Planning a solid content marketing strategy will help you work smarter and more efficiently because it will provide you with the information you need to get the results you want.

Planning a content marketing strategy helps you define your content marketing goals, the steps you take to achieve them, and how you measure success.

A good content strategy addresses your business challenges and how you will leverage content to solve them. In fact, creating a documented content marketing strategy is so important that it is the very first step in a content marketing program,

In this article, we will look at some of the most important elements for planning your strong content marketing strategy.

What Is the Content?

Content is information that is relevant in a given context and whose form is determined by the medium through which it is transmitted.

In this sense, we can say that content is information presented through a channel in different forms (textual, graphic, audio, video, …) in a specialized field and for a specific audience. 

In digital marketing, the content applies to white papers and blog posts as much as it does to videos and podcasts.

Content is vital to your business because it allows you to attract potential customers to discover you and engage with you in an organic way.

Content is the means by which you will help people learn something new, solve their problems, work better, and ultimately find solutions that help them achieve their goals.

 It is also a way to show your expertise and make your target audience aware of the things that interest them and to build a relationship of trust with them so that if they decide to buy.

Content marketing is an integral part of many companies’ marketing strategy whether it’s a business-to-business (B2B) or business-to-consumer (B2C).

If you look at the content marketing statistics, you’ll see that 91% of B2B marketers and 86% of B2C marketers use content marketing.

What Is  A Content Marketing Strategy?

A content marketing strategy is a document that describes how you plan to attract and engage your target customers with content. It typically includes an analysis of your customers, the types of information they will need, and the solutions you can present to help them solve.

A content marketing strategy also defines your business objectives and the role your content will play in achieving your company’s business objectives and goals.

Of course, content creation is important to the growth of your business, but it must have a well-planned purpose.  First of all, you need to have a clear idea of the business goals that you can associate the content with. 

In other words, if you don’t have a business goal for creating content, there’s no point in talking about a content strategy. Finally, a content marketing strategy will outline your plans for creating and distributing your content.

Why is A Content Marketing Strategy Important?

As you have seen, content marketing is the marketing approach par excellence. But to put your content marketing into practice, you need a strong marketing strategy.

In fact, having a strong content marketing strategy is important for any business that produces content because it helps you know:

• Who is your target audience?
• What are their pain points?
• What channels do they use when they want to make a purchase in your niche?
• What is your market position?
• Who are your main competitors?
• What are the advantages and disadvantages of your product/service compared to what your competition is offering?
• What are your marketing objectives?
• What are your marketing metrics to measure your progress?
• What is your clear plan to achieve your marketing objectives?
• What are the channels you are focusing on and the marketing methods you plan to use?

A strong content marketing strategy will also allow you to deduce where you are now, mark where you want to go, and map out the path to get there. In addition to all this, you should consider building your presence on social media, forums, Q&A sites, which requires planning a long-term content marketing strategy.

A strong content marketing strategy will allow you to explore where you and your competitors stand in the market, develop a plan to reach your destination, decide which channels you will focus on and which marketing techniques you want to use.

A strong content marketing strategy allows you to coordinate all the efforts you want to deploy, work together to achieve the set goals. You should keep in mind that content marketing is by nature a long-term approach.

Because when you set goals and create content, you’re investing time and resources into assets that will have a profound effect on how people perceive your business and can have a return on investment later.

Spending more time with your content allows you to better craft content that perfectly meets the needs of your potential customers and, as a result, improves trust and loyalty to your brand, as well as engagement and conversion rates.

Another important factor is to make your content on all your channels work together for a common purpose. This is the fastest way to achieve growth.

Key Elements of A Content Strategy

To develop the key elements of your content marketing strategy you need to create a document strong enough to guide your actions and help you meet the challenges.

By asking yourself some questions you can better define the framework of your content marketing strategy.

• What do you want your content to accomplish in pursuit of your business goals?
• What are the key performance indicators (KPIs) for each type of content?
• What is your target audience for the different types of content you will produce?
• What do a content audit of your site’s existing content and our gaps tell you?
• How do you need to find content ideas that match our brand voice, your goals, and your audiences?
• What content formats can you better produce?
• How will you distribute the content?

There is always a need to review your content strategy plan to ensure it is current, engaging, and innovative for your audiences.

