Creating a proper content marketing strategy from scratch is not an easy task. You must keep in mind many different factors all at once. It may be challenging if you are doing it the first time, but you will get used to it with practice. To help you in creating a good content marketing strategy, here are some useful tips:

Acknowledge the Power of Content Marketing

Why is content marketing important? Here are the top ten benefits of this kind of marketing:

  1. It provides value with no strings attached.
  2. It develops lasting relationships with your audience.
  3. It increases the visibility of your brand.
  4. It helps you build authority and credibility.
  5. It improves brand awareness and recognition.
  6. It generates traffic to your site to improve lead generation.
  7. It helps your customer move through the purchase decision more quickly.
  8. It creates loyalty and trust with both your current customers and prospects.
  9. It positions your business as an expert in your industry.
  10. It opens a channel of communication through social shares and comments.

Set Your Goals & Define Your Objectives

Once you understand the importance of a clear content marketing strategy, you must set your goals and define your objectives. What are you trying to achieve with content marketing? It’s probably all of the above, but you must still set one or two main goals that you will be putting the most effort in. Here are the four main goals to choose from:

  1. Beat the Competitors: This one is probably a given and may look a bit general, but it is actually a very valid point. By having a clear content marketing strategy, you may be able to be way ahead of your competitors in many senses. Content marketing is seen as a subtle, indirect type of marketing, so you will gain yet another competitive edge over your competitors.
  2. Attract New Customers: Every business must strive to reach out to new audiences in order to increase their customer base. Obviously, attracting new customers is also possible with the help of content marketing, so consider making it your number one priority.
  3. Raise Brand Awareness: Going hand in hand with attracting new customers, raising brand awareness will also mean getting you more exposure. Even though brand awareness is said to be a less important factor, you may still want to put it as number one on your list.
  4. Promote Trust & Loyalty: Promoting trust and loyalty is crucial for establishing proper customer relationships. If your audience believes you, they will come back to purchase more.

Do Your Research & Know Your Audience

In order to be able to write good content, you must do your research and know who you are writing for. Knowing your audience is one of the most important aspects of writing any kind of work. Make sure that you know everything about your readers including their gender, age, location, social status, level of education, interests, and buying habits. These will not be the same for each and every person, so don’t worry if you suddenly find out that different portions of your readers have different interests. All you need to do is build customer personas based on the data you collect and then create different content for each. But remember: you will not be able to please everyone.

Here are some tools and services to help you write your content once you make your content marketing strategy:

  • Grammarly: This online tool checks your text’s grammar, spelling, and punctuation.
  • Trust My Paper: This online writing service can write your content for you if you don’t have the time to do it yourself.
  • Hemingway Editor: This online tool highlights adverbs, passive voice, and complicated sentences in your text asking you to remove them.
  • Google Docs: This online equivalent of Microsoft Office Word is perfect for teams to share and edit word documents in real-time.

Choose Your Platform & Channels

The platforms and channels you will use to distribute your content are very important as this is how you will get your content through to your audience. Depending on what you choose, you will need a different budget, a different amount of time you spent on creating your content, and even different equipment.

The three main channels are as follows:

  • Blogs: If you still don’t have a blog on your company’s website, then it’s time to create one. Blogs are the go-to channel for content marketing as you will be able to easily optimize your articles for search engines.
  • Social Media: Social media is a bit different, but it has a similar logic behind it. Instead of keywords, you will be using hashtags to allow users to discover your posts.
  • Videos: Perhaps the most popular platform for posting videos is YouTube. By uploading good videos to YouTube, you will also appear in search engine results higher than usual articles.

Start Writing & Publishing

You are finally on the last step of creating your content marketing strategy, which is writing and publishing your content. If you will be doing it yourself, follow all the steps above. In case you choose to hire someone to do it instead, make sure that you have a good budget for it and you find professionals that will provide you with high-quality content.

Once you write your articles and blog posts, make sure to first get some feedback on them from your colleagues, friends, or family. You can get professional feedback, but it is not necessary at the start. Don’t forget that you may receive negative feedback, so be sure to react to it appropriately. You can check out How To Respond To Surprising Negative Feedback to find out more about what to do in such situations.

Final Thoughts

In conclusion, a content marketing strategy is very important for many reasons: it increases your traffic, improves brand awareness, and gives you a clear plan to follow. Carefully review this article and create your own content marketing strategy that will be effective and bring visible results.

Diana Adjadj is a Freelance Writer, blogging about Content Marketing, Social Media and Life.
w: 3to5marketing.com
e: dianaa.adjadj@gmail.com

Author