In today’s competitive B2B marketing landscape, businesses need to learn how to set themselves apart from their competition. Content marketing is an excellent digital marketing strategy that helps your brand connect with your audience.
When you build content marketing programs, you invest in expanding your audience while aiming for increased revenue, organic traffic, and lower costs. Providing informative, entertaining, and engaging content is a proven and effective way to reach out to consumers, develop brand presence, and drive sales.
It means that content marketing is, without a doubt, critical for the growth of your business. Below we discuss the importance of a content marketing strategy and how to craft one.
What is a Content Marketing Strategy?
In-depth research shows that 53% of marketers rate content creation as a top priority. Despite this substantial number, another extensive study shows that 63% of all businesses lack a documented content marketing strategy.
Moreover, 64% of surveyed people agree that learning about content marketing strategy is essential. Whereas, 75% of B2B purchasers said they rely on the content as research when making buying decisions. From all of these studies, it becomes pretty clear that a content marketing strategy is essential for your business. But to draft the perfect marketing strategy, you need to understand its meaning as well.
At its core, content marketing is another strategic marketing approach working to help you gain organic traffic. However, this marketing approach focuses on crafting relevant, consistent, catchy, and valuable content that offers high-quality information. And, ultimately, gets you the most out of your target audience by driving more clicks, sales, and sign-ups.
Steps to Devising a Successful Content Marketing Strategy
Crafting the perfect content marketing strategy entails the following steps:
1. Setting Your Goals
Your content marketing strategy should start with defining your business plan. It entails:
- Your targeted audience
- The content you’re going to use
- The unique value your content provides them
Apart from figuring this out, your content marketing mission statement should also outline what obstacles and opportunities they may face during the process.
While those are benefits your audience gets from interacting with you; your approach should clearly define your goals. Typically, a marketing mission statement aims for the following:
- Expediting revenue
- Increasing sales
- Gaining more traffic
- Boasting authorization and influence
- SEO that leads to organic traffic
- Reduction in marketing costs
- Enhancing social media engagement
2. Establishing KPIs
Your goals should be specific and achievable; otherwise, you won’t reach any of your milestones. Here you can set key performance indicators (KPIs) that outline what, when, and how you should be achieving your goals.
They comprise revenue, sales, traffic, SEO, and additional digital marketing aspects such as email marketing. Moreover, you’ll have to keep a close look at your marketing expenditure and how much making sales and acquiring new leads costs you.
3. Know Your Target Audience
Without a clear understanding of whom your target audience is, it will be challenging for you to fabricate informative and compelling content. To pinpoint your target audience is, you can do the following things:
Collect demographics based on age, gender, education, and income. You can do so by checking the in-depth analytics of social media and websites.
Ask follow-up questions from your consumers to gain constructive feedback. Their responses give you an insight into the customer’s needs and how well your product addresses that.
Lastly, you can create customer avatars to collect extensive information about your customers. It includes, but isn’t limited to, their pain points, information sources, problems, and so on. It allows you to fabricate content that perfectly caters to their needs.
4. Figure Out Your Content-Type
There’s no shortage of variety of content in the market. However, there are certain particular content types that all content marketing strategies include.
Blog posts are an excellent and popularly used content marketing strategy. It is because they are a proven way of delivering remarkable results. To gain positive results, make sure your blog posts offer incredible value. Moreover, they should be shareable and actionable.
You can even go for video marketing, lead magnets, ebooks, webinars, and so much more.
5. Create Content and Distribute it
A messy schedule is bound to lead you to downfall. Instead of worrying about that, you can work on creating a smart content schedule that’s easy to follow through.
Next, it’s time to find out what questions your customers are asking. It allows you to figure out which topic should be your focus. Next, you can research your subject and add a unique twist to it to best address your customers’ challenges.
Lastly, you need to set a schedule to distribute and market your content effectively. You can do this via email, campaigns, or notifications.
6. Assess Your Current Standing
If your business has already been publishing content, it’s a good idea to assess it before moving forward. It means you need to analyze if your content matches your goals or not. You can do this by:
Logging your content, be it social media posts, blogs, guest posts, and so on, together.
