If there’s no rhyme or reason to your content marketing, you’re not getting meaningful results.
You need a solid content marketing strategy to shape and guide your approach, optimize your efforts and resources, and meet your goals.
Your content marketing strategy outlines the steps necessary to research, create, publish, and promote content that provides value to your audience and ultimately helps convert them into paying customers.
While there is no one-size-fits-all formula to create a content marketing plan and other aspects of your strategy, there are tried and true tactics to help start your efforts.
Begin with these five tips.
1. Create a content calendar
Effective content marketing requires getting the appropriate content in front of the right audiences at the best time.
Create a content calendar to do this seamlessly, keep your content flowing, and avoid missing opportunities to drive engagement, conversions, and sales.
A content calendar is a resource you can share with your teams to plan all your marketing content activities. It lets you visualize how to best distribute your content throughout the month, quarter, or year.
You’ll save a lot of time and resources, streamlining your efforts to write amazing content your audiences can’t help but read and share.
Below are some tips to consider when creating your content calendar.
Tip #1
Ensure everyone can view your content calendar. Not everyone in your company has to have editing abilities to your content calendar, but they should have viewing access.
Allowing team members across your teams to view your content calendar helps keep everyone in the loop, and you can avoid duplicate efforts.
Tip #2
Revisit and refine your calendar constantly. Your content calendar should grow and evolve with your content marketing efforts.
Leverage modern platforms with sophisticated content management and calendar features.
For example, Vista Social lets you plan, sort, create, and schedule weeks’ or months’ worth of social media content on a shared calendar. Then, the platform auto-publishes your scheduled content for you.
Image source: vistasocial.com.
Simplify tweaking your content calendar with a reliable social media marketing tool. It helps you stay on top of your content marketing activities seamlessly, from sharing relevant posts to using branded content for Instagram.
Vista Social also offers other advanced features, including a Smart Publisher that can curate and publish content for you, reporting and analytics to assess your content’s performance, and other Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok marketing tools.
2. Determine what makes your content unique
Your target audience can easily miss, skip through, and ignore the your run-of-the-mill content that every other brand is posting and sharing.
One solution is to get your blog posts, articles, etc., to stand out from other brands to increase your chances of reaching and engaging your audiences. It can help you achieve content marketing success.
Determine your one thing—what sets your content apart from your competitors while delivering value to your target audiences and potential customers.
Start by writing down the brand messages you plan to use (or already use). Then, narrow down your top three competitors and remove any brand messaging they also use.
You should be left with a unique set of brand messages which can help make your “one thing” clearer to you and your team.
Your one thing should embody your content program’s heart and soul and your brand.
Once you know your one thing, you can weave it into your strategy.
Leverage popular content optimization tools to improve your content’s quality for your Search Engine Optimization (SEO) efforts.
Ensuring you have high-quality content and implementing SEO can help you rank higher on Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs), increasing your content and website’s visibility.
You’ll get more website traffic and, in turn, conversion and sales opportunities.
3. Know your customers
You need to know whom you are marketing to before you can make your blog posts, articles, and other creatives and develop your strategy.
After all, you have to understand your potential customers’ needs, pain points, preferences, interests, and other details to provide valuable and relevant content that resonates with them.
Knowing your ideal buyers can help you focus your content marketing efforts. You’ll eliminate guesswork and avoid marketing to the wrong audience—people who don’t want or need your services and products.
Your prospects can be categorized into the following:
- Audience. Your audience is the high-level collections of individuals, such as your repeat buyers, with similar motivations, including a common agenda and interest.
- Segments. Customer or market segments are audience groups or sub-groups of individuals who share common traits (or can be grouped based on a common characteristic).
- Persona. Buyer personas are data-informed and detailed yet fictitious characterizations of your ideal customers’ or buyers’ goals and behaviors.
Create your buyer persona using handy digital marketing software such as HubSpot’s MakeMyPersona tool. It lets you generate templates for your ideal customers easily.
Knowing your target audience’s demographics, interests, pain points, etc., can guide your content marketing strategies. It can help you tailor your content to address your audience’s pain points.
You can provide value to help move them along the customer’s journey, ultimately converting them into customers and repeat buyers.
4. Produce more content with less
Creating new content can eat up a huge chunk of your time and resources.
Ensure your content marketing strategy includes ways to optimize your content production.
Some of the best ways to produce more content without spending too much time and money include the following.
Tip #1
Share curated content. You don’t always have to create content from scratch. Look for great and relevant content from trusted sources and share them across your marketing channels.
Remember to give proper attribution when sharing curated content and give your two cents about the piece to give it your flavor.
Tip #2
Reuse or repurpose content. Breathe new life into your old or previously published content by repurposing it. Update still relevant pieces with new information or turn these into animated videos, infographics, and other formats.
You can also republish evergreen content to bring them front and center, making them easy for your audiences to find and see.
Tip #3
Leverage User-Generated Content (UGC). Tap into content your customers to share content that involves your brand or posts relevant to your industry or niche.
It’s a great way to get and share fresh content ideas while encouraging interactions with your social communities and followers.
For instance, tech company GoPro famous for its action cameras, shares tons of UGCs on Instagram from users who share their stunning and captivating shots on their GoPro cameras.
Image source: instagram.com.
Sharing UGCs help humanize your brand, making it more relatable to your audiences. It can help you connect with and engage them better.
Tip #4
Implement content atomization. Break down a huge, single content piece into eight smaller pieces. It lets your content cover more ground while spending fewer resources than creating new content.
Start creating a winning content marketing strategy
Developing an effective content marketing strategy doesn’t happen overnight. It often takes a lot of time, energy, resources, and testing and tweaking to nail your approach.
Jumpstart your efforts to create a solid content marketing strategy for your business with this guide’s tried and tested tips.
