How to Create an Effective Content Marketing Strategy
Running a business is not easy. There are many things that you need to take care of, including marketing. In fact, marketing is crucial to the success of your company. How else are you going to grow your customer base?
There are many kinds of marketing strategies that you can use to get people interested in your products and services. The most reliable one out of the bunch is a content marketing strategy. Do you want to know how to create one? If so, you should keep reading!
In this article, you will find a short guide to content marketing. Once you are done reading, you will know what the definition of content marketing is and what steps you will have to take to create an effective marketing strategy. Check it out!
What Is Content Marketing?
In short, content marketing is a marketing technique that has become incredibly popular in recent years. It is based on creating and distributing informative content meant to attract a clearly defined audience. If you want to learn more about content marketing, take a look at this blog post titled A Better Guide to SEO Content Marketing.
Define Your Goals
Creating an effective content marketing strategy is not an easy task, but it is not impossible. For starters, you will have to define your goals. Your goals should be SMART, which is an acronym that stands for specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and timely.
For instance, if you want to improve the quantity of organic traffic that your website is getting, you might want to start by increasing organic traffic by fifty percent over the next six months. This goal is SMART. It is specific and achievable, it can be measured, and it has an end.
Next, you should come up with a way to track your progress. That way, you will be able to see whether you are getting closer to achieving your goals. You can do that by keeping a journal, creating a spreadsheet, or using a dedicated application. It is up to you!
Identify Your Target Customer
Your content marketing strategy is not going to be effective if you do not identify your target customer. It is what will help you tailor your content to your target market and build a strong relationship with the people that are most likely to purchase your products.
Imagine that you are selling a course that is dedicated to wanna-be teenage influencers. To get the best results, you will have to use trendy teenage jargon and internet slang. On top of that, you will have to do it in an authentic and original way. However, doing the same thing obviously would not work if your target customers were seniors.
Identifying your target audience is not that difficult. You can do it in many different ways. For example, you can analyze your products, see who your current customers are, and check who your competitors are targeting.
Choose Your Distribution Channels
Once you have defined your goals and identified your target audience, it is time to choose what distribution channels you will use to share your content. There are three main types of distribution channels that you can use – owned, paid, and earned.
Owned distribution channels are the ones that your company owns. You are the one who gets to control what is published there and when. These channels include your website, your blog, your social media profiles, and your newsletter.
Paid distribution channels are the channels that you can use for a fee. This might include influencer content and pay-per-click search advertisements. Unfortunately, it might not be a viable option if you do not have enough financial resources.
Lastly, there are earned distribution channels. To gain access to such channels, you have to publish content that is valuable enough to get shared and promoted by third parties, such as your customers, bloggers, and journalists, for free – hence the name.
It is up to you to determine which distribution channels fit your needs best. If you feel confused and do not know where to start, use the trial-and-error method – publish your content on a few different distribution channels, analyze your results, and use that data to figure out which channel is worth focusing on.
Decide on Specific Content Types
Next, you should start creating your content. To do that, you have to decide on specific content types that you would like to create. Most brands focus on publishing blog posts on their company blogs. Blog posts are easy to share, and if you are not a talented writer, you can always hire a freelance writer to write one for you.
There are other types of content that you can rely on, though. You could set up a YouTube channel and post videos, publish brochures related to your specific niche, organize webinars, post case studies – the possibilities are endless!
Publish Your Content and Monitor Its Performance
Lastly, you have to publish your content and start monitoring its performance. It might sound like an incredibly time-consuming process, but it does not have to be that way. There are a number of tools out there that you can use to make it easier.
If you want to track the social media shares that your content is getting, you can use Google Alerts and WordPress social share plugins. If you want to see what websites are linking back to your website, you can use Majestic SEO and Google Search Console.
There are other metrics that you can track and other tools that you can use, some of which are paid. However, it is definitely going to be a worthwhile investment, as it will help you measure the effectiveness of your content marketing strategy and address its shortcomings.
In Conclusion
There you have it! Creating a content marketing strategy is not an easy task. It will require you to take care of a number of different tasks, ranging from coming up with SMART goals and identifying your target audience to monitoring the performance of your content.
If you feel like you do not have enough time to complete these tasks, hiring a marketing agency to do it for you is always a viable option. It might put a dent in your budget, but if you choose the right agency, it is likely to end up being incredibly useful in the long run.
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