Essential Elements for a Content Marketing Strategy

1. Essential Elements for a Content Marketing Strategy

2. What Is Content Marketing? Content marketing is a strategic marketing approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly defined audience — and, ultimately, to drive profitable customer action. You can use different types of content to build brand awareness, improve customer experience, or generate inquiries and leads. Companies use also their content marketing channels to get feedback. But regardless of your goal, your final “content mix” – whether it’s your blog, your Facebook page, your Twitter account, or all of the above – should consistently and effectively promote your messaging, provide a great user experience, and add value to your business. Here we discuss essential elements that will help you form a strategy to get you there:

3. Identify Your Audience This is the first thing you need to work out – who are you talking to? Which target population are you gearing your content towards? This, of course, will be largely dependent on your product or service. For example, if your company makes baby toys, you need to talk to parents. But if your product is made for single professionals, then you need switch your voice and content to appeal to this segment. Basically, you need to talk to the right people, in the right language. Spend time identifying your target audience. Surveys, interviews, focus groups, and marketing databases are all great sources of information. If you’re on a budget, you can send a quick survey to your current customers, interview your sales team or even post a question to your social media channels.

4. Get Internal Support Content marketing is time-consuming and labor-intensive. You cannot do it alone. At some point, you will need support from all quarters – everyone from the product, development, marketing, and support teams… and especially from senior management. They need to buy into the strategy, understand the larger goal, and be willing to assist the process. This way, whenever you need help or additional resources, you already have their support. Getting them involved from the very beginning is critical to your strategy’s success.

5. Have Your Checklist in Place We’ve already established that creating and executing a content strategy requires plenty of time and resources – but we have some good news! The more time you spend planning in the beginning, the more headaches you’ll save later on. Make sure you cover the following questions right from the start: • What are you trying to achieve with content marketing? • What is your current situation? • How will you put this strategy in place? • How will you measure the strategy’s effectiveness?

6. Develop the Right Content Many businesses, given an opportunity to present their online brand, get lost somewhere along the way. Usually, it’s because they’re only looking at one half of the picture. Having your content in place is only the first challenge. The next challenge is to identify the channels you can use to distribute your content. Different channels are better suited for different types of content: shorter content is great for Twitter, while long form will perform better on LinkedIn or Medium. Videos are for YouTube, images go on Instagram, and infographics are good on almost any network. And we haven’t even touched on whether your readers access your content from smart phones, tablets, or computers.

7. Engage the Customer Customers are at the heart of content marketing, and everything you do must be geared towards them. This is the audience you’re trying to support, engage, influence, and empower. Everything in your strategy – from your content’s voice and tone, to the types of content you create and different channels you use – must work towards this end. Keep these two questions in mind: • Which stories will delight your audience? • Which stories will make the biggest impact?

8. Planning is Key There’s a carpenter’s proverb that says, “measure twice, cut once.” And as we mentioned in Tip # 3, the more you plan now, the more pain you’ll avoid later. Take your editorial calendar, for instance: have it in place for a whole year. When do you publish? How often do you update your website? Do you tweet in the morning, or in the afternoon? Do you have a “content bank” of interesting, timeless stories to tell? Many companies fail at content marketing because of a lack of planning. Have enough content.

9. Build SEO-Friendly Pages Like everything else in business, when you have an objective, you need to check to make sure you’re on the right track and achieving the goals you set for yourself. If you did the proper planning at the start, you’ll already have a list of Key Performance Indicators, benchmarks and milestones to achieve. For example, maybe you want to attract 10,000 unique visitors in a month, or generate 10 daily comments on each blog post. These are the KPIs you must monitor. Here’s a useful primer on metrics, and another one on tools.

10. Doing Proper Analysis So you’ve built all these pages and loaded them with great content, but you’re not sure why people are not visiting. Often, it’s because people can’t find your content. Proper Search Engine Optimization (SEO) ensures that your page is search friendly, and shows up near the top of search engine results when users search for products and services in your industry. What measures can you take to be SEO-friendly and make sure users find your page? The most important practice for building SEO-friendly pages is including relevant keywords in your content, and there are many tools that can help you optimize your blog, website and other channels.

11. Touch Sxope Consolidate Get in 12/14 Brook street, Everton park, 4053 QLD, Australia 0411 382 967 sales@sxope.com.au

12. Thank You..!