21 Steps to Develop a Foolproof Content Marketing Strategy

In the age of industrialization and widespread use of technology, content marketing strategy has gained tremendous importance.

Every organization has formulated a different content strategy suiting their business model, the company’s aims and requirements as well as their target audience.

A Content Marketing Strategy refers to the method that one utilizes to manage any source of media like photographs, videos, written content, so on and so forth.

Devising a content marketing strategy suitable for your business venture can be tricky at times.

A business contains various aspects that are interrelated and hence, a content strategy should be such that it incorporates every aspect of the company.

Content marketing strategy is a very effective method to manage online traffic and to procure new leads.

Many organizations still wonder- how to create a content marketing strategy?

This article aims to provide essential pointers for developing a content marketing strategy.

21 Steps to Develop a Foolproof Content Marketing Strategy

1. Understanding the Concept of Content Strategy

一个content strategy is a tactic used to manage any tangible media source like pictures, videos, or even written content.

It is an important aspect of yourcontent marketing plan, which showcases the identity as well as the uniqueness of your company.

Julie Fleischer, SVP, Head of Customer Intelligence at WW says-

“Content Marketing provides 4x the ROI of our traditional marketing spend.”

To ensure this, it is must that you are well aware of the concept of Content Marketing which actually deals with the gap between what businesses produce and what users want.

According to Content Marketing Institute-

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.

2. Know Different Types of Content Marketing

Besides creating authentic content, a company should also be aware of the different ways and sources of marketing their content. Differenttypes of content marketingrevolve around four different phases and they are-

(i) Awareness

(ii) Interest

(iii) Consideration

(iv) Decision

In these 4 types of phases, a wide variety of content is used for connecting and converting a wide variety of content to optimize sales growth. Some of the most common types of content used in these phases are-

These include-

(i)Blog posts

(ii)E-books

(iii) Cast studies

(iv) Templates

(v) Videos and podcasts

(vi) Social media

3. Importance of Content Marketing Strategy for Your Niche

The content marketing strategy is an essential process for business growth.

These strategies help to gain new leads, traffic and attract a quality audience and potential clients towards a company.

This process also provides a systematic approach towards building your business, and hence, every company needs to adopt a content strategy according to their requirements.

As per your marketing and business goals, you can come up with the befitting Content Marketing Strategy that can generate leads for you and boost conversions.

Some of the key stats that talk about the importance of Content Marketing Strategy are-

(i) Companies that blog regularly have more than 95% of inbound links

(2)网站选择博客更享受434%indexed pages

(iii) 87% of visionaries and 81% of leaders consider content as the core of their marketing endeavors

(iv) Businesses are going with a 5x increase in the paid content promotion since 2014

(v)的企业发布16 +博客文章/ month enjoy 3.5x more organic traffic

4. Solving Problems of the Audience

Usually, the product a company sells or a service they provide solves a problem an audience is facing.

一个content marketing strategy not only helps people who are figuring out the nature of their challenges but also supports people who are using your product to solve their problems.

This process makes your user more qualified to use the product. It is important that your content marketing strategy comprises the audience-first approach. Delving into the minds of your audience is very significant in designing a content marketing strategy that comprises the relevance with the expectations of your user base.

You should also identify the points of resistance of your audiences and accordingly, you should have a content strategy that can mitigate or impede those issues of your audiences. Finding out trusted content resources and brands in your niche or industry and exploring the partnerships will help you in having a credible presence on the web.

5. Identifying your Target Audience

一个company needs to identify the audience that it is targeting as well as the number of targeted audiences.

一个content strategy may cater to the needs of either one type of audience or multiple types.

Devising a content marketing strategy for every kind of audience can help bring in new leads and traffic.

It is also important for you to ask audiences for subscribing owned channels, as this will motivate them to become a loyal audience for you.

6.Identifying your Company’s USP (Unique Selling Point)

一个company’s competitors or contemporaries may have similar products to sell or services to provide.

To get ahead of your competitors, it is essential to know which aspect or factor makes your company different from the rest.

That uniqueness should then be incorporatedinto your content strategy to convince the target audience of your authenticity.

7. Defining a Company’s Mission &Goals

The best way to begin the process of strategizing is to form a content marketing strategy template for your company.

This content marketing strategy template will help you systematically formulating a content strategy that shall contain all the crucial aspects of your company. This content marketing strategy template must provide a content marketing strategy mission statement.

This statement will help you decide what’s essential for the company and what’s not. This mission statement shall highlight –

(i) The target audience of the company

(ii) The content strategy that you have devised to attract them

(iii) The benefit that the audience will receive

8. Evaluating your Current Position

一个company must have knowledge of the workings as well as the effect of its previous content marketing strategy.

This will help them in evaluating the areas where they are lacking. Evaluation can be done by logging into all the content uploaded, such as blog posts, guest posts, etc.

After that, assessing the usefulness or success of these posts and recognizing the potholes is an essential step in deciding how to create a content marketing strategy.

