The rapid digitization of the world has made traditional marketing practices obsolete and no longer effective for any progressive marketing plan. The world has changed so much that even traditional digital marketing is unable to cope up with the changes and new domains and strategies are added each day under the digital marketing horizon. The rapid rise in
Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies have brought together a revolution in the digital marketing world where everyone seems to be curious about how their jobs will be impacted by the onset of new AI tools.
With the continuous evolution of the digital marketing industry, content marketing is emerging to be a full-fledged domain that has become an integral part of any successful marketing strategy.
There is a good reason behind the integration of content marketing into all marketing plans and that is because content marketing is known to generate three times more leads than paid search or other advertising plans.
If you want to unleash the full potential of content marketing and grow your business revenue you need to have an effective content marketing strategy as not all strategies will work wonders for you. But before doing so, you first need to understand what content marketing strategy is and then move forward to know what the better way to do it is.
If you are interested in finding the answers to these queries, then you have presumably hit the right spot, this is because, here I’m going to explain the basics of content marketing strategies, and I will also outline the key components of a successful content marketing plan.
In this blog post, you will learn:
- What Is Content Marketing Strategy?
- Why Have A Content Marketing Plan?
- Elements Of A Powerful Content Marketing Strategy
- Steps To Creating A Complete Content Strategy
- How To Perfect Your Content Marketing Strategy With Rankwdh
Let’s get started with understanding the basics of content marketing and its significance for modern businesses and promotion plans.
What Is Content Marketing?
Content marketing is a strategic marketing approach that is concerned with the creation and distribution of valuable and relevant content to attract the attention of a specific audience. Content marketing involves consistent content creation for capturing and retain the attention of a clearly defined audience niche to maintain brand credibility in the field. The ultimate goal of content marketing like all other marketing approaches is to have increased revenue focused on profitable customer action.
Content marketing is slightly different from other digital marketing approaches in the sense that it is not focused on pitching products or services a brand wants to sell but rather the content marketers are entirely focused on providing relevant and valuable content that is desired by prospective customers and they are finding it to solve their issues.
All in all, content marketing is all about growing, engaging, and retaining your brand audience/ customers by providing them with valuable content that gives solutions to their issues regarding the products or services of that specific brand.
Now that you have briefly grasped the idea of content marketing, let’s dive into understanding the content marketing strategy and then proceed with knowing how to do it perfectly.
What Is A Content Marketing Strategy?
A content marketing strategy is a comprehensive promotional plan regarding a product or service offered by a brand. This well-executed plan is focused on creating an outline of how a brand/ business will use desirable and relevant content to attract and retain customers.
The content to be created may be in a variety of forms and is distributed through a variety of digital channels such as blog posts, videos, social media posts, newsletters, articles, buying guides, and Infographics.
Some of the widely used content marketing examples include:
- Emails
- Podcasts
- e-Books
- Newsletters
- Social media posts
- Blog posts
Content marketing is crucial to the success of any business be it offline or online and for a good reason, because digital channels have become part and parcel of modern life offering an increased likelihood of being viewed by potential customers. Skipping out on these channels will put the business at risk of losing out to competitors and for effective business growth, an effective content marketing strategy is the key.
Effective content marketing refers to a well-thought-out marketing plan that is focused on bringing the full potential of digital media channels in promoting the products and services offered by a brand improving leads, retaining customers, and ultimately increasing the revenue generated.
For a content marketing strategy to be effective, you must have a carefully planned “Content Plan” which should be aimed at sending the right message to the right candidate or I should rather say, potential customers.
Content Plan is commonly going by the name content calendar where brands and businesses keep track of their written plan for managing the distribution of products and services. For instance, if you are a startup online shop looking for an effective marketing strategy, you would necessarily incorporate social media channels blog posts, emails, newsletters, and even paid search in your marketing plans.
Your content plan or content calendar will mark the time with specific timelines to display your upcoming steps in the distribution of your products and services. You may have planned to release a blog post on the 10th of the current month at 7 am while emails and newsletters about that specific blog post will be shared with subscribers and potential customers at the next hour.
Similarly, you may have planned to share your blog post on social media platforms such as Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, etc. on a coming day. Thus your content plan will highlight all the activities you will be planning for promoting your product or service across various platforms during a month or a year.
While creating your marketing plan, you must structure it around the needs of your target audience. Another significant factor to be mindful of is the goals of the business you have set for yourself.
Creating engaging, valuable, and relevant content is the heart of any content marketing plan but effective content marketing strategies should not only focus on creating content. This is because distribution and promotion of the content are of equal importance as that of content creation in content marketing.
