Creating a well-developed content strategy is an essential part of any digital marketing plan. Your brand communication should extend beyond your products and services. To gain new customers and retain existing ones, you have to nurture them with regular content creation. This allows you to maintain a healthy relationship with your audiences and provide them with valuable and reliable information.
What Is a Content Strategy?
A content marketing strategy is a high-level approach to creating and distributing content for your target audience. Putting out content that isn’t purpose-driven is costly and time consuming. It’s essential to understand your audience and prioritize relevant, practical, and valuable content to them. You should understand where they spend their time online, what they spend their money on, and their pain points. Developing a well-defined strategy before you start creating content will allow your brand to create more relevant content. In turn, you’ll clarify your messaging, build trust and credibility with your audience, and create consistency.
Establish Goals and Benchmarks
You must align your strategy with your business goals to develop an effective content marketing strategy. Goals might consist of building brand awareness, increasing engagement, or converting more leads. Some content marketing metrics to improve performance include user behavior, engagement, SEO, and revenue. Once you establish which goals you want your content strategy to accomplish, you can set KPIs and determine targets based on current benchmarks. Benchmarks are anything you can use to measure success while targets are what you want to achieve.
Analyze Your Competition
Once you establish and understand your target audience, you should research your competitors’ content and keywords that they’re ranking for. Evaluating topics, keywords, and length of content is an excellent opportunity to determine what they’re not doing. Then, you can fill in the gaps and build a content plan that provides better value to your audiences and in the marketplace.
Choose Which Content to Create
Oftentimes when people think of content creation, they only think of blogs. However, there are many other content options to explore depending on your brand, audience, goals, budget, and resources available. Some are more dynamic and interactive than others, but additional content forms to consider are videos, infographics, e-books, podcasts, or case studies. The type of content you create will all depend on your audience and content strategy goals.
Promote Your Content
Brands can promote their content on their blog or website, but social media is also a great way to reach new audiences. Each social network has unique characteristics and features. To determine which platforms to promote your content, you should establish where your primary audiences spend their time online. If your audience lives primarily on Instagram, it might be best to create visually interactive content.
Measure Success
After you develop a content strategy, measuring your results will determine how effective it is. This will help inform you if you’re investing in the correct formats and channels. Always keep your organization’s goals top of mind and continuously monitor performance against designated benchmarks.
The Takeaway
Investing the time and resources in a well-developed content marketing strategy will help you gain visibility and build trust and loyalty. Producing unique content that meets your audience where they are allows you to establish credibility and build brand awareness. You can refine your strategy over time, but once you see the results, you’ll understand the benefits that a well-developed content strategy can have for your business.