Developing a successful content marketing strategy
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There is no doubt that over the past few years the marketing landscape has undergone fundamental transformations under the influence of content, mobile and social technologies. Content marketing has become an indispensable and powerful tool for marketers to increase website traffic, online presence and attract new customers.
However, creating good content is not an easy task for many marketers, and often this step is a stumbling block on the success path of many content marketing programs. Effective content marketing requires a good strategy, excellent planning, optimized distribution and promotion, and continuous analysis of the effectiveness of content.
To simplify this process and help you maximize the effectiveness of your content marketing program, we have put together a comprehensive outline of how to optimize the entire life cycle of a content marketing campaign to help you stay on the right track to positive ROI. This is the first of a six-part cycle that guides you through each phase of the entire life cycle of a successful content marketing program.
So, without further ado, let's move on to strategy.
Let's draw an analogy with a building. Even if you are not a builder, you know that when building a house, first of all, you need to take care of a solid foundation and build walls, and only then do paint and add furniture. Simply put, if you skimp on the first stage, you doom yourself to failure and the inevitable collapse of your entire unstable and unstable building, which simply cannot survive without a solid foundation.
Why is this so important? Conversations are great, but conversations that have nothing to do and do not correlate with the needs of your customers are useless and ineffective.
That's why you should conduct an annual audit of your content marketing strategy to ensure that your investments are organically aligned with your goals and objectives.
Although this is a relatively time-consuming process, the research phase can begin even when you are just launching your content marketing campaign. Here are a few steps that can help you develop the right strategy for your content marketing:
Marketing strategy involves not only the creation of a large amount of content, but also the ability to make sure that the content is of high quality.
Have you clearly defined the goals and objectives of your content marketing?
Now that we’ve moved on to more content-oriented thinking, let's look at this situation: over the next three months, identify specific business goals that will be common to the entire company, and not just your marketing team. Do you want to be mentioned in 20% or more blogs this quarter? Or do you need to increase sales next year by 15%? All the actions that you take should ultimately contribute to at least one of your goals.
To achieve real results, go beyond engagement and set goals that are directly related to your business. These goals should be translated into clear key performance indicators (KPIs) that you can use to monitor your progress and apply the necessary adjustments if necessary. This will help you make sure that you stay on the path to success.
Before creating your content, you need to determine the mission that your content must complete. In other words, what is the ultimate goal of your content? Creating content blindly, without an initial idea of why you are doing this, is more like a deep dive in pitch darkness: you have no idea where you are going. Use the goals and objectives that you identified earlier, even at the stage of creating the mission of your content marketing, and develop them in the following setting: the mission and strategy of your content should be consistent with your business goals. This idea should be at the root of your content marketing. The content you create should not contradict the original goals that you set at the planning stage of your strategy. For a deeper discussion of this issue, you can read the article,
“Content Direction” is a concept introduced by Joe Pulizzi that emphasizes the importance of differentiating your content from competitors. It also highlights the significant advantage of carefully pre-designing your content before it is created. When planning content, consider how it will differ from similar competitors.
Your industry alone is a great place to start. Here you can get an idea of the most famous authorities, competitors, experts, and other significant topics and personalities within your discussed space. You can find helpful tips about what content your target audience wants to see in this article.
In addition to your industry, however, you should pay attention to your customers: who is better than your customers to help you identify behavioral patterns to achieve your goal? The practice of compiling personal cards (persona mapping) is an effective way to gain a deeper understanding of those who represent your audience: the problems they face, how they make purchasing decisions, and where they turn for advice and communication. Successful pieces of content are those that are specific to your audience.
Look for ways to communicate with customers when, where, and how it is possible. Call them. Buy them some coffee. Tick with the sales team. Receive calls to customer support. Understanding your client is not as difficult as it seems at first. Rather, the fact that most marketers either do not want to make an effort to do this, or are not confident enough to interact directly with tête-à-tête customers.