Distribution and promotion channels and platforms will determine if your content is viewed only or is engaging your potential customers. The visitor engagement with your content will increase the likelihood of conversions and thus will bring in more leads, and better revenue and ultimately will establish your brand as an authority in the field.
Now that I have briefly highlighted the definitions and basics of content marketing strategy, you must be wondering why you need to have a content marketing plan or why there should be a content marketing strategy to begin, does simply sharing your product on social posts suffice as a content marketing strategy or is there more it? Let’s find a detailed answer to all these queries in the coming section by highlighting the significance of a content marketing plan.
Why Have A Content Marketing Plan?
The importance of content marketing for any business is a fact and there is no second thought to it. But what most people mistake with an effective content marketing plan is that haphazard production and distribution of content is not what drives your business growth but rather a well-executed marketing plan with clearly defined audience, goals, timelines and channels to be used for distribution is what a successful content marketing strategy requires.
A successful content marketing strategy will define success metrics, help business owners achieve specific goals, and improve their business growth by expanding their reach and retaining their customers. The difference between an effective and ineffective content marketing strategy may be narrowed down to documentation only.
According to verified content marketing sources, it is confirmed that 78% of successful content marketers believe in having documented content marketing strategies while unsuccessful content marketers seem to have no such documentation process.
Documentation of your content marketing strategy is what makes your content marketing plan, when you are going to create desired content and when you are going to distribute it is specifically written in your content plan and it determines the success of your strategy and ultimately helps you achieve your marketing goals.
Besides making the content marketing strategy successful and driving business growth, some important benefits of an effective content marketing plan are explored below:
Builds Brand Reputation:
Having high-quality accurate and factual content on your website or your blog is what determines your brand reputation. The quality and accuracy of the published content is what gives the visitors an idea about your credibility and strength in the field. Visitors are seeking information and for saving their time and resources they will only think about visiting credible and reputable websites that provide them with valuable information.
For instance, if you are a novice digital marketer seeking information about the latest trends and happening, you may likely visit Hubspot to find answers to your queries, if you are a financial geek, you may rather go with Forbes or Wall Street Journal rather than visiting any random sites at SERPs.
Thus having reliable content will add to your credibility and reputation as a brand and this will bring in possible visitors and increase the likelihood of conversions.
Improves Seo Rankings:
SEO strategies are integral for increasing your organic reach and site traffic. The basic SEO strategy to have improved ranking is to add quality content to your sites thus content marketing is the heart of SEO marketing plans and valuable, engaging, relevant content to your domain will determine your online visibility. Better quality content will ensure enhanced visibility and therefore, will generate more leads.
For instance, you can integrate trending keywords and related keywords in your content to increase your organic reach of the site and have a better ranking on the search engine result pages (SERPs).
Drives Traffic To The Website:
As I have said above better quality content will ensure brand credibility and will improve SEO ranking, all of these strategies will ultimately increase the traffic to your site which is the first step in achieving your brand goals of better revenue and improved customer satisfaction.
For instance, by Having the right content marketing plan, businesses can attract visitors to their website, retain potential customers, and thus increase the chances of converting them into paying customers.
Increases Customer Loyalty:
Regularly updating your site with valuable content that is desired and enjoyed by visitors and customers alike is the key to having a loyal customer base. If a brand wants to keep customers engaged and ensure that they keep coming back for more, there should be something productive to be offered in exchange for their time. Seeing those visitors as products and providing them with reliable services will instill loyalty in them and will compel them to come again to find solutions to their queries and problems.
5 Elements Of A Powerful Content Marketing Strategy
Let’s now head for finding ideas to develop specific content marketing strategies and for that knowing the essential elements of an effective marketing strategy is the way to go. A powerful content marketing strategy should be based on these 5 elements to achieve success and ensure efficiency:
The five elements of a powerful marketing strategy are:
- Audience Personas
- Brand Storytelling
- Brand Mission
- Brand Goals
- Action Plan
Let us now discuss each of these elements in detail.
Audience Personas: Well-Defined Target Audience:
Identifying your audience and specifying their requirements and needs is the very first step you should take for planning your marketing strategy be it content marketing, social media marketing, or any other promotional plan. If you don’t know who you are talking to and what they want to listen to, keeping their attention and making your point seems difficult therefore, if you want to achieve half success in your content marketing plan, begin with a clearly defined audience is a necessary milestone to be achieved.