Content marketing statistics provide information that allows content marketers to see how they solve problems for their target customers and generate leads. This allows you to decide which techniques will be most effective for your audience, your business, and your prospects.

Content Marketing Strategy for SEO

Content is the most important part of any content and SEO strategy. Google is increasingly focused on providing users with quality content that satisfies their search intent.

If you’re new to content creation, you can give your content more weight and authority by creating a thematic group of content that targets researchers who want to answer questions or solve a problem.

Your content needs to be well organized and connected to each other to stand out in SEO. 

Read More:

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Here’s how to develop a strong content marketing strategy in 10 steps:

1. Set Your Content Marketing Goals

Your content marketing strategy consists of establishing a brief mission statement that makes it easier for you to focus on what is important in creating your content.

If you know your goals before you start planning, it will be easier to determine what is best for your content marketing strategy.

In the content marketing mission statement, you need to describe your target audience, the content you will use to reach it, and the benefit you will derive from it.

Your objectives should, of course, be linked to your overall mission and vision. To make your goals clearer to your audience, your content must also be organized hierarchically to achieve those goals.

Some questions can help you better understand the creation of your content.

• What is your goal and what is your strength in developing a content marketing plan?
• Why do you want to create a content marketing plan and produce content?

Your goals may be an increase in revenue, an increase in traffic to your site, a commitment to social media, an increase in visibility and authority for your company, SEO success, etc.

2. Know Your Audience

For a successful content marketing strategy, you need to be clear on who your audience is in order to create the right content to reach them.

By knowing your prospects and your target audience, you can produce more valuable and relevant content that the audience might want to read and convert.

The best way to know your target audience is to create a buyer persona. A buyer persona is a fictional profile that describes your ideal customer, based on market research and information from your current customers.

When you create your buyer persona you need to describe their days, the things they care about, and the things that motivate them, especially when it comes to your products and services.

Define the topics that your brand can and should provide a solution for, then create buyer personas that you will address.

Gather information about your audience so that your content resonates with them.

Who is interested in your content?

How many audiences are you creating content for?

What problem can your content solve for your buyer persona?

With the information and feedback from your customers, you can prioritize their needs and priorities. This allows you to create buyer personas to better target your efforts and create the type of content that will help them the most.

In general, your content should educate and train your audience and make them more qualified users of your product.

 As you move forward, your content strategy should support different types of audiences.  Those who are already using your products to overcome challenges and those who are still thinking about their key challenges.

Using tools like Google Analytics, you can gather demographic data such as age, gender, education, income, and interest from your visitors, email subscribers, and social media followers.

If you want to engage different types of buyer personas in your business, consider using different types of content and channels.

3. Establish Your Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)

Once you have defined your objectives, you need to choose the right key performance indicators for your content marketing strategy. The best way to achieve your goals is to make them specific and measurable.

 This means defining key performance indicators (KPIs). KPIs will let you know when you’ve reached your planned goals in terms of revenue, sales, traffic, SEO, and various aspects of digital marketing such as email marketing and social media metrics.

Here are some examples of the KPIs you should measure to achieve your content marketing goals.

Drive additional traffic to your site

For this goal, you need to focus on creating engaging content that drives readers to your site which not only increases readership but can also increase your brand’s online credibility and increase sales.

Some of the KPIs of the content marketing strategy for this objective are:

• Total number of monthly website views,
• Content conversion rates
• Percentage of returning readers.

Develop brand awareness

For this KPI your content marketing strategy should include creating branded content that people love and want to share with others.

KPIs to measure the success of this goal include:

• Social shares
• Views from partner audiences

Lead generation

A reliable strategy to achieve this goal is to offer valuable content for the purpose of lead generation.

Some of the key performance indicators related to this objective are:

• Landing page conversion rates
• Number of leads generated

Improve customer retention

This is an important KPI to help you build awareness of your business and brand yourself as an expert in the field by offering relevant and valuable content that informs and educates your customers.

Some of the KPIs for content marketing include

• Upsell revenue,
• Percentage of loyal customers
• Retention rates.

Convert more prospects into customers

To achieve this goal, focus on creating content that, while emphasizing engagement and quality, informs your prospects about your company and your products or services.

Read More:

18 Main Content KPIs You Need to Track to Measure Success

4. Conducting a Competitive Analysis

You can actually learn a lot from your competitors by conducting a competitive content analysis. To implement your content strategy, it is important to conduct a competitive analysis to determine where you need to put more effort and resources into the content.

