Content Marketing Strategy

What is a Content Marketing Strategy

A content marketing strategy isn’t to be confused with your content strategy or content plan. These terms are often used interchangeably when the three are separate and necessary assets for any marketing plan.

Your content marketing strategy is why you’re creating content, the audience you’re helping, and how you’ll help them in ways your competition cannot. Typically, this involves using content marketing to build their audience, so they can either lower costs, earn more revenue, or reach better customers.

Your content strategy is broader in scope. It involves creating and publishing valuable and usable content. You’ll determine the titles and types of content and where to publish them. Some will be posted on your website, while others will go to different websites where your audience will likely browse.

Your content plan is the tactical document outlining exactly how you’ll execute your content strategy and who will handle all the tasks.

Your internet marketing strategy must come before you build your content plan. It is the marketing plan for your content, so it needs to include key topic areas you’ll cover, the content assets you’ll create, when and how you’ll share your content, and any specific calls to action to include. With that said, let’s focus on what to include in your content marketing strategy.

Why You Should Invest in Content Marketing

Content marketing generates more than three times the leads for your business as outbound marketing but costs 62% less. Not only this, but a content marketing strategy can also affect other marketing activities you’re already using. For instance, an ongoing content strategy can help you build more organic search traffic, increasing the chance your company will appear in the search results for users in your target demographics.

Having a content strategy in place can give you content to fuel social media syndication efforts. You’ll have updates to share on social media and content you can add to your email marketing campaigns. You can use your best content for a landing page to increase conversions for a paid advertising campaign.

Content marketing isn’t limited to just blog posts. You can use it with many assets, including everything from white papers to video, audio, infographics, and more.

The Business Goals You Hope to Achieve with Content Marketing

Think about your goals for content marketing. Do you want to increase your customer base as a whole, boost average order value, improve the quality of your customer base, or reduce marketing costs? What is the unique value you’re aiming to provide with your content? Consider your business model and the opportunities and obstacles you may encounter as you execute the plan.

Your Buyer Personas and Customer Journeys

Here you discuss the specifics of the audiences you’re creating the content for. You’ll detail who they are, what they need, and what their content engagement cycle may look like. It’s also a good idea to map out the content you can deliver throughout their buyer journey so you can help move them closer to their goals.

Think about the messages you want to share and how your messages differ from those of the competition. Also, note speculations about how you believe the landscape will evolve after you share the messaging with your audience.

Your Brand Story

Distribution Channels

Here, outline the platforms you’ll use to tell your brand story. Outline your goals, objectives, criteria, and processes for each one. Then, consider how you’ll connect them to maintain a seamless customer experience and cohesive brand conversation. If you do not know where to start, feel the channels your target audience uses to connect with the brands they love – even if they are your competition.

If you struggle to find the time to build a complete content marketing strategy, you can simplify the process with a one-page plan. This plan includes a laser focus on the goals your company aims to accomplish within the next year and how you measure progress toward those objectives. What will content marketing do during the next year (build brand awareness, introduce a new product, and so on), and what are the metrics you’ll measure to determine how successful content marketing is? And if even that’s still too much for you because you need to handle other things in your business, you can contact us here at SEO Inc. for guidance.

Contact us to learn more about how we can help you, and get in touch today! You can also book a meeting directly with our CEO, Garry Grant. Click the following link to Schedule a call with Garry.