In the current era of digital technology, when information about almost everything is easily accessible with just a few touches to the smartphone screen, buyers are able to easily educate themselves before making a purchase decision and as a result are more independent and informed than ever. Smart marketers should publish content that directly corresponds to each stage of the three phases of a digital shopper’s travel journey:
According to digital marketing expert Barry Feldman, you should always be able to answer any of your top 30 questions. Make a list of the most frequently asked questions about your industry and prepare an answer for each. If you can’t say anything that would help resolve the issue or add value, then this is a bad topic for discussion.
Determine which stage of the sales funnel corresponds to each question. For example, software pricing questions should be classified as funnel bottom (BoFu), while basic definitions of industry terms will be included at the top of the funnel (FoFu).
According to Lee Oden, “you need to stop creating content and instead start creating answers that are relevant to your customers at every stage.” The following table shows an interesting way to visualize your customer by presenting him in the various steps that he goes through. Later, you can use this to develop and plan the content that you will need to promote:
Organization of significant potential customers: write down the customers you wanted to touch in the columns below. Tip: be realistic and don't list too much.
Define and classify content: create personalized content that will most effectively serve to move from one stage to the next.
Let's try this example: you have identified your target audience as women between the ages of 30 and 50 who live at home with pets and children, and you use content marketing to promote your brand of household cleaning products. Your potential buyer has not heard about your products, so your goal at this stage is to transfer it to the awareness stage. To do this, you should expand and diversify your content. Consider using common concepts, such as “The Brandiest Children's Activities” or “How to Remove Red Wine Stains from a Carpet,” which she might look for in situations where your product might be useful.
Note: when your visitors enter the Review phase and become potential buyers, it's time to add specifics to your strategy. Despite the fact that customers already know about your product, their knowledge is minimal at best, and additional information is needed to fully convince them of the value of your product. Right now you are presenting the benefits of your product. For example, “5 things you could do with a [product] that you don’t know about.”
This is the final stage of the customer’s journey, and at the same time, the best time to attract your community to create additional content. On the one hand, you already have satisfied customers who may be willing to provide evidence of their experience or extol the benefits of your product in writing. But at the same time, you must make sure that these people are nearby and remain loyal, so provide them with informative content that contains useful information about new opportunities, offers, or tips, if applicable.
Building a list of all your ideas for content in the table above will give you a great start to define your content, which you can now design and plan in advance, in the content calendar.
While the results may seem overwhelming, it’s still useful to take into account whether the necessary content will be more useful if it is created from scratch or supervised. Do not forget that third-party content collects from 4x to 7 times more trust than brand-generated content, so overseeing some of the content in the above table is an effective way to save time and reduce stress, while strengthening your position.
Although brand recognition is the primary goal at the top of the funnel, your goals as you progress towards the foundation of the funnel should go towards lead generation through the creation and curation of content.
Organize the framework of your content for conversion: each fragment of the content of the publication (be it original, curated, modified content) should be optimized for conversion. Always include GTS in your blog posts to drive traffic to your landing pages and generate more leads.
You should regularly conduct in-depth audits as the basis of your daily content creation practice. Although this may seem unnecessary at first, you should make auditing a common practice to analyze the effectiveness of your content as it grows. To determine the effectiveness of your content and improve it, you need a holistic method for measuring ROI. This includes careful and regular monitoring of page views, potential customers, sales, etc., created by each piece of content. You should also keep track of conversion rates for each post, which will help you optimize, update, modify, and recycle content over time. This practice is vital if you want to save time and produce more quality content!
If you want to learn more about how to consider the right KPIs to measure the ROI of your content marketing efforts, check out this simple content marketing analytics framework!
• Give value to your audience: Each sentence or paragraph that you write must be designed to provide value to your audience. Your content should be about them and how exactly you can bring something useful or valuable to the life of your customers, and not engage in continuous self-promotion and flood them with information about your brand.
• Maintain integrity: no matter how it sounds, during the writing process it is very easy to get lost and forget about the original purpose of your post. Resist the temptation to flood your readers with information in one post. Instead, think strategically and save some of your ideas for later in order to later develop them into several separate good posts for your blog.
However, creating good content is not an easy task for many marketers, and often this step is a stumbling block on the success path of many content marketing programs. Effective content marketing requires a good strategy, excellent planning, optimized distribution and promotion, and continuous analysis of the effectiveness of content.
