Content marketing is a great tactic to reach your business goals.
By providing valuable and relevant content, you can skyrocket your brand awareness, and position your business at the top of the league of your industry.
However, great content isn’t effective if it doesn’t attract, and engage the right audience.
If your goal is to build a larger digital footprint, your content should be paired with a top-notch content marketing strategy.
Building a winning Content Marketing Strategy to support your Content Strategy
A successful content marketing strategy is one that makes the publications you create to speak directly to a target audience. It brings qualified leads.
Surprisingly, a staggering 63% of businesses don’t have a documented content strategy, according to a report by the Content Marketing Institute.
Don’t be one of them. Be the exception! Read my tips on how to build a Killer Content Marketing Strategy in 7 simple steps.
By the end of this post, you would know how to improve your online reputation on Search Engines, boost traffic to your website and ultimately, increase sales and customer loyalty thanks to a top-level strategy.
7 steps to building a Killer Content Marketing Strategy
1. Competitive content audit
The ultimate goal of your strategy: creating effective publications that actually drive results.
How to do so? Conducting a content audit is a fantastic way to assess what posts work best in terms of performance, and which ones can be improved to meet your marketing goals.
Just ask yourself: What kind of publications works best in terms of behaviour, SEO, engagement, and conversion rates?
Then, all you should do is to define specific metrics and KPIs (Key Performance Indicators), collect some data, analyse the results, and then create a content marketing plan accordingly to your business needs.
Here are 5 metrics you can use to evaluate the impact of your content:
- Behavioural metrics: It is way to track how your users interact with your content. From page views, and unique page views to number of unique users, entrances, and bounce rate. Google Analytics is a very useful tool to get some insights about how your users behave with your content, and on your site in general.
- SEO performance metrics: It is a way to measure how your site is performing in Search Engines. You can find out a lot about your organic traffic, and check where your pages are positioned in the search engine results pages (SERPs) for particular keywords. You can also track other things like backlinks, crawl errors or pages indexed, for example. You can find some information on Google Analytics, but to have an extended vision, you can add some other tools like Google Search Console, Ahrefs, Moz, SEMRush or KWFinder. On these sites, you can also track what your competitors are doing, what keywords are using or the type of backlinks they have, and use the information when setting your own strategy.
- Engagement metrics: It is a way to identify how your audience engages with your content. You can use Google Analytics to see relevant details like the average time spent on a single page or discover what type of articles your users are more interested in.
- Conversions metrics: It is a way to check what pages are performing better in terms of generating leads, and which one can be modified to improve conversion rates. You can find information about the estimated revenue generated by specific pieces of content (single pages) you have created. The goal: to convert visitors, and readers into customers. With tools like Google Analytics, you can see information that can be very useful to increase the number of leads, conversions, and ROI (Return of Investment). Something to look at if you are creating a content marketing strategy for a B2B company.
- Authority metrics: It is a way to evaluate your page, and domain authority. You can check indicators that predict how relevant your website is (or content from a particular page) in a scale from 1 to 100 in search engine results. There are many factors that can affect your page or domain authority, but one thing to consider is the number of high-quality links pointing to your website (DA) or individual pages (PA). The idea is to produce valuable content to position your site (business) as a source of reference in your industry, and have other relevant sites (businesses) linking to your site. Tools such as Moz are perfect for measuring domain, and page authority.
2. Identifying and understanding your audience
If you discover who you target audience is, it will be easier to produce content that is fresh, and relevant, and at the same time, effective in drawing their attention towards your business.
You can discover plenty of things about your audience by using tools like the ones mentioned earlier like, for example, Google Analytics.
Alternatively, you can use platforms like Facebook or Twitter to monitor their activity, and conduct some surveys.
When creating your content marketing strategy, and defining your audience, keep in mind that, by the end of the day, the goal isn’t just selling a product by using an amazing content.
The idea is to make your audience feel identified with your brand.
There are casual users, buyers who may acquire your products, followers of your brand, and then, advocates who share the same values of your company, and are more than happy to recommend your products.
An average content marketing strategy pursues any type of user through content; a great one uses competitive content to turn customers into advocates of a brand.
3. Define your content goals
Think about the objectives you want to reach with your content marketing strategy.
This means that every piece of content that you create should be used to meet these goals.