Make a list of your competitors and conduct a website audit of your competitors to determine how many different types of content such as blogs, case studies, white papers, ebooks, etc. they have published and how often they publish each type of content.

You may notice that some of your acquaintances have so much content that it will take a giant content creation team to top it.

But this will at least help you find inspiration and define your content strategy better to compete with your online competitors, and eventually surpass them.

This way you can understand what type of content works best for them and how you can stand out.

You can take advantage of SEO tools like SEMRush or Ahrefs, to find out plenty of information about your competitors as well as their most successful content, the keywords that bring them traffic, the amount of traffic they get from paid and organic search, their backlinks, and much more.

With tools like BuzzSumo, you can also gain a lot of information about how your competitors’ content is performing on social media.

5. Assess Your Current Position

Content is the most important part of any content and SEO strategy. Google is increasingly focused on providing users with quality content that satisfies their search intent.

If you’re new to content creation, you can give your content more weight and authority by creating a thematic group of content that targets researchers who want to answer questions or solve a problem. Your content needs to be well organized and connected to each other to stand out in SEO. 

If you’ve been in business for some time, review and analyze your content marketing efforts. Perform a content audit and collect the results of that audit over the past year. You can perform a content audit with tools such as Screaming Frog and SEMRush. 

Screaming Frog gives you a list of URLs on your site and analyzes page titles and descriptions as well as duplicate page searches. With Screaming Frog, you can even create sitemaps.

With SEMRush, you can audit your site. Just set up a project and select the URL you want to audit. The result of the audit gives you a detailed list that includes content titles and descriptions, content length, links, and social actions.

Using the information collected by auditing your content you can explore and determine what you will be doing in the coming year and set new goals to achieve.

6. Create An Editorial Calendar

Lack of planning is a key mistake in your content marketing strategy. As part of your content marketing strategy, you need to know exactly when you want to publish your content on each of the platforms you want to use.

Therefore, it is essential to build an editorial calendar also known as a content calendar to plan all your content.  To find content topics you can use Buzzsumo’s question parser and then add them to your calendar.

Choose a given topic and the Buzzsumo tool will give you a list of questions that people have actually searched for on Google. Once you have gathered the titles of the content you are going to create, you can integrate them into an editorial calendar that will provide you with a schedule for distributing the content to your audience.

If you’re only publishing a few pieces of content per month a simple spreadsheet may suffice.

But if several people are involved in the creation of each piece of content, you’ll need a tool that is tailored to your work to specify who is responsible for making which content, etc.

There are several tools you can use like Google Calendar, CoSchedule, or G Suite.

Using an editorial calendar can have a big impact on your efficiency and help you increase traffic.

 Using an editorial calendar, you can publish a library with diverse and well-balanced content. You can also use a social media content calendar to promote and manage your content on social media networks and other sites.

7. Create Content

When you start writing, you need to find out what already exists on the topic of your content, then try to add value to your audience. Do keyword research to identify key terms to use to improve SEO and search engine ranking.

Think about having a consistent voice that reflects your brand personality while keeping in mind the SEO ranking factors that are important to optimize your content.  For example, you can be professional, very casual, or something in between.

The important thing is to keep a balance between condescending to your audience and showcasing your expertise.

Types of content to create

To create an effective content marketing strategy, you need to find successful content to build on.

Think about the type of content you want to create because each type of content will require a different approach.

 There are different types of content you can create for your readers or viewers, some examples of which are:

Blog posts

Most successful content marketing strategies are based on publishing a central core of content on a site that must be published regularly to attract new visitors.

Your articles should provide useful content to your audience, encouraging them to share them on social media networks and other websites.

Again, with Buzzsumo, you can match the types of blog posts you want to create. 

With Buzzsumo, you can also view social sharing statistics for content on the web such as

-The popularity rate of the content on a particular topic.

– Data on the most shared domains publishing on that topic.

 – The top shared content items related to it.

E-books

E-books in the context of inbound marketing are lead generation tools that customers or readers can download after submitting their details in a form.

They are typically more in-depth, longer, and published less frequently than blog posts.

Case Studies

A case study is the most versatile type of content marketing strategy, as it can take many different forms, such as a blog post, a podcast, an ebook, and even a graphic design.

With a case study, you can tell the story of a client or customer who successfully solved a problem by working with you.

