How to Create an Effective Content Marketing Strategy
Content marketing is an essential part of any brand’s digital marketing strategy. In fact, recent research shows that marketers who regularly publish content see a 19 percent increase in search traffic and a 23 percent increase in site visitors. Content marketing helps you establish your brand, build trust with potential customers, and drive traffic to your website by creating blog posts, video content, pictures, images—even GIFs! Content marketing is more than just a series of posts about your company or products. It’s a strategic process that involves analyzing your audience, creating content based on their needs and interests, and distributing it through the right channels — all while tracking performance to see what works and what doesn’t. But if you’re new to content marketing or need a little refresher, this article will help you get started by walking you through the process step by step.
Create a Content Marketing Strategy
First and foremost, you’ll want to create a content marketing strategy. This will help you to map out your entire campaign so you can stay on track and focus on what matters most. With a strategy, you’ll know how much time and money you have to invest, what content types will give you the best ROI, and how to measure your success. Your content marketing strategy should include the following: – Audience: Who are you creating content for? What do they care about? – Objectives: What do you want your audience to do as a result of consuming your content? This can include things like signing up for your email list, making a purchase, or visiting your website. – Content: What kinds of content do you plan to publish? What is the tone and voice of your content? Do you plan to create original content or repurpose existing content? – Channels: Where will you publish your content? Are there certain channels you want to focus on? Do you plan to use paid or organic channels?
Define Your Audience
Before you can create content, you need to know who you’re creating it for. You may already have a general idea of your audience based on who your customers are. Or you may be targeting a totally new audience. Regardless, you need to take the time to really understand your target audience. What are the goals and challenges of the people in your target audience? How do they currently solve those challenges? What type of language do they use? What websites do they visit? You have to get inside their heads and be able to see the world through their eyes. This will help you create effective content that resonates with your audience and moves them to take the next step.
Define Your Content Objectives
Once you’ve mapped out your audience, you need to decide on your content objectives. Your objectives should align with your audience’s goals and trigger a call-to-action that moves them down the conversion funnel. Some common objectives include increasing brand awareness, driving traffic to your website, and increasing sales. Depending on your objectives, you may want to create different types of content. For example, if you want to increase brand awareness, you may want to publish blog posts with helpful tips and tricks. If you want to drive traffic to your website, you may want to create valuable guides that encourage people to sign up for your email list.
Decide on the Right Channels
If you have a general idea of what content you’d like to publish, it’s time to decide on the right channels. You may be creating all new content or repurposing content you’ve already created. In either case, you’ll want to know which channels are best suited for each piece of content. Here are a few considerations when picking channels: – Your audience: What channels do your target audience visit? What is their preferred method of engagement? – Audience size: Are there any platforms where your audience is huge? If so, you may want to focus on those channels. – Channel effectiveness: Does your audience engage with a channel regularly? Does it provide value to your brand? – Channel cost: What is your budget for publishing content? Are there any channels with low publishing costs?
Write Editorial Content
Once you’ve decided on the type of content you’d like to create, it’s time to sit down and write. Editorial content can come in many forms, including blog posts, eBooks, guides, and more. Pick a type of content that speaks to your audience and is closely aligned with your brand. Depending on the type of content you plan to create, you may want to follow best practices like the evergreen article model or the inverted pyramid structure. These models help you create content that’s easy to read and understand. They also allow readers to skim your content, if they so choose. Your content doesn’t have to be long either. In fact, short-form content (like listicles) can perform just as well as long-form content. Just make sure that your content aligns with your objectives.
Don’t Forget The SEO
When you are creating good content it is always a good idea to pick a keyword set that you are writing around. Use a tool or an SEO agency to evaluate your copy. Fine-tuning the copy to make sure it has great value in SEO is worth the spend. We personally offer this service at Univelocity just hit the let’s chat button up top.
Produce Video Content
Videos are one of the most popular types of content in digital marketing. In fact, research shows that 84 percent of people prefer watching videos over reading text. They’re also great for SEO since Google can easily see how relevant your content is. When creating video content, think about your objective and what you want your audience to do. Are you trying to drive traffic to your website? Are you trying to sell a product? Are you trying to increase brand awareness? Once you know what you want your video content to do, you can create a script. Your script should be easy to understand and follow a natural flow. Be sure to include your call-to-action at the end and keep your script short and sweet.
Create Image Content
Images are another highly effective type of content. They’re a great way to break up your content and keep readers engaged. They can also be used as clickable links to direct people to your website. There are a few ways you can create image content. You can take photos or repurpose existing images from your website or social media accounts. If you hire a photographer, you can create stock photos or purchase images from a stock photo website. You can also create graphics in Canva or with other design tools. Depending on what type of image content you want to create, you may want to follow a few best practices. For example, images with human subjects tend to perform better than those without. Similarly, images with objects tend to perform better than those without.
Grow and Measure your Audience
Once you’ve created the content, you need to track its performance and determine what worked and what didn’t. This way, you can continuously improve your content and make sure you’re delivering value to your audience. Track your content performance using a tool like Google Analytics. This will tell you things like how many people visited your website, how long they stayed, and where they came from. You can also track your content performance using a social media management tool like Hootsuite. This will allow you to see how many impressions your content received and how many people engaged with it. Once you’ve collected enough data, you can determine how well your content is doing. If your traffic is increasing and you’re converting visitors into leads, then you know your content is working. If not, you may need to pivot your content to better suit your audience.
A Quick Content Marketing Idea for Small Teams
If you are low on copywriters or on a small marketing team or even just starting out focus on making good content. Once you have created a great blog post, case study, ebook, or white paper get the most out of it. In the past, we have worked with small teams that focused on a really good blog post. Once the blog post was created we broke it up into the H2 tagged sections for posts to social media and to create a campaign with the different sections of the article. So each H2 became the heading of a post to Instagram, Linkedin, Facebook, and Twitter with new images to drive traffic to the website. We also used the same concept in an email nurture campaign.