Content marketing is a continuous cycle that requires optimization at every stage to achieve success. Failure or ignoring even one of the stages jeopardizes the success of your marketing program, even if your content is of high quality.
To simplify this process and help you maximize the effectiveness of your content marketing program, we have put together a comprehensive outline of how to optimize the entire life cycle of a content marketing campaign to help you stay on the right track to positive ROI. This is the first of a six-part cycle that guides you through each phase of the entire life cycle of a successful content marketing program.
So, without further ado, let's move on to strategy.
What does it mean to develop a content marketing strategy
Let's draw an analogy with a building. Even if you are not a builder, you know that when building a house, first of all, you need to take care of a solid foundation and build walls, and only then do paint and add furniture. Simply put, if you skimp on the first stage, you doom yourself to failure and the inevitable collapse of your entire unstable and unstable building, which simply cannot survive without a solid foundation.
Why is this so important? Conversations are great, but conversations that have nothing to do and do not correlate with the needs of your customers are useless and ineffective.
That's why you should conduct an annual audit of your content marketing strategy to ensure that your investments are organically aligned with your goals and objectives.
Although this is a relatively time-consuming process, the research phase can begin even when you are just launching your content marketing campaign. Here are a few steps that can help you develop the right strategy for your content marketing:
Marketing strategy involves not only the creation of a large amount of content, but also the ability to make sure that the content is of high quality.
Make sure that the results of your content meet your goals.
Have you clearly defined the goals and objectives of your content marketing?
Now that we’ve moved on to more content-oriented thinking, let's look at this situation: over the next three months, identify specific business goals that will be common to the entire company, and not just your marketing team. Do you want to be mentioned in 20% or more blogs this quarter? Or do you need to increase sales next year by 15%? All the actions that you take should ultimately contribute to at least one of your goals.
To achieve real results, go beyond engagement and set goals that are directly related to your business. These goals should be translated into clear key performance indicators (KPIs) that you can use to monitor your progress and apply the necessary adjustments if necessary. This will help you make sure that you stay on the path to success.
Define the mission of your content marketing strategy
Before creating your content, you need to determine the mission that your content must complete. In other words, what is the ultimate goal of your content? Creating content blindly, without an initial idea of why you are doing this, is more like a deep dive in pitch darkness: you have no idea where you are going. Use the goals and objectives that you identified earlier, even at the stage of creating the mission of your content marketing, and develop them in the following setting: the mission and strategy of your content should be consistent with your business goals. This idea should be at the root of your content marketing. The content you create should not contradict the original goals that you set at the planning stage of your strategy. For a deeper discussion of this issue, you can read the article,
Find the direction of your content
“Content Direction” is a concept introduced by Joe Pulizzi that emphasizes the importance of differentiating your content from competitors. It also highlights the significant advantage of carefully pre-designing your content before it is created. When planning content, consider how it will differ from similar competitors.
Know your audience = buyers
Your industry alone is a great place to start. Here you can get an idea of the most famous authorities, competitors, experts, and other significant topics and personalities within your discussed space. You can find helpful tips about what content your target audience wants to see in this article.
In addition to your industry, however, you should pay attention to your customers: who is better than your customers to help you identify behavioral patterns to achieve your goal? The practice of compiling personal cards (persona mapping) is an effective way to gain a deeper understanding of those who represent your audience: the problems they face, how they make purchasing decisions, and where they turn for advice and communication. Successful pieces of content are those that are specific to your audience.
Look for ways to communicate with customers when, where, and how it is possible. Call them. Buy them some coffee. Tick with the sales team. Receive calls to customer support. Understanding your client is not as difficult as it seems at first. Rather, the fact that most marketers either do not want to make an effort to do this, or are not confident enough to interact directly with tête-à-tête customers.
