The popularity of content marketing has increased tenfold over the past few years due to its power to attract and retain new customers for businesses to indirectly marketing their products and services to. However, without a content marketing strategy, succeeding is quite literally a matter of success or failure, and you run the big risk of all your content marketing efforts going to waste together with wasting money curating all of the content. So, the first thing you need to do if you want to get ahead of your competition is to have a well thought out content marketing plan that has your business’s goals in mind. Now although we are going to share the fundamentals of building a content marketing strategy, we came across a blog post about content marketing by a digital marketing agency called Revive.Digital, which we found to be highly informative. So, for further reading, we would highly recommend this in addition to our article.
Why Do I Need a Content Marketing Strategy?
At its fundamental core, your content marketing strategy should be why your business exists. You need to think about why you are creating content, who your content is helping and how you can help them in a way that your competitors can’t. And, companies that use content marketing to build relationships with their audiences achieve increased revenue, lower costs and more loyal customers.
Start by Defining Your Content Marketing Goals
What’re your objectives for developing and implementing a content marketing strategy? Why do you want to create a content marketing strategy in the first place? You need to be able to answer these questions before you start planning. This way you will have a much easier time planning what the best content marketing strategy is for your business. Whether you are planning on a monthly, quarterly or annual basis, it is absolutely crucial to set your goals. By doing so means you will have a clear vision in mind, and you will be able to see how you have progressively worked towards the goals, which will help motivate you even more along the way.
Brainstorm Your Content Ideas
Once you have set out your content marketing strategy and goals, you then need to move onto determining what the best types of content are for you to use to achieve these said goals. There are many different types of content and formats that you can create. It’s just a question of deciding which types will be the most effective for reaching your goals. When brainstorming your content ideas, take all of the following formats into consideration –
- Blogs
- Vlogs
- Slideshares
- Guest Posts
- Infographics
- eBooks
- Videos
- GIFS
- Memes
- Timelapses/Hyperlapses
- Podcasts
- Case Studies
- Social Media Content
Conduct a Content Analysis
If you have been operating as a business for quite some time, it is always a really good idea to conduct an audit to assess your content marketing efforts so far. This way, it can help you figure out how to do things differently in the future, which will let you stand out from your competitors. For example, if you have been creating blog posts for a while then creating a downloadable PDF of your blog content can be a great way of adding value for your target audience.
Build The Best Content Marketing Team There Is
Once you have defined your strategy, your goals and decided on what content you are going to use, you are going to need to build a team of content marketing experts to execute the strategy. As a manager, it could be possible to create all of the content yourself if that’s within your skill set. But the reality of this is that it just isn’t scalable in the long term. When you have a content marketing team in place, every team member can play on their strengths and create the very best content on a consistent basis to build a loyal audience of customers.
Create a Content Schedule
A content schedule is so much more than a calendar for your content. It’s a great place also to plan your social media campaigns, to brainstorm future content ideas and organize everything that you have coming up in terms of your content marketing efforts. A content schedule will basically help you streamline everything you have in your content marketing arsenal.
Nice piece Hassan…. just one missing component. What about identifying the right tools? Great content marketing requires the right technology to keep pace in this “always on / mobile” market.
Hi Chris,
Yes, you pointed out rightly. But the implementation of a strategy is required tools that is the second stage.