The Basic Elements of a Content Marketing Strategy

Are you having trouble putting together a content marketing strategy? The first step is to develop a plan that looks at your goals, how to target the right people, calls to action to convert consumers into paying customers, and different types of creative to reach your audience.

There’s no magic to creating a usable content marketing strategy. Your basic content marketing strategy should have just a few elements:

·        Identify objectives that impact your business’ bottom line.

·        Determine what actions can help you achieve those objectives.

·        Pinpoint the customer groups who are most likely to take action.

·        Create content marketing materials that will motivate each group.

·        Promote that content to those customer groups.

·        Evaluate how you did.

Keep in mind that content marketing takes time. Content marketing is not for the impatient. The reality is that you’ll need at least three to six months of effort before you see any traction with social media outreach. Blogs can take even longer. So, to make it easier, learn how to automate, curate and outsource your content.

You can make content marketing easier by making sure it doesn't become time-consuming. Always be looking for what you can automate or outsource. Most marketers are under a lot of pressure to create content consistently, and small business owners are under even more time pressure. Programs like Hootsuite and Sendible can ease some of that pressure by allowing you to easily automate and schedule your content.

UNDERSTAND YOUR OBJECTIVES FOR YOUR MARKETING STRATEGY

The first questions you should ask yourself is, what’s your objective? What do you want out of this? Don’t just say “more business.” Be specific and measurable. Here are some common objectives of a good marketing strategy:

·        Improve customer engagement

·        Increase lead generation

·        Increase brand awareness

·        Increase sales revenue

·        Improve lead nurturing

·        Increase website traffic

·        Increase customer retention

·        Improve search engine rankings

You have to pick an objective that will impact your bottom line. For example, do you want:

·        25 new leads a month?

·        7,000 email subscribers?

·        Double your website traffic?

·        2,000 Facebook likes?

·        More first-time orders?

Which of those objectives would have the greatest impact? The number of leads. Why? While the others can help build your audience numbers, they don’t do much to contribute to your business’ financial bottom line. HOWEVER, you can use them to support your quest for new leads. Here’s how:

·        The website traffic and Facebook likes generate the email subscribers.

·        The email subscribers, whom you can communicate with directly and regularly, generate the leads.

·        The leads or orders convert into actual business revenue.

WHAT TRIGGERS CONVERT LEADS INTO PAYING CUSTOMERS?

The next step is to determine what actions you need. What are your conversions?

Maybe your objective has nothing to do with leads. Or your financial bottom line is impacted by repeat customers or webinar attendees. As long as they impact your cash flow, you’re good. However, if you’re not sure WHAT is going to most directly convert into quantifiable business, you need find out.

Create your content around this information. You need to understand the triggers that make people respond to your content. Without knowing this, you’re basically throwing stuff at a wall and hoping something sticks.

There’s another reason you want to find the key conversions for your content marketing, Return on Investment (ROI). Once you know what you want to build your content marketing strategy for, you’ve got a direct way to anchor your ROI.

Determine a value for these conversions. For example, each lead gained from content marketing may be worth $500 to you. Maybe each subscriber is worth $100. Calculate it however you like. You now have the metrics to track the ROI for your content marketing. That just about doubles your chances for success.

WHO IS YOUR TARGET AUDIENCE?

Who do you want to reach? What type of audience are you creating this content for?  Ask yourself the following questions:

·        Who is the ideal audience for your content? (These are the people most likely to buy or become clients.)

·        What does this ideal audience want to know?

·        Which social media platforms do they use?

·        What influencers can help you reach this audience?

·        What kind of tone would work best for marketing to this audience? Serious? Playful?

What other outlets, such as blogs, vlogs, or major publications can you promote your content on? Without an audience that wants it, the content doesn’t really matter.  Know your audience’s priorities as you plan. Focus on what THEY want to know, not what you want to tell them.

GROUP YOUR AUDIENCE INTO PERSONAS

Defining your audience is so important that many marketers break their audience down into groups called personas. Each persona has unique demographics, beliefs and needs pertaining to your business. For example, a real estate broker might have personas for home buyers that include single females, single males, married couples and married couples with children.

You’re going to create content for each one of these personas, and for each step they take along their “buyer journey.” There are usually at least three phases of a buyer’s journey, so if you’ve got three persona types, that means you’ll need at least one piece of top-grade content for each phase of all three personas. That’s nine pieces of content, minimum.

There’s one last essential thing to know about your personas: Where do they tend to consume their content? You need to know that for the next step. Are they video watchers? LinkedIn pros? Email readers?

CREATE ENGAGING CONTENT

Now that you know what actions you want prospects to take, who they are, and where they tend to find or consume your content, you can finally create some content. Focus on informing and educating first. This is called value-based marketing.

Brainstorm thirty to forty different content ideas that would be of value or helpful to your audience. When you’ve got the list, slash it down to at least half. Cut out the most difficult content to create, the least useful, the lamest ideas. Commit to creating the content that survived the cut.

Here’s a secret for making content creation easier: Never create a piece of content and only use it once. Every single piece of content you make should be reused and recycled. As an example, every blog post could:

·        Become content for an email.

·        Be rewritten into a section of an eBook.

·        Recorded into video or audio segments.

·        Be broken into 10-15 different tweets and social media posts.

·        Be made into an infographic.

·        Be reposted on an appropriate industry site (like Medium or LinkedIn).

PROMOTE YOUR CONTENT

This is as important as the content planning and creation. Spend at least as much time promoting each piece of content as you did creating it. For example, share your work on social media, reach out to influencers, or optimize your content for search engine traffic. Promotion matters a lot in content marketing. It’s probably the most overlooked part of a content marketing strategy. It’s also the most common reason content marketing fails.

Videos, emails, social media posts, and SEO are good organic ways to promote your content, but you should also consider adding paid options such as sponsored posts and advertising to the mix. Paid advertising is a great way to get your content in front of time-sensitive or very specific audience groups.

EVALUATE YOUR CONTENT WITH ANALYTICS AND METRICS

Now that your content is out there, how did you do? Your analytics close the loop of your content marketing strategy. Refer to your analytics and your metrics, then circle all the way back around to the beginning of your strategy. Ask yourself a few questions:

·        Did you achieve your objectives?

·        Were your conversion actions effective or do you have to tweak them a bit?

·        Did your content have the right messages for your audience?

·        Did your audience act on your content?

·        What type of content did your audience engage with the most?

Once you have your answers, go back to your strategy and make the needed changes. Your strategy is a living document that will be revised over and over again. Double down on the content that worked and create more of the same type of content. Remember, it’s what your audience wants to consume, not what you want to tell them.

HAVE A WRITTEN STRATEGY

You’re twice as likely to be effective with your content marketing if you have a written-out strategy. According to a 2015 study conducted by the Content Marketing Institute, 35 percent of business-to-business marketers said they had a documented content marketing strategy, while 48 percent said they had a strategy, but didn’t write it down.

Sixty percent of businesses with a written strategy rated their content marketing as highly effective; only 32 percent of those who didn't write it out said the same. A content marketing plan doesn’t have to be complicated. Don’t be intimidated by books from so-called content marketing experts that have written about content marketing strategy; much of what you need to learn can only be learned by trial and error; and then by repeating your successes.