Hello there!
Ever wondered how to have a content marketing plan for the next 6 months? Creating unique, interesting and engaging content is necessary for every business to retain existing users as well as attract new users to your website.
Did you know that 63% of businesses do not even have a well-documented content marketing strategy? If you’re feeling overwhelmed and in doubt about how to get started with a content strategy for your business, then look no further!
Here are some simple steps to get started with your ultimate content marketing strategy to grow your overall business. Rather than getting started without a game plan for your content, it is important to have a content marketing strategy to ensure that your business goals are met:
- Setting up your mission and goals:
The first step in creating your content marketing strategy is to set out a main content marketing statement of your mission. The mission statement of content marketing helps to outline important points such as target audience, content and benefits of using this strategy.
A method of creating a business mission is by defining your target audience, type of content and business goals. Some of the different goals that can be included are:
- Engagement on Social media
- Reduction in marketing costs
- Success with SEO
- More traffic to your website
- Improving the overall revenue
- Increasing the overall sales
2. Establishing your KPIs:
The next step in your content marketing strategy is to establish your key performance indicators to help you achieve your goals better! KPI’s go a long way in helping to establish goals, such as:
- Revenue
- Sales
- Traffic
- SEO
Achieving certain KPI’s will broadly help you achieve different metrics which are beneficial to your business are:
- Hitting an established revenue target
- Getting more overall signups
- Gaining new email subscribers
- Increase in the traffic of a website
- Improving the overall search ranking
- Tracking marketing expenditure
- Analysing digital spending
- Keeping a track of acquiring leads and sales
3. Knowing your Audience:
Knowing your audience is important in understanding a successful content marketing strategy and it is important to create content with the right plan to collect demographics such as web analytics, social media and email subscriber analytics.
Some other aspects that are involved in knowing your audience are getting feedback from your customers and creating buyer personas as well. Doing all of these steps will help you gain a perfect mental picture of who your audience is.
4. Analysing and assessing your current position:
Assessing the current position of your content goes a long way in figuring out your weak points, to work on them in the future. To analyse and assess your content, you will have to perform a content audit to meet the business goals of your business.
A content audit involves:
- Identifying the gaps in your existing content strategy.
- Assessing the usefulness or success of the content.
- Some of the different pieces of content involved in the audit are guest posts, blog posts etc.
5. Evaluating the best channels for content:
Understanding the best channels for content is essential, as the content that you will produce are successful in finding an online presence for your audience. Content analysis tools such as Buzzsumo can give us useful metrics such as:
- Shares done on different networks
- Sharing done by content type
- Sharing done on the length of content
- Top content produced in the last year
6. Deciding on the type of content:
Content marketing strategies help to publish content on the main website called as a home base or content which is repurposed and shared to other websites, across other domains.
Different content types are more suitable for different audiences. Some of the different types of content are:
- Lead magnets
- Webinars
- Checklists
- Worksheets
- Podcasts
7. Allocating Resources:
It is important for a particular team or person to take complete ownership of the type of content. In a majority of cases, the CEO or the chief marketing officer will take the final call on the type of content that would go out.
To produce content that would reflect the image of the brand consistently, it is important to have a content team. Your team needs to consist of:
- Content creators who are available in-house for generating new and engaging content.
- Video creators, podcasters and graphic designers.
- Freelancers for the work that cannot be done in-house.
8. Creating Content Calendars:
There is one another step before writing content; it is the systematic allocation as part of your content strategy. Some aspects of creating a content workflow are:
- Creating a content outline.
- Writing the post.
- Creating accompanying changes.
- Sending post to the author.
- Making any changes.
- Uploading and publishing.
The lack of planning is one of the major mistakes made in a content marketing strategy. It is important to have a content calendar, to get all of your content scheduled!
In conclusion, these are a few steps on how to create the ultimate content marketing strategy for your business. We hope that you utilize our tips and create your own unique content marketing strategy for your business. Good luck!