Analyze whether they are practical or useful.
Pinpoint what places you’ve previously overlooked.
7. Measure Results
Lastly, you need to examine whether your content marketing strategy is doing well. For this, you’ll have to bounce back to step 2- establishing your KPIs. If they’ve changed, it means you’re performing well.
Using tools such as Google Analytics, OptinMonster helps you assess your progress.
The Importance of a Content Marketing Strategy
Here’s a list of reasons your website needs to up its content marketing strategy:
· Expedite Audience Retention
Your content can have a dramatic effect on the user’s experience. A well-crafted and engaging content captivates the audience to continue reading.
In simple words, an absorbing content marketing strategy will enthrall new prospects while ensuring previous ones enjoy a positive experience. In turn, your brand impression enhances.
· Increase Social Media Traction
A well-written and enrapturing content marketing strategy allows you to build authentic and strong connections with your audience through social media.
While it’s nice to have a solid social media follower count, using a content marketing strategy to up your social media traction game is entirely different. High-quality and attractive content will help you gain traction by captivating readers through your content.
· Building Brand Trust
Crafting content offers you the option to answer your customer’s queries. Consequently, when you interact with your audience and devise enthralling content to help them, your brand gains major trust points.
It means creating informative and useful content without taking anything from the audience, thus strengthening your relationship with your target audience. Moreover, when you optimize the content to appear during a challenging time, your brand awareness goes up.
Ultimately, your customers are more likely to associate a positive experience if they see high-quality content often.
· Generating Successful Leads
Your content marketing strategy strives to nurture leads while building organic connections with interested consumers. Typically, your audience is more likely to purchase from you if they view or read your content.
Here you intelligently use call-to-action (CTA) to encourage prospects to check out the products they’re reading about. Lindsay Kolowich, from the HubSpot Academy team, says that content is the perfect way to motivate first-time buyers to check your landing page.
Furthermore, she mentions that your content should offer valuable information to visitors while capturing their attention. Moreover, you should optimize your content by adding clear yet catchy call-to-action. As to where it doesn’t matter, you may include it inline, at the bottom of the post, or on the side panel.
If your visitors are fascinated and interested in your content, they’ll follow your CTA. It means you need to ensure your CTA guides the audience to their next step, aka the conversion process. Different businesses describe converting differently. Your business may define it as making a purchase, collecting more data, reaching out to the sales team, and so on. In each scenario, your content should be the motivator; you should clearly explain their next move.
· Lead Conversion
Your content is the prime way of converting customers and driving better revenue growth. An in-depth study by ABG Essential shows that content marketing conversion rates are six times higher than any other digital strategy.
Moreover, the Content Marketing Institute shows how 61% of online consumers decided to purchase their products after reading a recommendation. At the same time, 74% of all surveyed companies cited that content marketing expedited their number of leads.
Not to mention, 72% of surveyed businesses agree that video content can increase conversions and ROI. Whereas HubSpot shows that a good content marketing strategy helped inbound marketers double their average conversion rate.
It means a diligently crafted content marketing strategy helps businesses enhance their conversion rate. They do so by educating their prospects and forming an instant, deep connection.
· Improving SEO
Content marketing strategy is the perfect way to increase brand visibility and trust. Moreover, when you focus on providing consistent, optimum quality, and engaging content, your SEO efforts go up a notch.
The main objective of your content should be increasing trust within your audience while connecting with new consumers. And that is only possible if your content ranks high in search engines. You may choose from various excellent and proven content strategies like the pillar model to appear on the top of google searches.
· Establishing Authority
Your customer base is more likely to listen to your advice and recommendation if they see you as a professional. And for that, you need to establish your business as a credible source.
Your informative yet captivating content helps you establish authority online. In turn, your visibility in the search engines also increases. For this reason, your content must bespoke of your experience and skill. Moreover, you can offer invaluable solutions to your audience.
Sources
https://www.lyfemarketing.com/blog/why-is-content-marketing-important/
https://optinmonster.com/how-to-create-a-successful-content-marketing-strategy-in-8-simple-steps/
https://contentmarketinginstitute.com/developing-a-strategy/