You can identify your audience in the following ways:
- By surveying your consumers and finding out their needs and specific changes they desire
- By researching industry trends and market changes
- Specifying targeted and non-targeted sections of the audience
- By keeping tabs on your competitors and their targeted audiences
Brand Storytelling: Unique Value Proposition:
After defining your target audience, you should think about defining your business, and this is done by summarizing your business history, company mission, purpose, and values. A brand story is an insight into a company/ business that will highlight what you want to sell and to whom you should sell. Your brand story will also determine the right message for promotional deals and packages to your targeted audience. Brand storytelling will give direction to your marketing strategy and plan.
You should focus your story around the following points to make your content marketing strategy effective
You should portray your customers are the heroes of the story and focus on their goals and challenges so that customers can relate to the content and feel immersed in it.
Keep consistent with your brand personality and don’t deviate from taking a turn around
Highlight the purpose and key values of your brand that customers can find relatable
Connect all the above-mentioned factors (Brand personality, values, purpose, and goals of the brand to the hero and center it on your product to build the narrative of the product making the hero).
Brand Mission/ Multi-Channel Approach:
Digital media marketing is reliable if you have control over your owned media outlets and for having the best of your brand mission and goals, it is important to go with multiple channels and not just put all your eggs in a single bucket. You should highlight your brand mission according to the specific story you have built and then relate it to media channel goals.
Every social media channel has its specific requirements and target audience and this should be kept in mind to distribute your content. For instance, you can promote your services and skill sets on LinkedIn platforms while you can promote your luxury products and services on Instagram, Facebook, etc. Similarly, Twitter may be suitable for building your brand narrative and storytelling or ensuring customer engagement.
Keep the target audience in mind and center your content on their preferred media outlet. For instance, if your target audience is teens or Gen Z, promoting on streaming sites or music applications may be a better way to achieve your goals than putting efforts into covering various digital channels. To align the business mission with the platform you should focus on the following points:
Your audience: the users for whom you are creating content
The benefit: the value you add to your audience’s life or the information you will provide them.
The outcome: how will the published content help the audience in achieving their goals?
Business Goals/Content Distribution And Promotion Plan:
You should establish your business goals and then work your best to achieve your goals. Depending on the type and level of the goals you want to achieve you should employ both paid and unpaid strategies to achieve your business goals.
The content should be promoted through paid and organic channels, such as email marketing, social media, and SEO. You should also keep a record of your business goals in documentation form and then use that for your business cases. Depending on your business case, you will then plan your distribution and promotion plans for the products and services.
You can create a business case (documentation) by following strategies:
- Identifying business goals
- Finding out the company’s perspective in achieving those goals
- Resources to be used for achieving those goals
- The expected outcomes of your investment
- Budgeting your whole marketing plan
Action Plan:
The final step is to put your plan into action and you should use a formal content plan to distribute and promote your product and services. A personalized strategy will be effective for diverse audiences. Keep in mind that regular analysis of the data gathered through content marketing campaigns is important in helping businesses refine their strategies and identify the most effective tactics.
You can use the following points to create an action plan:
- Choosing content topics and campaigns
- Determining content formats
- Picking distribution channels for promotion
7 Steps To Creating A Complete Content Strategy
If you are looking forward to creating your very own content marketing strategy that aligns with your business goals and mission statements then you should take into account long-term planning to incorporate challenges and resources required for effective implementation of your strategy.
Long-term planning is significant in marketing plans it can anticipate challenges, weaknesses, and drawbacks and then provide durations for remedial measures to be taken as corrective phase of the marketing plan.
Documentation is necessary for all long-term plans and while documenting your content marketing strategy you should mark all the important dates and venues to be shared with stakeholders. You can create documents in Google Docs, spreadsheets, slide decks,s or any other format that offers cloud backup and offline working support.
A complete content marketing strategy involves a few key steps that are given below:
Define Your Target Audience:
As I have asserted in the elements of a content marketing strategy, you should focus your strategy on those elements therefore, the very first step of any content marketing strategy should be to research your audience.
Find out their needs, goals, aspirations, and what they are looking for in products and services. Having a clearly defined target audience is the single most important factor that determines the effectiveness and success of any strategy.
If you fail to perceive the requirements of your target audience, no matter how great the rest of the steps are, your content marketing strategy will not achieve its full potential. Therefore, begin by understanding your audience. Identify who your audience is, what their needs and interests are, and where they spend their time online.
Set Measurable Goals:
Setting Goals is also an important aspect of your marketing plan but what differentiates an effective marketing strategy from an ineffective one is the type of goals. Yes, you read right, the type of goals you have set for your content marketing strategy will determine if it will be successful or not. By type of goals, I don’t mean the exact notions of your goals but rather the measurable and immeasurable goals.
