How to Create a Content Marketing Strategy
Content marketing, done right, is an incredibly effective form of marketing. The main reason for this is because it gives your customers value up front: when they browse your content they’re able to take advantage of your expertise and experience your brand without purchasing a single thing.
This builds trust, something which is essential for brand loyalty. When they next encounter the main problem your product or service aims to solve, they’ll remember your blog or social media and position you in their minds as the source most likely to offer an effective solution.
But content isn’t something you can just jump into producing without a plan. Content marketing requires consistency and longevity, and the best way to pull that off is by creating a content marketing strategy ahead of time.
Luckily, you’re in the right place to find out how.
But wait – is content marketing right for you?
Content marketing might not be the best marketing strategy. It works best for people who aim to build trust and authority: if neither of these factors particularly relate to your business, then you should probably sink your efforts into different marketing strategies that may work better.
For example, content marketing would be a great option for:
- Legal
- Finance
- Business coaching
- Service-based industries
In these niches, it’s all about gaining trust through communicating knowledge and explaining concepts to your audience. In other words, content marketing works well for industries where you need to tell the audience they have a problem.
And content marketing wouldn’t necessarily work as well for:
- Impulse buys
- Very small everyday items
- Ecommerce
In these industries, it’s less about being a trustworthy seller (although this does matter!) and more about your offer: fastest shipping, lowest price, highest quality. In other words, when your audience knows they have a problem, and just wants to solve it as fast as possible.
Okay – so let’s say you’re a freelancer, coach, purveyor of fine gloves, or you have any other offer which would benefit from long-term, drip-feed marketing: in essence, you need a content marketing strategy.
Let’s get started.
1. Set your mission and your goals
What do you hope to accomplish with content marketing? Why are you doing this? (Hint: the wrong answer is “because everyone else is”.)
Ask yourself, what does your business need more of? Some ideas include:
- Increased loyalty
- More leads
- More sales
- Higher customer lifetime value
All of these can be accomplished with the right content strategy. Deciding on what effect you want to create will ultimately decide what kind of content you create, and where you distribute it.
If you aren’t sure what problem needs fixing, but have a nagging feeling that content marketing will somehow “help”, then spend a bit of time thinking about the list above. Which would make the most impact?
2. Choose content channels
Now you know what you want to achieve, it’ll be easier to choose the content channels which suit your business and your goals.
This is one of the most important parts of any successful content marketing strategy. A TikTok presence will suit some businesses, not others. Similarly, Instagram might be the perfect platform for your products, but not your competitor’s.
Ask yourself: would your product or service lend itself to visual content, or written content more? And is there any format you’re more comfortable creating in?
For example, the traditional format for legal advice content is usually written. But if you’re excellent at presenting video, then you might be able to make a unique name for yourself over on YouTube.
Here’s a list of possible content channels to get you started:
- Your own blog
- YouTube
- TikTok
- Podcasts
Don’t forget about niche channels: even FitBit has its own community features which lets users create posts to others. For fitness businesses, this could be an untapped market with little competition.
3. Establish your KPIs
This isn’t as scary or corporate as it sounds. Basically speaking, content marketing is a fairly nebulous concept. You can’t measure its impact very easily.
Unlike an ad campaign, it can be difficult to work out if a content marketing strategy – spread across multiple channels – is having any effect at all. That’s why we need to decide on key performance indicators (KPIs) we want to track to make sure everything is trending upwards.
Your KPIs will depend on your chosen content channels. For example, you might choose:
- Shares
- Likes
- Views
- Subscribers
- Comments
- Time watched
- Inbound links
4. Start a resource pool
Before you start creating content, you need to first know what you’re going to talk about. It’s not a good idea to come up with stuff on the fly every single week, unless yours is a particularly dynamic and dramatic industry which responds to current events as they happen (e.g. investing).
And even if it is, it’s a good idea to have some content in your back pocket if you encounter a bit of a boring week.
A resource pool can be as simple as a bookmarks folder of links you’ve found on the Internet which you want to talk about, interesting videos you’ve seen, articles you’ve read, or anything else. You can keep a notebook of blog post ideas, or carry an ongoing note file in your phone of snippets and interesting statistics you can share.
Anything relevant can be turned into valuable content for your readers, viewers and listeners.
5. Create a content calendar
Now you know what you want to post and where, it’s time to decide on when.
This part is heavily dependent on your chosen content channels, and your goals. Your best bet is to look up case studies of other marketers who have achieved their goals and look at how often they post, what time of day, etc.
You may find the “often as possible” rule is in effect: or at the very least, you might be surprised at how much content other businesses put out.
Don’t be fooled. Quality always trumps quality: just because another marketer has had success spamming their audience, doesn’t mean you should. As long as you take time to create the best content you can, it doesn’t matter if you “only” put out content weekly, or even monthly. Your subscribers will look forward to it.
BONUS: Create recurring sources
Congratulations – you have a content calendar, and you’ve been posting reliably for a while now! Is there anything you can do to make content creation even easier?
Why, yes. Creating recurring sources of content is one of the best-kept secrets of a successful marketing strategy. But what does that mean?
Effectively, it means you’ve put content creation on auto, so all you need to do is go harvest the ready-made content, and post.
You can do this in a few ways. Some of the most successful are:
- “Recycling” old posts (e.g. “did you miss this?”, “here’s one of my followers’ favourites…”
- User-created content (e.g. “send in your photos of our product for a chance to be featured!”)
Making content marketing work for you doesn’t have to be hard, but it can be very rewarding. What’s your content strategy look like? Let us know in the comments!