9. Audit

As mentioned above, analyzing the effect of your previous content strategy will help you understand the areas where the company is lacking.

Reviewing your company’s previous policy is an essential step in content marketing.

Figuring out what new things the company can offer and setting new goals for the next year is an important point to be noted.

Some easy to complete steps of doing content are-

(i) Generating a list of all your content

(ii) Retrieving metrics and categorizing the content

(iii) Creating an in-depth reader or customer profile

(iv) Conducting gap analysis

(v) Creative your new content strategy

List of metrics that you need to retrieve when you are performing content audit are-

(a) Title of Content

(b) Length of Title

(c) Category

(d) Ranking for the main keyword

(e) Search volume for the main keyword

(f) Average organic search traffic per month

(g) Meta description

(h) The bounce rate of organic search traffic

(i) Average time on page of organic search traffic

(j)反向链接的数量

(k) Number of linking root domains

(l) URL Rank

(m) Total Social Shares

10.Buyer Persona

As mentioned in the previous point, a company needs to identify the nature of its target audience, which is termed as “buyer persona.”

This instruction is more important for people who have just started their venture or for those who are looking to expand their target audience.

11. Selecting a Content Management System

一个content management system consists of three, significant parts- content creation, content publication, and content analytics.

These three areas form the backbone of how to create a content marketing strategy and help in systematizing the process of devising and effectively using the content strategy for your company’s business.

12. Deciding the Type of Content that you Want to Create

There are various content marketing examples available based on the content formats used.

These content marketing examples include blog posts, guest posts, infographics, videos, and many more.

After deciding the topics that you want to add in your content, it is crucial to decide on theformat of the material to be used. This will help you chalk out a budget and the amount of money to be invested in these formats to gain the best possible outcome.

13.创造新的想法s for Content

The content decides the authenticity of a company that it creates.

Hence, a significant step to know how to create a content marketing strategy is to brainstorm ideas to attract new leads and target audience towards your company.

14.麦ing a list of channels to use for publishing

After creating the right kind of content, the company must also decide the chains which it wants to approach to publish their content.

The channel selection process depends on the target audience. It is always better to contact channels that have the maximum concentration of your target audience. These channels include owned properties such as websites and blogs as well as social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, etc.

15. Establishing KPIs (Key Performance Indicators)

As mentioned before, setting specific goals and mission for the company is an important content marketing strategy.

But these goals should be achievable, practical, and accurate for a stipulated period. This is where KPIs come into the picture.

They will help you to know when you have achieved your goal by providing certain milestones for your company to complete. These milestones will be in terms of revenue, sales, traffic, SEO, etc. This step will help in solidifying your content marketing strategy.

16. Creating a Content Calendar

Content publishing is an important front of content marketing strategy.

Hence, creating a content calendar to set dates for publishing a piece of content is a critical way of managing your content.

Lack of planning is a significant content marketing mistake that companies make, which leads to incurring losses. To avoid this, a content calendar system should be adopted by every organization.

17. Allocating Roles

一个company must assign roles and responsibilities to people to ensure the smooth functioning of the entire process.

Ideally, a person should be appointed to supervise the whole process of content production, and a few people should be appointed to create and deliver individual content items.

18. Tools and Resources

For creating original and authentic content, a company will require in-house content creators, specialists in video creation, podcasts as well as graphic designers and freelancers.

You may also need special equipment to shoot videos, podcasts, and for arranging hosting events on social media websites.

19.Typical Content Production Process

The skeleton of a standard content production process includes the following essential steps-

(i) Creating an outline of the content, highlighting key points to remember and getting this approved

(ii)Creating the content and adding unique details like photographs or links

(iii) Sending the content to the editor and making the specified changes

(iv) Uploading and publishing the content on the shortlisted websites.

20.Distribution of Content

Distributing content is an essential step in a content marketing strategy.

This process should be done systematically to avoid any mishaps. For this, it is vital to create a content calendar as mentioned above and a proper schedule for uploading or publishing your content.

The company can also make use of email marketing to send their content to every client personally.

21.Assessing the Results

After implementing the devised content strategy, it is vital to determine the effect and understand whether the content marketing strategy has worked in favor of the company or not.

For analyzing the effectiveness of the procedure, the company can use the KPIs which it had established beforehand.

By monitoring your progress, you can improvise the content marketing strategy to gain maximum benefit and maximum benefits.

Wrapping it up!

So these were the 21 crucial points to be noted by companies and start-ups before devising a full-fledged content marketing strategy to enhance the company’s growth.

Adept inclusion of content strategy will empower your brand to widen your reach, generate leads, boost sales and ensure conversions. You can have a look at various content marketing strategy templates and content marketing strategy examples that are available online and devise your own content marketing strategy.

So, if you also want to learn and master the right Content Marketing Strategy for your brand then enrolling in aDigital Marketing Coursewill be highly useful for you.

How important do you consider Content Strategy for the optimized online presence of today’s brands? Feel free to share your views with us in the comments.