Constantly creating fresh content that will be accepted by your audience can be a challenge. This is why most business owners look for someone to do the hard work. But one thing is for sure; content marketing is a necessary strategy for those who wish to raise their brand awareness. So how do you create an effective content marketing strategy? Check out some of the tips below!
Know your audience
Trying to serve your audience with streams of blogs and articles but failing to understand exactly what their needs are will have a negative impact on your marketing strategy. Gaining access to your market is easy. You can study the efforts of other brands or competitors that share your market. Have a look at their top-performing posts and gain insights from them. You can also look at your best-performing social posts and the tone that grabs the attention of your followers.
You can use surveys or track traffic reports from Google Analytics. Taking a look at your audience directly means knowing where they hang out, what they love, and their shopping and browsing habits. Having such knowledge helps you create an effective content marketing strategy.
Know your goals and mission
It is only wise to pen down your mission statement and the goals you wish to accomplish with your posts before you start brainstorming ideas. This step normally gives you an anchor to all of your future assignments. What most marketers don’t understand is that they can communicate the objective of a business with a simple mission statement.
Within the statement, you can also isolate your audience, content form and main objective. You should also establish a clear understanding of the type of posts you’ll be providing apart from just having a good mission statement. Your breakdown should look like:
- 40% recipes and advice, and otherwise interesting content that fosters cultural engagement.
- 20% content curation from different sources
- 20% brand promotion
- 10% product-related ideas
- 10% promoting company culture with the intention of recruiting new talent and company updates.
Research
Content creators always have an easy time thanks to Google Alerts. Creating and commissioning content calls for a great deal of research and this tool comes in handy. Creating an effective marketing strategy also demands that you stay up-to-date on popular news, viral internet items and videos. All these should be related to your industry so that you can source interesting posts to include in your blog.
Draft ideas
By using your statement, content breakdown and the info you have on your target clients, you will be able to assemble your team and draft lots of ideas. The ideas can be in form of headlines you can optimise with useful titles. For instance, you can write around 25 evergreen titles that will rank over time. Have your audience in mind as you create the titles.
Your ideas should also be more informative, with an approachable tone if your intent is to cater to a market of entrepreneurs and creative professionals. On the other hand, if your website caters for ‘men’s interest’, you should try to be humorous and casual at the same time.
Creating an effective content marketing strategy shouldn’t always be based on self-promotion. If your marketing efforts are ads about your product, then you are bound to lose visitors. You should always make sure your audience has informative content.
Figure out the best medium for each idea
You may be having a number of ideas for your content. However, not all of them play the same way. Try exploring different media for communicating them. The best and most effective route is making use of a straight blog post. There are other ideas that are suited to a video or infographic. This will help you enhance your brand identity, engage your audience and capture more readers who view your website on various platforms.
Create an editorial calendar and assign your team.
You need to come up with an editorial calendar once you have an idea of how your posts will be shaped. The calendar should include social media posts and audit dates so that your post is always on track.
You should be able to publish at least a blog post a week, or you can aim for much more such as three a day (depending on your budget and the team). All in all, you have to be consistent. You can commission your blog posts and articles as soon as you have a concrete plan of your content stream.
Publish, promote and track the progress of your contents
Quality should always come first before anything else when it comes to publishing content. The posts you intend to forward should ideally be useful and informative for your audience, carefully edited for grammar and spelling and also written with a tone that best fits your readers.
To improve the brands google ranking, you should consider including SEO elements in each post. Keep an eye on the post analytics to guide your later posts as you think of publishing and promoting them. Being aware of the responses from your readers will help you create a better post.
By following the above steps, you should be able to create an effective content marketing strategy that will boost your website. Once your bounce rate starts rising, add more elements on the page to direct your readers to other interesting posts. If you are also getting a substantial bump in referral traffic from other blogs or sites, consider interacting with them on a deeper level to increase its promotion.