Create a Content Marketing Strategy Your Audience Will Love

If you want your business to be successful, you need to have a solid marketing strategy in place. One of the best ways to market your business is with a content marketing strategy.

Content marketing is one of the cheapest and most effective ways to market your business as all it takes is creating content that your audience will love. The content you create will help you rank better in search engines and continue to bring you traffic long after it’s been published.

However, many business owners and non-profits don’t have a content marketing strategy and those that do, don’t have it written down. In this guide, we’ll help you create a content marketing strategy that attracts your ideal audience.

What is Content Marketing?

Before we dive into creating your content marketing strategy, let’s explain what content marketing is. Put simply, content marketing is all about creating content that introduces your brand to your audience, educates them, and ultimately promotes your products or services.

The content you create and share can include blog articles, eBooks, videos, podcasts, and similar. It can also include content you publish on social media.

How to Build a Content Strategy?

When it comes to content strategy, most people don’t take the time to plan their content and execute that plan. Usually, website owners will get all excited about the possibilities of content marketing, produce some content, and then get caught up in client work or projects.

When the above happens, the momentum fizzles out and their content strategy goes out the window.

But if you want to create a smart content marketing strategy, you need to do the following:

• Spend some time researching your audience
• Look into what your competitors are doing
• Choose the appropriate keywords and marketing channels
• Decide how you’ll measure the success of your content strategy
• Create a content marketing calendar

Let’s go over these steps below.

Identify Your Target Audience

The first step in creating your content marketing strategy is to identify your target audience. You need to understand what they want and what their challenges are. You also need to know what kind of content they like to consume.

Once you’re clear on that, your content needs to speak to your audience and solve their challenges.

To get inspiration for your content, you can check out your competitors as well as observe your ideal audience on social media platforms.

Let’s say we’re creating a content strategy for a home renovator contractor. We might look at groups and pages on Facebook for inspiration. Another place where we can search for inspiration is to check out HGTV’s lineup.

Measure Success

Once you know what type of content to create and what topics to cover, you need to set goals to be able to measure the success of your content marketing strategy.

A few goal examples might include:

• Getting website traffic
• Improving your SEO rank for certain keywords
• Raising brand awareness
• Boosting your conversions

You’ll also need to determine key performance indicators (KPIs) or the metrics that will help you track your results. This can include:

• Email sign-ups
• Lead inquiries
• Social media followers
• Monthly website traffic
• Conversions

Sticking with our home renovation contractor example, they might be focused on lead inquiries, email sign-ups, and increased conversions. They want more people to reach on their email list and ultimately the phone to ring more with qualified leads.

Pick Topics and Keywords

Search Engine Optimization or SEO plays a large role in content marketing. Proper SEO helps drive organic traffic from Google and social media to your site.

That’s why doing keyword research is another important step of your content marketing strategy. You can do some keyword research with a free tool like Word Tracker’s free keyword research tool.

When you’ve found your keywords, you need to use them to write SEO optimized content. Your post and page titles are just as important and need to be compelling as the title is the first thing your audience will see.

You can use the Headline Generator tool to come up with compelling titles for your blog articles and pages.

For example, our home renovation contractor might input:

This will get him results such as these:

Alternatively, you can use the free headline analyzer to make sure your post and page titles create an emotional response from your audience.

For example, a blog post about the cost of a kitchen remodel might be popular. A video sharing the results of a kitchen remodel that includes the before and the after might be another good topic to explore.

Choose the Best Marketing Channels

The next step in creating your content marketing strategy is choosing the best marketing channels. Most common marketing channels include:

• Your email list where you can send a weekly newsletter
• Video on platforms like Youtube or IGTV
• Social media like Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, and others
• Your blog where you can publish relevant blog posts and articles

A solid content marketing strategy typically combines two or more channels. When choosing a marketing channel, don’t forget to take into account your audience and how they like to consume content. For example, if they prefer video content, it makes little sense to create a podcast.

Check Out Competitors

Another important step in creating your content marketing strategy involves checking out your competitors. It’s important to mention that this doesn’t mean stealing their website copy or content.

Rather, it means seeing what they are sharing and what’s performing well for them. Check out their blog and take a look at their social media profiles. Visit their website and see what they’re doing.

As you’re checking our their website, don’t forget to take note of topics they aren’t covering. This is a great opportunity for you to experiment with those topics, fill the gap, and see if they bring you results.

For example, a home renovator contractor in Fairfax, VA might check out the following competitors: oakhillbuilding.com or cornerstonedesignremodeling.com or dollhomes.com

Create a Calendar

The last step in developing your content marketing strategy is to create a calendar for your content publishing. Your calendar will help you keep track of the topics you’re going to cover and decide what content you’re going to put out when. It can also include on which channels you’ll publish specific content on.

For example, here’s out social media content schedule for September 2020:

You can create a content calendar using a simple Google or Excel spreadsheet. You can also use tools like CoSchedule to plan out your content across all your marketing channels.

Ready to Get Started?

Creating a content marketing strategy might seem daunting but once you break it down, it becomes easier.

Want someone to take the reins of your content marketing strategy? We can help! Contact us today to chat about your content marketing strategy goals and needs.