Over the past few years, the marketing landscape has undergone a massive transformation fuelled by content, mobile, and social technologies. Content marketing has, therefore, become an essential and powerful tool for marketers to boost website traffic, online visibility, and their customer base.
In this context, content marketing strategies are a crucial part of most competitive businesses. What does it take, then, to create a plan that delivers time and time again?
Having gone through the trial-and-error stage of this process, our blog this week takes a look at what it takes to nail a foolproof content strategy. Keep reading to find out!
Step one: Identify your goals
Prior to creating your content strategy, having a few goals in mind is key to ensuring you fine-tune this process to the requirements of your business. Because, If you aren’t sure what you want to accomplish, how are you going to determine the best ways to succeed?
By modelling your content strategy around your primary business objectives, your content development process will be more productive and effective, maximising return on efforts.
Once you know what you want to achieve with your content, it’s also easier to decipher what metrics are useful in measuring performance and success. In this regard, it’s always best to establish benchmarks before content goes live.
Step Two: Customer research
A crucial part of any successful content marketing strategy is to wade deep into the waters of customer research.
Given that information-gathering is imperative to a successful content marketing strategy, living and breathing your target market will help you break down thought patterns, preferences, and interests; all of which are important to creating good content.
It’s also important to remember that your target market could vary over time. In order to increase cast your net over prospective audiences, you will, therefore, have to constantly monitor and revise your customer demographics and content approaches.
Step 3: Leveraging the right content management system
A content management system utilises automation tools to optimise content, schedule social posts, and give you insights into how your content is performing – in summary.
When powerful automation tools are used successfully, they can drive conversions, boost leads, and ultimately generate sales for your company. Further, a powerful system will also streamline your content and take care of the more mundane aspects of your work, such as scheduling.
In this context, there are numerous tools on the market that can help you do your job, eliminating tedious hours spent optimising and managing content.
Depending on how you want to model your content and your target audience, there are a plethora of content management systems that can be used for this purpose.
Tools like SmarterQueue, for instance, is a forerunner for social media management and publishing. Another effective automation tool for content publishing is WordPress. As a free and open-source content management system, WordPress is mostly associated with blogging and is often lauded for its user-friendly features and functionality.
Step 4: Identifying what form your content should take
Identifying what form your content should take, is the last step in our four-step content marketing strategy. Here, your content can be presented in various forms, choosing between which really depends on your objectives.
In essence, different types of content can help you achieve various goals or reach different demographics. In most cases, a variety of content subsets is ideal for engaging users and pushing products or services out. Again, this depends on your target audience and what they are likely to respond to.
In this regard, blogs, videos, infographics, guest posts, and podcasts, are a few ways in which you can do so. Beyond this, however, shaking things up every now and then is sure to keep your audience engaged and interested!
Key takeaways
By taking a step-by-step approach, as highlighted above, marketers now have the resources they need to create a winning content marketing strategy.
In this process, make sure you create a story around your brand, imbuing values that mean something to both your company and your target audience. By staying on message and delivering content your customers want to see, there’s no truer (or faster) way to reach the stars.
Want more tips to create a successful content marketing strategy?
At Hype Insight, we aim to provide you with visionary content marketing strategies and advice. Contact us today for more information about our services; success awaits!