Many businesses are now using content marketing as a way to increase trust, build brand awareness and ultimately boost sales. In fact,according to research by Content Marketing Institute, 89% of B2B marketers are using content marketing. This means you have to take your content marketing strategy very seriously to stand out in the crowd.
Document Your Goals
According to the research, over 60% of B2B marketers don’t have a documented content marketing strategy. It is very important to document your strategy.
Documenting will help you make your strategy a priority. Running a company is a lot of work. You can come up with an effective strategy with very little effort. Just take your time and create a document for it.
If you have a marketing team ensure there is someone responsible for documenting your strategy. Better yet, just do it yourself. It is easier to let one person be in charge of the content marketing strategy. Everyone else, including stakeholders, should just participate in its making.
There are a lot of guides that can help you with creating a content strategy. Not knowing how to write one should not be an excuse. It is a necessity to document your strategy if you want to be successful.
Determine The Heart and Soul of Your Content Program
A successful content marketing strategy cannot just be maintained by good writing only. There is a lot of awesome content out there. More and more is being published everyday. You need to determine the one thing that will set your business apart.
Creating good content takes time and effort. Innovation and differentiation is key. Look at what your competitors are doing and strive to do better than them. Fill the gaps that your competitors have left. You can get more insights from the audience’s comments and feedback. Also, try to keep up with the current and future industry trends.
Base your strategy on the information around you. Listen to your customers, sales people and other departments across all areas of your business. Also, take advantage of tools used to measure success such as Google Analytics.
Measure Your Content Marketing
Choose the methods and metrics you will use before you create your content. The metrics will help you know if the content marketing strategy is going to help you achieve your business objectives. You will want to justify the resources you used to create content. Measuring the metrics against the KPIs is very important.
The categories of content marketing metrics and tools to use include:
- Web traffic – Google Analytics and other analytics tools.
- User behavior – Google Analytics and other analytics tools.
- Impressions and CTR – Google Search Console
- Keyword rankings – SemRush and Buzzsumo
- Lead generation – Google Analytics
- Content Shares – SemRush and Buzzsumo
Know Your Audiences
The point of your content should be to provide a solution to your audience’s problems. You also need to understand the people you are creating content for. Create a definition for your audience. Choose a segment of the audience population and find out their psychographics and demographics. You can focus on your top 5 audience only.
The information will help you find out the kind of people that are interested in what you are offering. It doesn’t matter who they are exactly. You don’t want to get stuck on any stereotypes such as gender and race. Focus only on what they need from you and their motivation.
Research Audience Needs
Understand your audience’s problems. Your content should solve problems for them without advertising a product or service directly. Put yourself in your audience’s shoes.Know the kind of issues they are facing. Find out ways of solving these pain points.
Your content should focus on making your audience’s lives easier. Understand what a user is looking for when they search for something and offer help. Don’t always rush to sell your products or services.
Create Amazing Content
The most important factor of your content marketing strategy is the content itself. The work that leads up to content creation is done. This is also very important for the success of your business.
Remember as we said earlier, there is already too much content available at people’s disposal. You may also have already created plenty of content before. Consider revamping your old content. There’s new information coming up everyday.
- Reuse content – allows one to write content once and then add it to other different publications.
- Curate content – when one shares the most relevant and highest quality content on a specific topic for their target market.When you use someone else’s content, be sure to give credit and give your own point of view.
- User-Generated Content (UCG) – here fan’s can promote your business. It is content that has been created by contributors.
- Atomization – This is breaking down a huge piece of content into smaller, focused and more strategic pieces of content.
Create A Content Calendar
Use a scheduling tool such as Coschedule. It will help you take control of your entire marketing strategy. Your schedule should suit the needs of your customers and content goals. Every business that uses content to advertise has different audiences and different target groups.
Feel free to explore your options. Scheduling tools are easy to use and they provide a lot of guidance for their users. Find out the best time to post. Note that the best time is when more people are online. You can test your new scheduling tool with your old posts. Repurpose and refurbish your old posts on your new scheduling tool. This is the best way to learn faster and try some new things out.