How to Create a Content Marketing Strategy

Content marketing is highly influential in attracting audiences, but getting it right is important to achieve success.

What is content marketing?

Content marketing is the process of creating and publishing content that’s of use and relevance to target audiences, so they’ll visit your site, fulfil a call to action, and become a loyal customer. A successful content marketing strategy can improve your bottom line.

Content marketing takes various forms including blogging, social media posts, videos, how-to-use guides, newsletters and e-Books.

Why your business needs a content marketing strategy

By establishing a content marketing strategy, you have a cohesive, methodical and documented approach to creating and distributing your content, so that it reaches the right people and has the desired effect.

With a strategy in place, you can organise what content goes where and to whom, you can ensure a consistent approach and optimise the efficiency of everything you produce. A content marketing strategy also lets you establish your brand identity.

As an example, if you’re creating content for social media, this may differ from website blogging, so your strategy will outline various elements you need to consider, to ensure the right yet consistent approach.

How to create a content marketing strategy

Before you develop a content marketing strategy, you need to do some research.

Goals

Define your goals and decide what you want your content marketing to achieve.

Target audience

Decide who you want to target. Think about the problems or dilemmas this group might face, and how you could use your expertise to help them. What areas might interest your target group?

Think of content ideas that would be useful to these people, without directly promoting your products or services. Consider different stages of the purchase process that your audience might go through.

Use tools

Make use of tools to organise and schedule your content, such as WordPress plugins, which we mentioned two below to get you started.

CoSchedule

CoSchedule Integrates directly with your WordPress dashboard, this tool helps you plan and arrange your content on a calendar. The plugin helps you to promote your content with scheduled social media sharing with plans starting at $30 per month.

A 14 day trial is also available for testing before having to commit to purchasing.

Editorial calendar

Editorial Calendar for WordPress is available to download for free on the wordpress.org plugin directory website. Although it doesn’t have as many features as CoSchedule, it’s a good editorial calendar option for you.

Unfortunately, it lacks social media promotion tools, saying that, it lets you schedule all of your content months in advance for smooth implementation of your content marketing strategy.

Wrapping things up

Don’t forget to promote your content once it’s published. If you want to win audiences over, creating a content marketing strategy is something every business can’t afford to ignore.

Check out our info-graphic: 10 Stats Businesses Can’t Ignore About Digital Marketing