A content marketing strategy is a plan for how you will create and distribute valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain your target audience.
Creating a content marketing strategy may seem daunting, but if you break it down into steps, it’s not as difficult as it seems.
In this blog post, we’ll walk you through the process of developing a content marketing strategy step-by-step.
Content Marketing Strategy Template
- Define your goals.
What do you want to achieve with your content marketing? More website visitors? More leads? More sales? Once you’ve answered this question, you can move on to step two. - Define/Know your target audience.
Who are you creating content for? Knowing your target audience is essential to creating content that resonates with them. Spend some time researching your target audience so that you can create content that appeals to them. If you get inside your ideal buyer’s mind, you will come up with powerful content ideas that resonate at specific stages of the buyer’s journey. - Research your competition.
What kind of content is your competition creating? How are they distributing their content? This research will give you insights into what’s working well for them and what you can do differently to stand out from the crowd. Lots of companies are doing content poorly, so it’s always good to stand out, rather than be led by your competition. - Audit your content
By auding the content on your website, you will get a strong idea of the content you already have, and whether you first need to focus on deleting poor content, updating existing content and creating new. - Create a content calendar.
A content calendar will help you organise and plan your content in advance. Having a content calendar will make it easier to stay on track and ensure that you’re creating a consistent stream of high-quality content. - Plan your content creation
Decide what resources you will be need to create content to the required frequency. Will you be focusing on creating engaging written content first? Or are you able to create powerful video content too? What processes do you need in place to execute your strategy? Do you need training and coaching for your in-house content creators? Or will you hire content creating freelancers? - Choose your media/marketing channels
The next step is to choose your channels. Where will you publish your content? Will you use a blog? Social media? Email marketing? Paid advertising? Once you’ve decided on your channels, you can start creating content for each one. - Create killer content
This is the most important part of your content marketing strategy. Your content must be interesting, informative, and engaging if you want people to read it and even share it. Take the time to create quality content, and your efforts will pay off in the form of increased traffic and engagement. - Promote your content.
Once you’ve created some amazing content, it’s time to promote it. There are a number of ways to promote your content, including social media, email marketing, and paid advertising. Experiment with different promotion strategies to find what works best for you and your business. Over time, if your content is good enough and you’ve optimised your content for Google (SEO) and other search engines, success in the organic search results could significantly impact the number of customers and your revenue.
Developing a strong content marketing strategy is essential for any business that wants to succeed online. By taking the time to define your goals, target audience, and competition, you’ll be well on your way to creating a successful content marketing strategy that will help you achieve your business goals.
If you want to create a successful content marketing strategy, follow the structure above, but especially the four steps: define your goals, know your audience, choose your channels, and create killer content.
By taking the time to understand what you want to achieve and who you want to reach, you can create a strategy that will help you reach your goals and grow your business.
The power really comes when you know your target buyers so well, that you’re creating the exact written, video and even audio content they’re craving for.
So what are you waiting for? Get started today.