Templates

Templates are a convenient content format for generating leads and providing exceptional value to your audience. With template tools, you can help your audience save time and succeed by increasing engagement with your content.

Infographics

 Infographics are a great way to share a large amount of data that is easy and clear to understand.

Videos

Visual content, such as videos, is the preferred form of content to capture the audience’s attention. It is a highly engaging form of content that can be shared on social media networks and websites.

Videos require a greater investment of resources and time than written content, but visual content is gaining popularity.

Podcasts

By launching a podcast, you don’t have to worry about your audience being busy offline. Your listeners can download or stream the file and listen again at their convenience. If someone chooses to subscribe to your podcast feed, they can automatically download all the podcasts they are interested in.

If you have conversations about interesting people to interview, consider podcasting as another content format to experiment with.

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8. Determine the Best Content Channels

Just as you can develop content in different formats (blog posts, infographics, videos), you will also have different channels such as your website or social media to publish the content.

 Depending on your preferences, you may be in certain social networks that have a larger audience than others. It’s best to focus on what works and build from there, rather than trying to do everything at once.

Start with market research to find out which channels your audiences are on and tailor your content to meet their expectations. For example, Pinterest can serve up several pieces of visual content, such as diagrams, infographics, or original illustrations, to drive traffic to your website.

Instagram is particularly well-positioned to tell a visual story that showcases your brand identity. With platforms like Twitter and Facebook, you can expand your audience and drive traffic to your website.

On Facebook, you can share your website content, blog posts, and product promotion videos. Again, as the last step, you can take advantage of some tools.  For example, Google Analytics can help you get an overview of the top social networks where your content is shared.

Another tool that can provide you with similar data is Buzzsumo.  Buzzsumo’s content analysis tool gives you graphs showing metrics such as shares by the network, shares by content type, shares by content length, and top content from the past year.

 This information gives you an idea of which networks to target to get social media engagement and shares for your content.

9. Plan Content Distribution

The next step after the creation of the content would be to distribute and market your content. To get the results you want, you need to process them properly. To do so, you can proceed to:

• Establish a schedule for sharing your content on social media.  Distributing your content on different social media platforms can seem time-consuming. You can easily automate social media publishing across multiple networks.
•  Use email marketing to distribute your content to subscribers.
• If you have mentioned influential people in your content, you can alert them to distribute your content even more widely.

10. Analyze Content Performance

The best way to know if your content marketing strategy is really contributing to your goals is to measure your key performance indicators (KPIs).  

And these KPIs will depend on the goals you set for yourself when creating content. For example, if you decide to create blog posts for SEO, you should track metrics such as :

– The position of each blog post in searches and the number of clicks versus impressions.

– Organic traffic

This is the amount of traffic each blog post brings to your website.

 – Conversion rate

What do your visitors do after consuming your content? Do they leave or continue to read other content, sign up for your newsletter or leave comments?

– the number of email subscribers

-the rate of engagement in the email

-time spent on the site

– event registrations

– Comments, shares, and mentions.

Try to prioritize these metrics. Then decide how often (monthly or weekly) you will collect your data.

You can collect this information using tools like Google Analytics to look at data such as:

– What brought them to your site (content creation, distribution, promotion, etc.)

– Subscription sources (ebooks, your content, webinars, social networks, etc.)

You can then combine and present all of this data each month to get the information you need to make decisions.

All of this helps you adjust your content marketing strategy to make sure you’re meeting the interests and expectations of your readers, which certainly contributes to your own goals.

Read More:

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Conclusion

Having a content marketing strategy is no guarantee of success, but not having a strategic approach will cause your business to grow more slowly than it could. By following these steps and exploring the resources mentioned here, you can easily implement your content marketing plan and better manage your business.

Plan your content strategy with the resources you have and commit to a high level of quality and targeted brand messaging.  And then continue to develop your content strategy as you learn more about your customers, engage with them, and build the bridge between your brand and the people your business exists for.

Once you’ve documented your content marketing strategy, you need to create a phased approach and timeline or project plan for outstanding items and include the necessary stakeholders.

 By tracking your key performance indicators, you’ll be able to find insights and make optimizations that will get more people in your target audience engaged with the right content, ultimately leading them to a profitable business.

Most importantly, remember that you need time to track, analyze and report on your performance – in other words, to develop a solid and effective content marketing strategy.