Having measurable goals will help you track the progress of your marketing strategies and take corrective measures. If you set forth immeasurable idealistic goals you will not be able to track your progress or find out what is going wrong with your marketing strategies. An effective marketing strategy should have clearly defined measurable goals such as increased website traffic, more leads generation, improved customer engagement and retention etc.
Choose Content Types:
Based on the type of audience, you should determine the suitable type of content for them. The format or type of content will determine if your visitors will engage with the content or just randomly swap or skip through it.
For instance, if the target audience is housewives, the videos and Infographics may be used to save their time and deliver more information, while the students and scholars may find blog posts, articles, and newsletters more engaging and appropriate. Similar teens and youth will find social media content to be more enticing and suitable for them. Therefore, you should center your content marketing strategy on your audience’s preferred content format.
Develop A Content Calendar:
Creating a content calendar formally called a content plan is an important factor for content marketing strategy and it is an essential factor for all long-form strategies. The instant short-time content marketing strategies may see the worth of a day without documentation of specific content plans.
But when it comes to long-form content marketing strategies, content calendars will be extremely important and the care given to content calendar creation will be a significant determinant of success of any content marketing strategy. The content calendar should clearly outline the timeline and schedule you’ll follow to create and publish content.
Determine Channels Of Distribution:
Now that you have developed the content according to your business goals and target audience, you must be prepared to distribute it to your audiences you should not only be mindful of the preferred content format of your target audience, but you should also identify the preferred distribution platforms of your audiences. The distribution channel will determine the engagement of your users and choosing the right channel will be a key player in generating more leads and improving customer retention.
If you base your whole marketing strategy on a digital media platform that is not very popular with the masses or is not supported in a specific region, then your whole efforts will be wasted. For instance, let’s assume that you have come up with short promotional videos of your upcoming products that are suitable for American citizens and you plan to promote them on TikTok as a short reel-type video.
This will not be a wise decision or an achievable idea TikTok usage in America will be negligible compared to the Asian region and the Asian users may not find your product suitable for them. Therefore, choose your content distribution channel according to the preferences of your target audience for an effective content marketing strategy.
Develop A Promotion Plan:
A successful content marketing plan does not only rely on social media posts and blogs but it will take a holistic approach where all ventured will be entertained and all platforms will be used. You should consider using both paid and unpaid approaches for successful marketing plans.
For instance, paid searches as PPC marketing may be the best option for startup businesses or less familiar products and to ensure that you don’t miss out on the benefits of organic reach and social media reach, you should also put efforts into unpaid marketing plans.
Analyze Results:
Content Marketing, like Digital Marketing, is an ongoing process and you should never think that your job is done with the publication of your content on social media or over search engines. The publication rather marks the beginning of your job and you should give proper attention and time to this secondary phase.
After putting your content for distribution, you should regularly monitor your content, observe its organic reach, click rates, and leads, and use all other important metrics and tools for measuring your goals and changes brought to your business after the onset of your marketing plan.
Tracking and analyzing these outcomes will brief you about the success or failure of your marketing strategy and you should continually strive to improve your strategy by modifying your goals, building better marketing campaigns, and coming up with optimized strategies and better marketing plans for achieving higher and better revenue goals.
Perfect Your Content Marketing Strategy With Rankwdh
If you are a novice business owner or just starting your journey in the digital marketing field, you should not risk your business growth by blocking paid marketing options. If you don’t feel confident in your marketing strategies or need an expert opinion to have a better hand for curating your personalized marketing plan, you can contact me and my team anytime at Rankwdh.
Rankwdh is a professional digital marketing agency that offers you personalized and carefully curated digital marketing offers including SEO, SMM, PPC, website development, guest posting, copywriting, and many other digital services with integrated AI metrics and tools to measure the effectiveness of our plans. We take pride in using our expertise to help businesses develop and refine their content marketing strategies as we believe in growing together.
Our team of experienced digital marketing professionals have command over diverse industries and niches and they can provide compelling content creation services in various industries. They provide well-researched content and will not skip your audience’s needs while creating content for your business.
They work with you to identify your target audience, develop the right types of content for them, and execute a distribution and promotion plan that drives results. With our help, you can be assured that your business will reach its maximum potential on the web.
Keep in mind that by staying informed, staying flexible, and working with a trusted partner like Rankwdh, you can have an effective content marketing strategy that will resonate with your audience and will drive your business toward its goals.
If you are into the professional expertise of digital marketers at Rankwdh, feel free to Contact Rankwdh today to learn more about our content marketing strategy services.
Let’s grow together!