Define your life cycle stages = funnel stages
In the current era of digital technology, when information about almost everything is easily accessible with just a few touches to the smartphone screen, buyers are able to easily educate themselves before making a purchase decision and as a result are more independent and informed than ever. Smart marketers should publish content that directly corresponds to each stage of the three phases of a digital shopper’s travel journey:
Define and answer the main questions of your audience at each stage of the funnel
According to digital marketing expert Barry Feldman, you should always be able to answer any of your top 30 questions. Make a list of the most frequently asked questions about your industry and prepare an answer for each. If you can’t say anything that would help resolve the issue or add value, then this is a bad topic for discussion.
Determine which stage of the sales funnel corresponds to each question. For example, software pricing questions should be classified as funnel bottom (BoFu), while basic definitions of industry terms will be included at the top of the funnel (FoFu).
Map a Buyer's Path
According to Lee Oden, “you need to stop creating content and instead start creating answers that are relevant to your customers at every stage.” The following table shows an interesting way to visualize your customer by presenting him in the various steps that he goes through. Later, you can use this to develop and plan the content that you will need to promote:
Organization of significant potential customers: write down the customers you wanted to touch in the columns below. Tip: be realistic and don't list too much.
Define and classify content: create personalized content that will most effectively serve to move from one stage to the next.
Awareness:
Let's try this example: you have identified your target audience as women between the ages of 30 and 50 who live at home with pets and children, and you use content marketing to promote your brand of household cleaning products. Your potential buyer has not heard about your products, so your goal at this stage is to transfer it to the awareness stage. To do this, you should expand and diversify your content. Consider using common concepts, such as “The Brandiest Children's Activities” or “How to Remove Red Wine Stains from a Carpet,” which she might look for in situations where your product might be useful.
Note: when your visitors enter the Review phase and become potential buyers, it's time to add specifics to your strategy. Despite the fact that customers already know about your product, their knowledge is minimal at best, and additional information is needed to fully convince them of the value of your product. Right now you are presenting the benefits of your product. For example, “5 things you could do with a [product] that you don’t know about.”
Decision:
This is the final stage of the customer’s journey, and at the same time, the best time to attract your community to create additional content. On the one hand, you already have satisfied customers who may be willing to provide evidence of their experience or extol the benefits of your product in writing. But at the same time, you must make sure that these people are nearby and remain loyal, so provide them with informative content that contains useful information about new opportunities, offers, or tips, if applicable.
Building a list of all your ideas for content in the table above will give you a great start to define your content, which you can now design and plan in advance, in the content calendar.
While the results may seem overwhelming, it’s still useful to take into account whether the necessary content will be more useful if it is created from scratch or supervised. Do not forget that third-party content collects from 4x to 7 times more trust than brand-generated content, so overseeing some of the content in the above table is an effective way to save time and reduce stress, while strengthening your position.
Although brand recognition is the primary goal at the top of the funnel, your goals as you progress towards the foundation of the funnel should go towards lead generation through the creation and curation of content.
Optimize your content for conversion
Organize the framework of your content for conversion: each fragment of the content of the publication (be it original, curated, modified content) should be optimized for conversion. Always include GTS in your blog posts to drive traffic to your landing pages and generate more leads.
Always audit
You should regularly conduct in-depth audits as the basis of your daily content creation practice. Although this may seem unnecessary at first, you should make auditing a common practice to analyze the effectiveness of your content as it grows. To determine the effectiveness of your content and improve it, you need a holistic method for measuring ROI. This includes careful and regular monitoring of page views, potential customers, sales, etc., created by each piece of content. You should also keep track of conversion rates for each post, which will help you optimize, update, modify, and recycle content over time. This practice is vital if you want to save time and produce more quality content!
If you want to learn more about how to consider the right KPIs to measure the ROI of your content marketing efforts, check out this simple content marketing analytics framework!
Useful tips to help you keep your finger on the pulse while writing:
• Give value to your audience: Each sentence or paragraph that you write must be designed to provide value to your audience. Your content should be about them and how exactly you can bring something useful or valuable to the life of your customers, and not engage in continuous self-promotion and flood them with information about your brand.
• Maintain integrity: no matter how it sounds, during the writing process it is very easy to get lost and forget about the original purpose of your post. Resist the temptation to flood your readers with information in one post. Instead, think strategically and save some of your ideas for later in order to later develop them into several separate good posts for your blog.