What is Content Marketing Strategy [How to Create Yours]

Content marketing strategy goes beyond just writing blogs, landing pages, or posting on social media. It is really about engaging with your audience throughout their entire journey. When done right, it’s a smart and careful way to make your brand stand out in a world full of messages. Get to know your audience and produce relevant content to attract their attention, earn their trust, and be the first thing they think of when buying. Whether you’re in B2B or B2C, having an effective content marketing strategy is extremely important. It’s a great way to show off your brand to new potential customers and help them make smart choices. In this article, we’re going to explore what content marketing is all about and share 9 steps to help you create a strategy that really works.

What Is Content Marketing Strategy?

A content marketing strategy involves generating, publishing, and distributing valuable content in order to attract and engage certain audiences. It seeks to increase consumer activity, lead generation, and brand exposure.

The following are just a few examples of content marketing:

• Posts on blogs.
• Emails and newsletters.
• Posts on social media
• Podcasts
• Videos and Ebooks

The ultimate purpose of a content marketing strategy is to increase your audience and achieve your business goals.

Why Is a Content Marketing Strategy Important?

The following reasons make a content marketing strategy crucial for businesses:

• Build Trust with Your Audience: Consistently offering valuable content positions your business as an industry thought leader.
• Increase business awareness: High-quality content can bring more visitors to your website and introduce your business to a larger audience.
• Improve SEO Efforts: Since these are important ranking factors in SEO, search engines prefer companies that regularly post high-quality content.
• Create Leads: By giving potential customers the knowledge they require to make wise decisions, content marketing contributes to the creation of leads.

How to Create a Content Marketing Strategy

B2B marketers with an effective content marketing strategy tend to find more success compared to those without one. When it comes to content production, there are a few key steps to keep in mind. First, you really want to get to know your audience. Here are 9 easy steps to creating and implementing a content marketing strategy to expand your business without wasting time or money.

1. Set Your Mission and Your Goals

Creating a content marketing mission statement is a useful starting point when developing your content strategy plan. This simple statement will help you differentiate between what’s vital and what’s not when creating content, keeping your content marketing strategy on track.

A mission statement for content marketing describes:

• Your target audience.
• The content you’ll utilize to connect with them
• The benefit they will receive

In your mission statement, explain what your audience can expect from your content marketing strategy and what your business can achieve from it. Your business goals are really important here.

2. Establish Your KPIs

The most effective strategy to achieve goals is to make them specific and measurable. Setting key performance indicators (KPIs) for your content marketing plan is necessary to achieve this.

The KPIs will let you know whether you’ve met your goals by providing milestones that you can mark off. They’ll cover what you aim to accomplish regarding revenue, sales, traffic, SEO, and various elements of digital marketing, such as email marketing and social media metrics.

3. Know Your Audience

As mentioned, identifying your target audience and creating content for them is essential to a successful content marketing strategy. To do this, you must first gather demographic information about your website visitors, email subscribers, and social media followers. Web analytics, social media analytics, and email subscriber analytics provide audience data:

• Age, 
• Gender, 
• Education, 
• Income, 
• key interests.

Google Analytics is a useful tool for learning which market segments your website visitors belong to.

Gathering feedback from customers

If you want to get to know your target audience better, try gathering some feedback from your current customers. You’ll get a better understanding of:

• What are their thoughts on the content you’re making right now?
• What are their most pressing needs?
• Ways to tackle their issues through your content

Getting the right customer feedback can really help you:

• Get to know what matters to your readers and subscribers.
• Figure out the best spots to connect with your customers.
• You can use WPForms to create a survey and easily collect consumer feedback.
• Fill out your buyer personas, which we’ll discuss next.

4. Create Buyer Personas

Having demographic data and customer feedback really helps you create or enhance your buyer personas. Knowing your target readers and customers via buyer personas or customer avatars makes creating content for them easier.

Great customer avatars really capture your customers’ pain points, challenges, where they get their info, and what influences their behavior.

Once you get the hang of this, you’ll start to understand:

• The type of content that really resonates with your audience and how it can benefit them.
• What’s going to get them to care about it?

5. Evaluate Your Current Position

A lot of businesses already have content available. This will include everything from your blog posts to social media updates, podcasts, videos, white papers, and more.

So, the next thing to do is see if that content is actually helping you reach your goals.

You’ll want to start by doing a content audit. So, what that means is:

• Keep track of all the content you create, like blog posts and guest posts.
• Figure out how useful or successful they are.
• Finding the gaps.

Check out how your content compares to your competitors and consider how new content will fit into the market.

6. Discover the Most Effective Content Channels

As you go through this process, you’ll begin to notice where your audience is spending their time and where you already have a strong online presence. It’s a good idea to concentrate on what’s working and build on it instead of trying to address everything at once.

Just to be completely certain, you should look over the web analytics. If you use Google Analytics, just head over to the Acquisition » Social » Overview. That’s where you can check out the main social networks that are sharing your content.

7. Figure out what Types of Content you want to Create.

You need to consider what kinds of content you should create next. Every content marketing strategy will include certain content formats.

Successful content marketing strategies frequently involve a major piece of content on your site that you can repurpose and publish elsewhere.

Blog posts are a key piece of your content marketing strategy, and they continue to produce great results. Your blog posts should really be actionable, valuable, and shareable, and they can cover a variety of article types.

8. Create a Content Calendar

To make your content strategy work, it’s important to figure out the best times to publish on each platform you plan to use.

Lack of planning is a major content marketing problem, so use a content calendar to have all of your content scheduled. There are a few different ways to go about this. You can use Google Calendar to record the due dates for all your content. This method is effective, particularly when you’re not producing a large volume of content.

If you produce a lot of content and manage a team, you can utilise a few more tools to make things easier.

There are a few ways to handle this, such as using productivity and task management tools like Asana, or you might consider a dedicated editorial calendar tool like CoSchedule. You can use both of these to set up different stages of the content creation process.

9. Check the Results

Finally, it’s time to see how well your content marketing strategy worked. This includes examining your initial content strategy plan KPIs to see if they’ve changed and if you’re still accomplishing your goals.

You can do this by:

• Follow the steps above to check Google Analytics and see how your work is doing.
• Use Buzzsumo and other social tracking tools to track how much people share on social networks.

It can also track the success of content marketing using Google Alerts and Mention. You can reach your engagement and recognition KPIs by seeing if your content is shared and talked about.

There are tools like SEMRush that can help you look at KPIs for your content’s search rank. As well, the data in your email marketing software will let you keep track of people who sign up for your emails.

If you keep track of your work, you can make regular changes to your content marketing plan to make sure it’s always relevant.

That’s it! You now understand how to create a content marketing strategy that is effective from the beginning to the end.

Wrapping Up

A clear strategy helps you stay focused, work efficiently, and achieve your business goals. Ultimately, developing a successful content marketing strategy is about more than just crossing off tasks like blogging or social media posting. It’s about developing genuine connections with your audience, understanding their needs, and providing them with valuable and engaging content to guide them through their journey. Whether you’re B2B or B2C, having a clear strategy in place helps you stay adaptable, repurpose effectively, and always keep your audience at the center of your efforts. Your strategy will grow with your brand if you stay flexible, repurpose, and keep your audience at the center of your efforts.