Whether you are new to content marketing or have been using the same approach for a while, it never hurts to revisit your content strategy plan to ensure it’s current, innovative, and engaging for your prospects and customers – no matter when or how they intend to buy.

When you have a well-defined strategy and plan, content marketing works best. Posting relevant and engaging content will drive traffic to your website and increase sales. However, if you have not carefully considered your strategy, you may be wasting your time and money. So, before you even consider posting content, you should conduct some research and develop a strategy.

If you’re having trouble planning for the upcoming year or need some fresh ideas to include in your plan, read more.

What Is Content Marketing? 

Content marketing is a marketing strategy that uses relevant articles, videos, podcasts, and other media to attract, engage, and retain an audience. This strategy builds expertise, raises brand awareness, and keeps your company top of mind when it comes time to buy what you sell.

So Tell Me, What Is A Content Marketing Strategy?

By creating and distributing content in various ways, a content marketing strategy establishes your brand as a thought leader, increasing trust among your audience. Content marketing is a type of inbound marketing that attracts customers and fosters loyalty, making it an effective customer retention strategy.

1. Establish Your Goals

Understanding why you are creating content is the first step in developing your content marketing strategy. Do you want to increase the number of sales leads you generate? Do you want more visitors to your website? Or do you see content marketing as a way to establish your brand’s authority? Once you’ve decided on your goals, you’ll need to set some targets. Wherever possible, those targets should be met.

Read more: The Ultimate Guide To Digital Marketing Trends For Businesses In 2022

2. Who Are You Looking To Target?

Understanding your target audience is essential for effective content marketing. Ideally, your product or service solves a problem that you know your target audience is experiencing. Similarly, your content guides and educates your audience as they begin to identify and address the issue.

3. Do Your Research

The next step is to research the competition you will face in attracting the attention of your target audience. But keep in mind that you will be competing for people’s attention and time with more than just your traditional competitors. There could also be content from news, reference, and entertainment websites that covers the same topics as your posts. When researching your competitors, take note of the types of content they are producing and which appears to be the most successful. 

Top tip – Find out what keywords they are targeting as well (more on that later).

4. Review Your Existing Content & Measure Performance

Never underestimate the power of analytics for your business.

Take a look at your social media analytics to see what posts have performed well for your business. Ask yourself – are videos performing the best? If so, what kind of videos? 

We recommend looking at social media analytics at least once a month so you can take a look at what content is performing the best. These metrics will help you figure out what type of content interests your target audience.

5. Keyword Research 

Once you’ve determined your objectives and comprehended your target audience, the next step is to discover what they’re looking for online. You’ll need to do some research on the keywords that people are typing into Google and other search engines. You can start by researching the search volume for the keywords you believe are relevant. Your keyword research will most likely produce some unexpected results and provide you with new content ideas.

6. What Content Formats Will You Focus On?

To determine which formats to prioritise, you must first meet your audience where they are. While you may be tempted to start a podcast or a TikTok channel because they have grown in popularity in recent years, first determine where your target audience lives.

Otherwise, you may waste time creating content that does not reach or engage your audience. Once you’ve identified the best formats, start planning a budget to see what resources you’ll need to carry out this strategy.

7. Define Your Content Pillars

Having social media goals is one thing, but when it comes to creating content for social media, it’s easy to lose sight of why you’re doing it. Having specific themes will make it much easier to create meaningful content for your audience.

Content pillars can help your brand’s social media content strategy feel more organised. They can assist your brand in achieving that crucial tone of consistency across your social media channels. This helps to give your brand a strong identity on social media because you’re producing content that people can recognise.

8. Start Planning Your Content

The topic of content creation deserves its own blog, but for the purposes of creating your content strategy, you should ensure that every piece of content is created to the best of your ability. When it comes to creating content for your business you will need to have some type of graphic design skills, the ability to write content and you need to be willing to push yourself to create video content for your business (even if that means voiceovers rather than being on camera). 

Regardless of who creates your content, you should also devote adequate time to your post copy, as this will have a significant impact on the success of your campaign. For example, if you want to promote yourself as an industry authority, the types of content you create should all be aligned to help you achieve this goal. 

9. Create, Schedule & Share Your Content

Figuring out how you’ll create and publish all your content can be a daunting task.

Before you execute, it’s important to establish:

• Who’s creating what.
• Where it’s being published.
• When it’s going live.

Each piece of content you create should be created with your goals in mind. Remember to use the keywords you discovered during your research. Most importantly, maintain high content quality. Don’t rush through content creation just to meet a deadline on your content publishing calendar. You will also need to promote your content once it has been published. So, share your posts on social media and forward the content to anyone you think might be interested.

10. Measure The Performance Of Your Content & Refine 

If you run a social media campaign without taking the time to use an analytics tool to see if you’re getting the results you want, you really don’t know where you’re going.

Social media KPIs and measurement are important because they tell you where you are in terms of starting metrics, where you want to go (objectives), and what action you need to take if your social media marketing campaign is to meet those objectives. Otherwise, you’re wasting time creating content with no clear strategy in place.

Summary

There are numerous factors to consider if you want to take your content marketing strategy to the next level. Always keep your overall marketing and business goals in mind, and ensure that everything from concept to distribution is considered with these goals in mind.

Set up internal processes to make the process go more smoothly and to ensure that everyone on the team can contribute to the success of your future content.