20 Aug 9 STEPS TO BUILD AN EFFECTIVE CONTENT MARKETING STRATEGY
Content marketing is a digital strategy form of crafting and distributing relevant, valuable and consistent content to attract and acquire a specific target audience, and ultimately gain profitable customer action.
If you’re not sure how it is going to work and help your brand, don’t overwhelm yourself with these ideas. We’re here to explain content marketing step by step!
But before content marketing, you need to know the buyer’s journey first.
- Awareness: Buyers experience a problem, need or opportunity and in this stage, they try to identify this challenge or pursue the opportunity they have. That’s why they are doing educational research at this stage.
- Consideration: Buyers now understand their problem or opportunity in a clear way and start to evaluate all available solutions, offers or approaches to their problem or opportunity.
- Decision: Buyers now decide on their solution, offer, approach or method and make a final decision to proceed with purchasing the solution they want.
It’s important to acknowledge these stages to create an effective strategy that’ll help your business. Content marketing is vital for the first two steps as the buyers are doing research.
Let’s assume that the buyer persona in the awareness stage wants to purchase a running shoe, but before making a final decision buyer wants to know which shoe will be the perfect and durable option. That’s why buyer starts to research durable running shoes on Google.
If you have content on your website about durability of some specific running shoes, the buyer will be on your website, reading your content and deciding based on that. Do you now see the value of content marketing?
How Do I Start on my Strategy?
Here is our step by step guide to start on content marketing:
1. Set SMART Goals
The first step of your content marketing strategy is to set SMART goals. Your content should be in line with these goals if you ever hope to achieve them. Your content can improve your brand awareness, your values and revenues.
2. Set your KPIs
Key performance indicators (KPI) are quantifiable measurements or data points to measure your brand’s performance based on a specific goal. KPIs can be stated as website traffics, social media followers, mentions and daily sales etc. There are various KPIs for various SMART goals.
3. Determine your content type
Next, you need to decide on your content type as there are many. To decide an effective content, you’ll first consider your target audience and buyers. You can put yourself in the target audience and buyers’ shoes and ask yourself the following questions:
- What challenges are they looking to overcome?
- How can you help them?
- Why do they need your service or product?
- What makes you stand out?
After finding answers to these questions, you can determine the best content type to attract your target audience and buyers.
4. Determine your content channels
It’s time to decide on which content channel you’ll use to share your content. If you have a blog post, yes, it’s an obvious one to share on your blog. But not all of the content channels are this obvious.
If you choose social media content, then you’ll need to choose on which social media platform you will share your content. As we’ve explained before, these platforms have their own differences and requirements (such as character limit etc.).
5. Set your budget
When setting a budget for your content marketing strategies, there are some key points to consider:
- Do you hire a content creator?
- Do you need any special equipment, program or software for your content?
- Do you need any paid ad space?
If you don’t have clear answers to these questions, we’d recommend you to set some amount that is suitable for you aside and use it along the way. Say you choose blog post and; therefore will share your post on the blog, and you are the content creator. So far it seems like there’s no need for a budget, but you’ll probably need it when you use SEO programs, data analysis, analysis software and etc. to evaluate your content and upgrade it next time.
6. Create your content
Yes, it’s time to create your content once you complete the first 5 steps. Remember the buyer’s journey? You’ll need that information when creating your content. If your target audience is in the awareness stage, just promoting a product will be ineffective. Therefore, we highly recommend you to start with educational contents whether it’s a blog post or video.
Your content should be in line with your target audience and buyers, and reflect your goal as a brand. Never create content just for the sake of it. Remember, you’ll need to be authentic and consistent, which brings us to our next step.
7. Set content framework and schedule
Content creation is a work of planning and scheduling, don’t rely on inspiration for your content marketing. Yes, when you start a new work or project, ideas may float to you but after a while it won’t and as a content creator you should be consistent.
When you have a ‘Eureka!’ moment, please write it down. Most people assume that they’ll remember it but it’s a hard duty when you have various to do’s on your mind. You’re not just creating content; you’re building a marketing strategy for your brand. That’s why you need a long-term content planning system.
This’ll also help you keep track of your projects, campaigns, content status, special days and events. You’ll also need to list any topic ideas you have for future content and research purposes, which will rescue you from just relying on inspiration.
8. Promotion and distribution plan
Content distribution and promotion is all about visibility. You can share your content on social media platforms, but remember you need to alter your captions for the target audience, don’t just copy-paste it.
There are various ways of promoting your content but we can divide them into main categories:
- Organic Promotion
Organic promotion is a great way of promoting your content especially if you’ve just started. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Backlinks are among most impactful tools. Social media posts, email marketing, content syndication, word of mouth and influencer marketing can also be great examples of organic promotion.
- Paid Promotion
You can also consider paid promotion and ads to boost your content. Google ads, social media ads, paid influencer marketing and native ads can be examples of paid promotion.
9. Analyse and measure results
Last but definitely not the least, you’ll need to analyse and measure the results of your content. This’ll help you to adjust and enhance your content marketing strategy for future as you’ll see what your target audience and buyers love and how they react.
If you are wondering how to analyse your results, there are various tools and software such as Google Analytics that’ll help you to measure and analyse data.
Attract Your Target Audience with the Right Content Marketing Strategy
An effective content marketing strategy will help you to engage with your target audience and buyers. You have various competitors in the digital world, and you need a strong and achievable strategy to get ahead of them.
Apply above steps to your brand to build a content marketing strategy and boost your brand value. If you need any assistance or support to start on or update your content marketing strategy, feel free to contact IDA Media!
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