How to perfect a content marketing strategy
In 2020, 70% of marketers are actively investing in content marketing, so that means a lot of content is being produced. With so much competition, it’s important to develop a strong content marketing strategy to ensure your brand rises above the rest. Planning ahead to ensure key messages, events and offers are communicated in a timely manner, while being clear and attractive to the customer will ultimately result in a higher marketing success rate for your business. Here are some tips to perfect your content marketing strategy.
Establish Goals
When creating different content, the first step is to establish the overall goals you want to achieve, and how these can be measured (KPIs). Do you want to drive more traffic to your website? Get more newsletter sign-ups? Sell tickets to a webinar? All of these specific goals will impact the messaging and call to action in your content, which you will want to keep consistent throughout your marketing strategy.
Identify Your Customer(s)
In all areas of marketing, it’s crucial to understand who your potential customer or target audience is and tailor your plans around seeking these customers out. Creating a customer profile, either using data from current customers or mind-mapping the personas of new potential customers, is a useful activity to get a clear picture of this.
Research Marketing Channels
Now that you have made your customer profile, you can do some market research to learn more about their online activities and preferred buying channels. Different age groups, countries and genders prefer different social media channels, and some age groups respond better to e-mail marketing than others. Do your research and select the best channels for your target audience.
Communicate the Benefits
For your customers to want to engage with your brand and product, the types of content you are distributing need to be both relevant and valuable to your audience. Using your customer profile, produce a summary of:
- What solution is your product providing them?
- What desirable benefits are you offering?
- What sets you above the competition?
- Do you have any unique selling points that would attract this audience?
Making sure all content is produced with the same overall messaging will ensure you’re attracting more of the right types of customers and keeping them.
Plan Content Types and CTA
Now that you have narrowed down your audience, the correct marketing channels, and your key messaging, it’s time to properly plan the content. For example, if your brand is sportswear aimed at a younger audience, using content full of eye-catching images of the clothing on Instagram is going to appeal to your target audience. If you are a HR firm, a blog around a recent development in policies or procedures on your website and LinkedIn would be better placed instead. Also, making sure that your call to action strongly encourages the customer to engage in the correct way (as established in your goals) such as “Shop Now” or “Sign up to our newsletter to Read More”.
Plan Distribution
Now that you have a comprehensive plan for designing and writing your content, it’s time to turn the focus on to how to get it out there to the public! Many businesses adopt the use of social media scheduling tools such as Hootsuite, TweetDeck or Buffer which allow you to schedule tweets ahead of time to automatically be posted on multiple social media platforms. These guarantee your content is consistently being distributed at the right times, but it is also important to have one of your marketing team members monitor the accounts and get involved in real-time conversations and ongoing trends to really give your brand the edge.
Most e-mail marketing tools also offer a schedule feature, so you can plan campaigns around special dates.
Use Your Findings (KPIs) To Continue Developing
KPIs, or Key Performance Indicators, are quantifiable goals which help you to track and measure your digital marketing success. If your current goal is getting more people to your website, you’ll want to track the click rates from your content to assess what is making the most progress towards that goal. If it’s sales, you should track your conversion rates to see how effective your CTA is.
Planning your digital marketing strategy can be a complicated business, so if you’d like some support please get in touch with us today on 01792 293 333 or email info@serenglobalmedia.com