If you are running an online business in this day and age, you are pretty much aware of the fact that traditional marketing is no longer effective. People are tired of being pitched to, which is why all successful businesses are pursuing their customers by offering high-quality content first.
However, even though the excellent material is the foundation of everything, you need to come up with a clear and well-thought-out content marketing strategy, if you are hoping to turn your followers into leads and then customers.
This means analyzing who the content will be written for, and which problems it will address. It also needs to be original and unique, and on top of that, you need to decide on its format and on the channels through which you will promote it.
According to Myles Petersen, who is the head of marketing for writing service Essay Scholaradvisor, whether you are just starting out or you are an experienced content marketer, you should do the following to put together an effective content marketing strategy:
1. Establish a Clear Goal
This is your starting point. You need to have a bright idea about what you want your content marketing strategy to achieve. For example, even though your ultimate goal is the increase your revenue by selling more product, there are other, smaller goals which lead up to that.
This includes boosting your traffic, increasing the quality of your leads, spreading awareness about your brand, building backlinks, reaching out to influencers, and so on. Your content strategy should reflect your goal.
2. Create Audience Personas
Coming up with a specific audiences persona will help you with addressing the right kind of audience, as well as to keep your content marketing efforts more focused and effective.
However, you should also make it a habit of updating your audience personas regularly, because they are susceptible to change over time. This means you will either have to change your personas to match your old audience better or to target an entirely new one.
3. Perform a Content Audit
If you have been doing content marketing for a while, and the volume of your content is significant, you can improve your strategy by doing a thorough audit of your content. Why would you want to do that? Even if you have been fortunate, there is always room for improvement, and the only way to tell which aspect of your strategy need improvement is to do an audit.
This includes analyzing analytics data, which should give you a better insight into your audience's habits, preferences, demographics, as well as devices and channels they like to use, repurposing your content, and changing your posting times on social media, just to name a few.
While you can build your website from scratch, if you choose to make one using a CMS, such as WordPress, you can make your job a lot easier. A lot of these platforms also can capture analytics data, automate some of your SEO efforts, and lots of other things. On top of that, you can quickly expand the functionality of every CMS with plugins.
Efficiently managing your content will save you a lot of time, as well as money because you will be able to do some of the things yourself since CMSs are usually very user-friendly.
5. Decide on the Type of Content
If you want your marketing strategy to work, your content needs to be diverse, even though the written material is still as popular as ever, you should create other types of content, as well. This means relying on different forms, such as images, infographics, video, podcasts, ebooks, animation, or slideshows, depending on your goals, as well as your target audience.
For instance, if you are targeting a younger audience which prefers to use portable devices, short videos, images, and infographics would be a lot more efficient than in-depth articles.
If you are trying to develop your business or brand, you will need to create accounts on all major social media platforms, because you don't want someone else to post questionable or inappropriate content under the same name as yourself, because that can break your reputation in seconds.
But, running all of them is not possible most of the time, or even necessary. For example, if your business is about selling products that have anything to do with fashion, lifestyle, or fitness, you will need to focus on platforms like Instagram, Pinterest, Facebook, and perhaps even Tumblr, and avoid others, such as LinkedIn.
All of this seems like a lot of work, and it is. But, if you take the time and do all of the things listed above, you will be able to build a brilliant content marketing strategy that will produce some excellent results. It is worth it.
