzing and improving your existing content. It can help you get the most out of your content while potentially avoiding redundant effort. Most importantly, it helps you understand the type of content that best resonates with your target audience.
At the end of the audit exercise, you will get objective answers to the following:
- The formats that have the most engagement and conversions
- The channels that drive the most traffic to your business
- Content topics, keywords that have delivered the best results
Pick a content management system (CMS)
A CMS helps you create, manage, and analyze content in a user-friendly way. You can choose a CMS of your choice to measure results and act upon them.
Content Calendar
There are different types of content that you can brainstorm, create, plan, and execute. There are specific content calendar tools to optimize and streamline your activities. For example, Notion, Google Calendar, CoSchedule, and Loomly assist you in listing your ideas and keeping a tab on your past work.
Content Creation
The key things to focus on while creating any form of content are:
- Relevance
- Originality
- Content forms (Text, Audio, Video, & Interactive)
Content distribution and Publishing
After content is created and planned, it is sent through various channels to get published. It can be printed in multiple types. It can be a paid medium or through your channel; it depends on how you want to go. Examples of paid channels are:
- Social media ads,
- Sponsored content
- Influencer campaigns
The critical thing to remember while content distribution is to have a well-versed knowledge of where your audience cluster is. So that it gets easy to go viral or catch the attention of your leads. Content publishing is the last step of the content marketing strategy. And published content helps you to have a better analysis of your performance.
Summary
The whole process and preparation might seem daunting to start with, but it is well worth the effort. A well-documented content strategy helps you clearly understand your audience, your competitors, and your own strengths. In case you are looking for the right partner to help you in this journey, do not hesitate. We are here to help.