Content marketing is an essential part of any marketing strategy. Making sure it’s properly addressed in your overall strategy is crucial to ensuring your marketing efforts are well-balanced and harmonious.
Fundamentally, a content strategy defines what sort of content you’re going to create. It also provides a guide for how you’re going to measure the success of the content you’re producing. Accurate definition of your key performance indicators is key in deciding how you can improve in the future.
Your content strategy should also state how your content will satisfy your overall marketing and business goals, as well as why your approach is best for your customers and prospects. Including data on your customers will make this a lot easier to define!
In this article, we’re going to cover a few simple tips to help you when you’re creating your content marketing strategy.
If you’re looking for a more guided approach, our content marketing experts at redPepper can help you devise and implement a content marketing strategy that works for you! Want to find out more? Give us a call on 01787 223850, send us an email (info@redpeppermarketing.com), or use our contact form.
Create SMART goals/objectives
Regardless of how amazing the content you write is, it needs to have a clear purpose and direction. Your content marketing strategy needs to align and complement your overall marketing strategy. If they aren’t in sync, your content won’t be working towards the same KPIs or objectives, leading to a disconnect and, more than likely, poor results.
At a higher level, you have to ask yourself if content marketing is going to help you achieve your marketing goals. If it isn’t then you may be worth spending your budget elsewhere. You don’t need to utilise content marketing. There are many industries where it’s vital but, on the other hand, there are many where it’s far less effective.
Define your audience
There are 2 key facets to your audience that you need to define. Firstly, who your current audience is. Knowing as much as you can about who your customers are and who is responding well to your marketing is vital to developing a successful content marketing strategy.
Secondly, you need to decide on your desired audience(s). These will be the people that you aren’t currently reaching but who you think will make your marketing more successful and, in turn, improve the uptake of your product or service.
You can learn about your existing customers by reviewing the data available to you. Typically, you can find this on platforms like Google Analytics and Facebook Insights. You can find more information in our blog “A beginner’s guide to data-driven marketing”.
Analyse your old content & what your competitors are creating
After deciding the audience(s) that you’re going to target with your content marketing, it’s important to understand how your current content fits into this.
Carefully analyse how your past content would be perceived by this audience and what you can do better in the future to appeal to them. This could be utilising new mediums – such as video, different social media platforms, podcasts – tackling different topics, changing your style, or even producing less content!
When you’re doing this, make sure you review what your competitors are doing. The kind of content they’re producing could give you ideas, even if it’s ideas of what to avoid! It could also help you identify areas that aren’t currently being utilised, opening up gaps for you.
Categorise your content into themes
Now that you’ve got your audience, it’s time to create categories for your content to fit into. Ideally, these categories will be formed from your brand/business’ core strengths and unique selling points (USPs). It’s also a good idea to feature content that is based entirely around your audience’s passions and lifestyles.
Try looking for other content that your audience consumes as well as thinking about what you can do as a brand or business to bring something fresh to the content they consume. You’ll also want to decide which categories of content belong on which platforms.
Fit your strategy into your overall marketing plan
Finally, you need to ensure again that your content marketing strategy fits into your overall marketing efforts. More often than not, you will be advertising to customers are different points of their journey, whether it be once they’ve visited your website, added a product to their cart, after they’ve purchased, or any other stage of their journey.
Your content should fit into this journey seamlessly and target customers at the different stages they go through.
Outside of the customer journey/marketing funnel, you just need to be confident that the content you’re producing complements your other marketing endeavours. The worst thing you can do is have content being produced in a ‘silo’!
