Chapter 3- How to build a refined content marketing strategy for your business?
Today, marketers as well as businesses understand the importance of content in marketing strategies and have realized how it can benefit in business success. The same we have been portraying in chapters of our Free Beginner’s Guide to Content Marketing where we have shared what content marketing is all about?
What type of content you can use for your content marketing strategy? Why content marketing is so important for your business? And, how does it become the part of marketing sales funnel?
After understanding all this, the real questions arise how to conceptualize these studies into your marketing strategies? And, How to create an ideal content marketing strategy for your business.
It’s easy to talk about the importance and benefits but quite complicated when it comes to applying these basics in your marketing strategy. Therefore in this chapter, we will be talking about how to build a content marketing strategy for your business. And, why is it necessary to make your content marketing strategy?
Content is the King of the Marketing; but in this chapter, you will learn how to rule with this KING. Here are the few steps that will help you to build a content marketing strategy for your business success:
Steps to Build a Content Marketing Strategy for your business
Define Your Content Marketing Goal
Before deciding your content marketing strategy, you need to answer yourself – Why you are making it? What is your end goal?
Every marketing strategy has a goal to be cherished. How you are going to measure your content marketing success. Like, for some businesses, the end goal can be app downloads, new subscribers to YouTube channel, traffic to the website, video views, social shares, podcast downloads, converting into sales, product purchase, email signups, free trial signups etc…..
The end result can be anything. But its need to be specific and clear while making your content marketing strategy. Without destination roaming around the world won’t take you anywhere. You will just roam and roam.
Therefore, knowing and understanding your goal is very important while making your content marketing strategy.
Like, Revolve your marketing plans around Business Marketing Framework – What, Why & How.
This framework revolves around are inter-related to each other. It all depends on how you make most it.
The best part about content is that you have the freedom to make the decision and create content as per your wish & feasibility.
Once you are sorted with a goal, it gets easy to determine the success of your content marketing strategy. Therefore, the first step is to determine and define your content marketing goal and work accordingly.
Research and Understand Your Audience
Once you know content marketing goal, the next step is to focus on your audience.
There is no point of creating a content if you don’t understand who is going see, hear or read your content. The effective content marketing strategy consists of the content that can be useful to its audience.
The ideal content strategy is designed to answer the most important issues of the audience. You need to have empathy and understanding for their situation.
With the right targeting, you can educate as well transform your audiences into long-term clients.
Plus the content is written as per audience behavior and issues can result in shareable content that will help you to reach your goals easily.
Therefore, the first step to understand the demographics and psychographics of your ideal audience.
The Demographics are the quantitative traits, or things you can really dig into and measure.
These measures can be easy addresses with the help of content marketing tools that help you create as well as understand the behavior of your audience.
Once you create your content and share to your audience, you will be able to view the insights on your social media platforms as well as through marketing analytics tools.
You will be able to see the results differentiated in many forms; like, which age group has read your content and shared on their social media platforms.
Though Psychographics’ Attributes such as attitude, belief systems, values, and interests are the things you can’t measure through these, an ideal marketer can analyze the right frame of people’s mind as per the trends.
These are the major critical things need to pay attention during the creation of your content marketing strategy. With properly analyzing your audience, you can maximize your opportunities for getting your content in front of your ideal audience.
Problem-solving content always attracts the right audience wherever they are spending their time.
Set Up Your Blog
The best and ideal platform to share innovative as well as visual content is through blogging. A blog helps you to host the content that you want to create for your marketing strategy.
And, the good news is that there are thousands of options for setting up your own website with ready to use platforms to fully customizable templates.
Blogging is basically a type of journal content that you share with your audience through the web. And, there are many ways to blog like you can do through writing (your own website or Medium), videos (YouTube), Audio (Apple Podcasts), etc.
The choice is yours! You can use any platform for blogging. But choose that would relate and benefit your business.
For example, PopXo is social media content sharing company that share the latest events and happenings related to lifestyle, health, and Television.
Though at the initial stage, they choose videos as the medium to share their innovative content and used as best to share on social media platforms especially Facebook.
Later, they decided to expand and started sharing their content on Website (text blogs) and YouTube as well.
With their smart marketing strategy, PopXo is one of the top content sharing startups in India with a huge female fan following.
Blogging can be a great content sharing platform but only if used in the right manner.
Start Building an Email List
Emails play a very important role in creating and sharing content. It is the safest and trustworthy medium acknowledged by customers. Emails let you communicate with your customers or subscribers by dropping your message directly into their boxes.
An email marketing list is a list of subscribers/customers who are a part of periodic mailing distribution by the businesses that can help:
- in tracking which services/products are used or purchased by that customer.
- In tracking how subscribers or customers make purchases (or if you have any other end goal).
- And, tracking how often they contact customer service.
Email marketing is also the best way of marketing, especially for businesses. In Beginner’s Guide to Email Marketing, we have shared 12 modules stating about what is email marketing? How it is important for your businesses? How to create an email template? Step by step guide to creating an email list. How to create an email marketing strategy? How to create an automated email campaign and much more.
In one of those chapters, we have shared how you can build your email list with the help of various email marketing tools. We have shared one example by using an email marketing tool – MailChimp.
Having an accurate and responsive email marketing list of current customers is always a goldmine for your content. These lists play a big role in any marketing strategy as they provide leads for sales, a group for testing new products and a group to provide feedback on satisfaction.
More importantly, having an updated and test mailing list can be the ultimate reason for any successful content marketing campaign.
Brainstorm Content Ideas and Use Appropriate Keyword Research
Coming up with new ideas is always encouraged in content marketing. You have a blog set up now and started pursuing email services, this is the time to talk about the actual content you want to create for your business.
Talk about your ideas with your marketing team, take help to come up with new ideas and discuss how it can align with your content marketing strategy.
Brainstorming before initiating any marketing strategy is always considered as a smart step to your marketing success. While discussing your content strategy with your teammates, you will have tons of ideas that you can write for your blog or videos you can prepare at this point.
Set your agenda, create a content calendar and publish the content accordingly. Then share the same published content through emails to your subscribers.
But make sure while creating content, you also search appropriate keywords to rank top on search engines.
Keywords help to generate traffic. Take your top keyword terms and outline content that will serve your goals, the user’s needs, and the keyword targeting.
This will help to create SEO-friendly content. Almost every day, Google introduces changes to its ranking algorithm. It’s good to keep yourself updated regarding Google SEO updates if you wish your content rank high on the search engines.
The takeaway from the chapter:
- Content marketing is important for any business success.
- You should have defined content marketing strategy based on the audience’s interest.
- Brainstorm ideas with teammates and try to club with the latest happenings.
- Be innovative in making your content marketing strategy. Stop copying, be unique.
- Publish problem-solving content for your readers/subscribers
- Stay updated with current updates
