How to develop a content marketing strategy for your website? Follow these 6 steps to create a content marketing strategy to grow your business.
Content marketing is defined as a tactical advertising approach towards creating and distributing relevant, informative content consistently in order to keep your existing clients at bay and spark interest with new customers in the hopes of driving profitable customer action. It is an important channel companies use to connect with their customers; as such, it’s is often used as a means to funnel business, revenue, more sales or help establish their business as the industry leader. Each marketing campaign requires careful consideration and planning ahead and without a comprehensive content marketing strategy, you will hardly be able to fully utilize all the benefits offered by your content and reach the users your company is trying to target.
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Find your target audience
Every content marketing campaign starts with defining your target audience. This is especially true when it comes to blog readers, as you need to find out as much as you can about potential readers before you start creating content. Every piece of content you create needs to be suited to your reader’s needs and individual preferences. This, of course, does not mean you only need to focus on a single demographic group, but rather that your content strategy needs to cover both the existing readers and the ones you would like to have visited your blog.
Your reader’s profiles need to go beyond the basic information such as age, gender, pay grade and purchasing habits. In fact, you should gather as much information as you can about your audience, including their device preference, browsing habits, previous purchasing engagements, etc. By collecting every little piece of information, you can find, you will be able to create an in-depth user profile that details your audience’s personal preferences, something you will later use to provide them with the type and style of content they’re most interested in.
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Specify the goal of your marketing strategy
Every advertising strategy needs to have a goal that is clearly defined and to the point. Although deciding on a common goal of your campaign might seem a bit obvious to some, marketers often fail to structure their goal into a single, crystalized vision of what they need to accomplish. Ask yourself, what is the aim of your strategy and what results are you trying to achieve with it. Only when you have an answer to these questions will you be able to determine the most suitable course of action and start working on your plan.
Determine which type of content you wish to feature
There are so many different options when it comes to featured content on a blog. What you need to do is to determine which ones you wish to feature. Of course, you can choose a few of them at the same time, but this will greatly depend on the topics and purposes of your blog. So, let’s see what are the options.
First, there is the most obvious one – blog post.
Depending on your topics, you should post a blog post regularly in order to attract more visitors. Such posts should contain some valuable and useful information for your audience and engage them enough in order to make them want to share posts on social media and other websites.
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Second, you can feature infographics.
These are visual representation of your content, with short text around the images. They can better organize and visualize your data, opposite to words and they are perfect if you wish to provide plenty of data and information to your readers and not clog up your blog. Plus, they are easy to understand.
Third, you can feature videos.
If this is something that fits to your blog, you can use them and create some highly engaging content which is easy to share across social media and websites. What is more, there are plenty of people who find it easier to sit through a short video than read an entire text.
Lastly, you can feature podcasts
You can feature podcasts and help your audience find your brand easier and faster. Podcasts have greatly developed in the past few years and many blogs choose to feature them every day and thus promote their brands.
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As already mentioned, you can combine these four forms of content on your blog. Choose the medium you think fits the best to your blog and audience and you should have no problems with delivering your content.
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Hubspot blog recently posted a list of different content types to diversify your website. Check them out below.
Decide the appropriate marketing channels
Every piece of content you create for your blog has to be easy to distribute through your channels and share across different media platforms. This doesn’t have to mean that you have to turn everything you share into a viral sensation, but rather that your content should be used to promote and support customer engagement and the purposeful use of the appropriate social media channels.
Take your time to decide what type of content will be shared, where and to which audience sections. For example, long textual posts are ideal for blogs, but images might fare better if shared via Instagram. On a similar note, posts shared by leading influencers in the industry will most definitely perform better than posts that reach your audience as an advertisement.
Keep track of your content’s performance
Once you have decided the audience, goals, and means of distributing your content, it’s time to measure its success. Every content marketing strategy needs to be measured and analyzed in order to determine which parts have performed the way they should and which needs to be further improved. Every blog owner should consider using social media monitoring tools to keep track of audience feedback. You can use Google Analytics in order to track traffic coming to your page and other online platforms to track various social media statistics.
When to update your content marketing strategy?
A content marketing strategy needs to grow and evolve in order to remain efficient. Although some parts of it need to stay consistent no matter what, such as the business and mission goals, every other part that is deemed ineffective or simply redundant needs to be changed immediately. Every aspect of your strategy that doesn’t have to do with business or mission goal should be regularly reviewed, yet updated periodically.
A good content marketing strategy is an important part of your marketing endeavors. It allows you to make your content as useful and as impactful as possible. It takes time, persistence, and creativity to grow a successful content marketing strategy.
Conclusion: Developing a Content Marketing Strategy
A well-developed content advertising strategy represents an integral part of your advertising efforts. It takes creativity, time and organization to formulate a successful strategy. From selecting the target audience and determining the goal of your campaign to isolating the appropriate marketing channels and measuring performance, setting up a marketing strategy for your blog will be a lot easier as long as you follow the steps described above.