Your content marketing strategy, if built correctly, will bring more clients and retain the ones you already have. A really well-built strategy allows you to unlock a deeper understanding of your audience and deliver content they actually want to read. A smart strategy can also help boost your communications and PR strategies by tying your cohesive brand voice into every aspect of your audience's customer experience.
With so much at stake, there is no time like the present to think through how to plan, create, execute, and optimize your content marketing strategy.
Mapping your content marketing plan
He who fails to plan plans to fail (or so the saying goes) and your content marketing strategy is a great example of how this plays out. Without planning ahead to take this on, you'll end up with a slapped-together strategy that doesn't perform well or at speed.
The planning starts with you defining your marketing goals--aligned to your organizational goals--and aligning them to the needs and expectations of your audience. Consider who you're talking to, what's keeping them up at night, and how you can be the solution to their problems. Armed with that info, you're ready to create your content calendar.
Your content calendar is the way you schedule the moving parts of your content marketing strategy, helping you keep updates consistent and post content when and where you need to. It can also help you keep track of everything from holidays to industry events, market trends, and other reactionary content topics you might need to include as you create.
You'll also want to identify the right channels for your content distribution, which boils down to meeting your audience where they are. Where are they spending their time? Where are you already seeing engagement from them, and where should you shift your focus? Sharing where they already are makes engagement faster and easier, and helps encourage word-of-mouth content sharing.
Creating valuable content
To create real value for your audience, you have to be delivering content that is not only consistent to your brand, but also offers a solution to their problems or an answer to their questions. That means you have to know them well enough to know what those questions and problems are, so that you can deliver the right content to meet their needs.
Value also comes from consistency when it comes to your content. You want to make sure you're posting regular content across your audience channels to keep them informed and engaged. Consider diving into blog posts, videos, infographics, and podcasts to help vary the way you spread your message, and don't forget SEO optimization to extend your reach.
Executing and measuring your strategy
Once the content you've worked so hard to get out there is up and running, it's time to make sure you've got measurement tools in place to build on that success. This takes planning too, which is why it's a big part of your content marketing strategy. You'll need to decide which KPIs are really important for your organization to help drive goals, and then find the best ways (tools, processes, and people) to gather that measurement data and share it with your teams. A few KPIs to consider include web traffic, leads, social media activity, and social engagement.
Optimizing your content for maximum results
Those measurements need to be put to work. By reviewing them and optimizing your content based on the data, you're creating a continous feedback loop that allows you to adjust faster to changes in audience preferences, see behaviours as they shift, and refresh existing content instead of always having to spin up something new.
A/B testing is a good place to start, since it allows you to test one aspect of a piece of content to find out what works best. This could mean splitting a distribution list in half and sending two different email subject lines. Or creating two different CTA buttons on a landing page. Or distributing two e-books with different color schemes. These tests allow you to compare your audience reactions in near-real time and adjust based on what works best.
Performance measurement is the core of this optimization cycle, but you can also collect direct audience feedback through regular user surveys that allow you to ask more strategic questions about their user experience, expectations, and preferences when it comes to your content. Then again, most marketers find observed behaviors to be a more accurate way to gather feedback than self-reporting.
Winning with your content marketing strategy
A strong content marketing strategy lays the groundwork for not just attracting new clients but keeping the existing ones happier by continously delivering value. It enhances trust, ties into your PR strategies, offers up sales-ready content, and boosts thought leadership efforts. If your strategy isn't in place yet, or isn't up to par, there's no better time to change that.
Embrace this comprehensive approach, and you'll find yourself winning with a content marketing strategy that drives sustained growth and engagement.
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