Once you know what content is best for your business purposes, and who is your audience, then, you can start thinking about defining some long-term goals for your content marketing strategy.
Do you want your content to be used to increase sales by supporting specific campaigns? Are you looking for content to attract new users to your site? Is your goal design long-form content to rank high in search engines, gain relevance, and position your brand as a leader in your industry? Is your goal to get new email subscribers in exchange of some valuable content?
Make sure to create ambitious, but realistic goals, and set up specific deadlines to achieve them.
The ideal is to create a calendar where you include monthly, quarterly, and annual objectives.
There are several goal-setting methodologies to that you can follow.
Two of the most common are S.M.A.R.T. (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, Time-bound) Goals or C.L.E.A.R. (Collaborative, Limited, Emotional, Appreciable, and Refineable) Goals.
4. Create an editorial plan and decide on what topics to cover
It’s time to decide what type of content will appear in your website, and design an editorial calendar to organize your time spent reseraching for topics and keywords, creating the actual content, publishing, and analysing it.
The goal is to be active, and write relevant SEO-friendly content regularly.
Where to look for inspiration when writing sizzling hot posts for your blog? You can find relevant, and trendy ideas on Google Trends, and social networks like Twitter.
You can search for ideas in Quora or Reddit and pop a question to its users. Make sure you specify some keywords to make sure your results are accurate.
Don’t understimate the power of seasonal feature articles, and how-to content guides.
Influencers from your niche are a great source of information as well.
Websites like Answer The Public or QuestionDB are also fantastic to get keyword, and content ideas.
What about keyword research?
Google Keyword Planner is a great choice for SEO & PPC keyword research.
Alexa’s Keyword Difficult tool is useful to find easy-to-rank terms, while LSI Keyword Generator is effective in provinding long-tail, and semantic related keyword oportunities.
Lately, check your competitors. On platforms like Ahrefs or SEMRush, you can see what keywords the competition is using, and also information about topics they are covering for their content strategies.
The options are limitless when it comes to creating content. Consider what publications can instantly grab the attention of your audience.
It all depends on the type of article you write. You can do a little test with your users, and see what works best.
Interactive and highly visual content usually is more effective in terms of engagement, and exposure.
Videos, quizzes, polls, interactive eBooks or infographics work pretty fine if you are looking for customer retation or expand the time spent on a single page.
You can also consider writing a guest post on a blog from someone who is influential in your niche in exchange of a do-follow backlink to your site.
This is a great natural link building tactic.
5. Repurpose your existing content
No content is useless. When creating new content, think about how it can be later sliced and diced it into different formats.
You can publish a blog post, and then repurpose the information and design an infographic, make a video, PDF guide, cheat sheet or slideshow to appeal to new readers.
Another great tactic is to write a long piece, and dive it into different chapters by creating a series.
In time, you can convert your blog posts into a stunning PDF or eBook, which can be downloaded for free if the user subscribes to your newsletter.
6. Design a distribution plan: Social Networks
As surprising as it might seem, there is life beyond your website.
A successful content marketing strategy is one that considers how to generate, and use content for both inside and outside your blog.
You can drive traffic, and build brand awareness with the content you produce for your social media pages.
It’s not just about sharing once in a while your blog posts on Facebook, Instagram or any other platform that it may be useful to promote your business.
The idea is also to create a sense of community with your audience. Encourage positive debates, and make your audience feel they are part of “a family”.
The first step is to identify what social networks will be useful for your business goals.
Then, adapt your content to every channel. You can save some time by using platforms like Hootsuite to manage all your social media accounts from a single dashboard.
Creating a unique branded hashtag is a good social media marketing strategy to boost your company’s identity, and culture.
Reaching influencers from your industry asking them to share your content with their followers in a social media post, is another excellent tactic to make your content even more valuable.
7. Analyse your results and rebuild some of your content if necessary
It’s time to assess the impact of your content marketing strategy.
Once again, you will return to Google Analytics, any other social tracking tools, and all the SEO monitoring solutions you have used to conduct your content audit, and set your KPIs to hit your targets.
You will get invaluable information on what content really connects with your audience.
You can use this data to generate your future posts or do some adjustments to existing ones, if necessary.
Make sure you constantly monitor you site’s content performance to make sure your content marketing strategy is up to date with the latest trends, and techniques!and
